of any other sort, but that it is a miracle.
It is a thing that only God can achieve,
and that calls into act and manifestation
all the resources of the Divine nature.
It is achieved through an unparalleled
of God. The miracle of the Gospel is
that God comes to the ungodly, with a
mercy which is righteous altogether, and
enables them through faith, in spite of
what they are, to enter into a new rela-
tion to Himself, in which goodness be-
comes possible for them. There can be
no spiritual life at all for a sinful man
unless he can get an initial assurance of
an unchanging love of God deeper than
sin, and he gets this at the Cross. He
gets it by believing in Jesus, and it is justification by faith. The whole secret of New Testament Christianity, and of every revival of religion and reformation | of the Church is in that laetum et ingens
paradoxon, θεὺς ὃ δικαιῶν τὸν ἀσεβῆ.
Ver. 6 ff. καθάπερ καὶ Δαβὶδ: David is not a new illustration of this doctrine, but a new witness to it. The argument just based on Gen. xv. 6 is in agreement with what he says in the 32nd Psalm. The quotation exactly reproduces the LXX. λέγει τὸν μακαρισμὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώ- που: ‘‘pronounceth blessing upon the man,” etc. (R.V.): or, speaks the felici- tation of the man. He does so in the exclamation with which the Psalm opens. Obviously to impute righteousness with- out works, and freely to forgive sins, are to Paul one and the same thing. Yet the former is not a merely negative idea: there is in it an actual bestowment of grace, an actual acceptance with God, as unlike as possible to the establishment of an unprejudiced neutrality between God and man, to which the forgiveness of sins is sometimes reduced.
Vers. 9-12. In these verses the justi- fication of Abraham appears in a new light. In virtue of its ground in his faith, he is not only a forefather κατὰ
“‘5—Il.
λογίσηται Κύριος dpaptiav.”