Introduction 575

Jews in it; no sentence such as 1 Thess. ii. 15 f. or Gal. v. 12. It is an establishment of principles he aims at; except in iii. 8, xvi. 17-20 there is no reference to persons. Even in chaps. ix.-xi. (see the introduction at chap. ix.) the whole tone is conciliatory ; the one thing which tries our faith in them is Paul’s assurance of the future of his own people. But as an interpretation of the actual working out in human history of that method of salvation which he has expounded in the first eight chapters—as an exhi- bition of the process through which the rejection of the Jews and the calling of the Gentiles alike contribute eventually to the uni- versality of the Gospel—these chapters are an essential part of the epistle. They are mainly but not exclusively apologetic: they belong to that whole conception of the Gospel, and of the mode in which it becomes the inheritance of the world, which was of one substance with the mind of St. Paul. No one who read the first eleven chapters of the epistle could meet the Apostle as a stranger on any- thing essential in Christianity as he understood it. No doubt, as ‘Grafe has remarked, it does not contain an eschatology like 1 Cor. xv. or 2 Cor. v., nor a Christology like Col. i. But it establishes that which is fundamental beyond the possibility of misconception. It vindicates once for all the central facts, truths and experiences, -without which Christianity cannot exist. It vindicates them at once in their relation to the whole past of mankind, and in their absolute newness, originality and self-sufficiency. It is an utter misappre- hension to say that “just the most fundamental doctrines—the Divine Lordship of Christ, the value of His death, the nature of the ‘Sacraments—are assumed rather than stated or proved ” (Sanday and Headlam, p. xli.). There can be only one fundamental doctrine, and that doctrine for Paul is the doctrine of justification by faith. That is not part of his gospel, it is the whole of it: there Luther is his true interpreter. If legalists or moralists object, Paul’s answer is that justification regenerates, and that nothing else does. By its consistency with this fundamental doctrine, we test everything -else that is put forward as Christian. It is only as we hold this, on principle, with the clearness with which Paul held it, that we can ‘know what Christian liberty is in the sense of the New Testament— that liberty in which the will of God is done from the heart, and in which no commandments or ordinances of men, no definitions’ or ‘traditions, no customs or “ orders,” have any legal authority for the -conscience. And in the only legitimate sense of the word this liberty does not make void, but establishes the law. That is the “paradox in the true religion which perpetually baffles those who ~would reduce it to an institution or a code.