for Christian morality ; that the only good man is the forgiven man, and that he is good, not because he is under law, but because he is not under law but under grace. There must have been many men who were practically Christian, and that, too, in the broad sense, which gave no advantage to the Jew over the Gentile, but who were far from realising their Christianity in principle like Paul. In his heroic sense, indeed, Christianity hardly survived him; it was recovered in something like its native power, attested even by a recrudescence of its original perils, at the time of the Reformation ; and it always requires to be rediscovered again. But this is only another way of saying that the polemic of the Epistle to the Romans, is not narrowly anti-Jewish ; it is anti-legal ; and whenever legalism | establishes itself in the Church anew, whether as mere custom, or as a dogmatic tradition, or as a clerical order claiming to be essential to the constitution of the Church, the Christian conscience will find. in this polemic the sword of the spirit to strike it down. We admit, therefore, that the epistle has a controversial aspect ; but probably the controversy is not so much with definite adversaries at work in Rome as with those principles and instincts in human nature which long experience as a preacher had made familiar to St. Paul.
3. A third view of the epistle defines its purpose as conciliatory. This, again, by no means excludes either of the views already com- mented on. Even controversy may be conducted in a conciliatory tone, and with a conciliatory purpose. When Paul wrote, he was extremely anxious about the unity of Jew and Gentile in the Church. His journey to Jerusalem had mainly that in view. In the epistle, while there is much that is trenchant in argument, there is nothing that is personal in feeling. There is no contemptuous irony, such as we have in 2 Cor. x.-xiii. ; no uncontrolled passion such as flashes out here and there in Galatians. Although the law works wrath and stimulates sin, he describes it as holy, spiritual, and ordained unto life. He speaks with passionate affection of the Jews (ix. 1 ff.), always recognises their historical prerogatives (iii. 1 ff., ix. 1 ff.), warns the Gentiles against self-exaltation over them, and anticipates the salvation of Israel as a whole. In chaps. xiv.-xv. also his gener- osity to “the weak,” though his judgment is unequivocally with the strong, may be regarded in the same light; the weak are certainly connected with the Jews, and his aim in the whole passage is the peace and unity of the Church. All this confirms us in thinking that the controversial aspect of the epistle should not be urged with special severity against Jewish Christians, or their modes of thought: Paul has no desire to exasperate any one, but in the position in which he stands, “the greatest moving power in the enlargement