lent for this, written on his heart; but in both it wrought to the same issues. There is nothing in the world less Jewish, there is nothing more human, than Rom. vii. 7-24; but that is Paul’s description of life under the law, and of the working of the law in that life. We understand it only too well, though we are not Jews; and so, no doubt, did those to whom it was first addressed. Hence Paul could quite well say to a Gentile Church: Ye were made dead to the law through the body of Christ ; and could associate himself with them to say, We were discharged from the law by dying to that in which we were held. A perfectly clear case of this is to be found in Gal. iii. 13-iv. 9. No one imagines that the Galatians were Jews, yet Paul vindicates for them the very thing which he says of the Romans here. God sent forth His Son, he writes, made of a woman, made under law, to redeem those that are under law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God sent forth the spirit of His Son into our hearts, etc. The alternation of the first and second persons here shows how Paul could conceive of Jew and Gentile alike as under law in their pre-Christian days, and how in their emancipation from this in Jesus Christ one experience was common to them all. In truth, “sin,” “the law,” “the curse of the law,” “ death,” are names for something which belongs not to the Jewish but to the human conscience ; and it is only because this is so that the Gospel of Paul is also a Gospel for us. Before Christ came and redeemed the world, all men were at bottom on the same footing: Pharisaism, legalism, moralism, or whatever it is called, it is in the last resort the attempt to be good without God, to achieve a righteousness of our own without an initial all-inclusive immeasurable debt to Him ; in other words, without submitting, as sinful men must submit, to be justified by faith apart from works of our own, and to find in that justification, and in that only, the spring and impulse of all good. It was because Paul’s Jewish experience was digested into a purely and perfectly human experience that he was able to transcend his Judaism, and to preach a universal gospel ; and the use of such expressions as we have in vii. 1-6 is no proof that those to whom they applied were Jews too. They apply to us.
(c) The character of the argumentation in the epistle has been adduced in support of the Jewish origin of the readers. It is quite true that in the dialectical development of his gospel in Romans Paul often states and answers such objections as would naturally occur to one representing the historical and legal standpoint of the Jews’ religion. Cf. iii, 1 (What advantage then hath the Jew 2), vi. 1 (Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound ?), vi. 15