faith and duty addressed to the central Church of the Empire from the standpoint of an Apostle who claims the right to promulgate a new law in the name of Christ for the whole Roman world ; it insists on the universal sinfulnmess of Jew and Gentile alike; like the Galatian it accepts Abraham as father of the faithful, but is careful to add that he is so not of the circumcision only but also of the uncircumcision ; it is not content to pass over God’s earlier dealings with mankind before Abraham and to identify Christ with the seed of Abraham, but goes back to the Fall, and describes him as the second Adam redeeming the whole race from the dominion of sin and death; it does not borrow its idea of law, like the Galatian Epistle, from the Mosaic, but develops the conception of an universal law of conscience even in the heathen world which maintains perpetual conflict with the law of sin and death in our members.
The reader can hardly fail to recognise in the changed attitude of the Apostle his altered position, and the transformation that he had been instrumental in effecting@ln Greece and Asia between the dates of the two Epistles. The earlier is animated throughout with the spirit of conflict, and vividly recalls the period when Paul was earnestly battling for the spiritual life of his Gospel against the surviving spirit of Judaism within the Church. But when he wrote from Corinth to the Roman Church, on the eve of his departure, having no more place in those parts, the issue of the conflict had been virtually settled by the wonderful expansion of the Greek Churches, Judaism had lost its hold, and the independence of the Christian Church no longer admitted of a doubt. Hence the Apostle does not hesitate to write of the national rejection of Israel as an accomplished fact, deeply as he deplored it, and earnestly as he craved for their restoration to a due share in their inheritance and a place in the body of Christ. The Roman Epistle belongs, in short, to a distinctly later stage in the history of the Church than the Galatian. Its decisive inclusion of Jew and Gentile in one category, its identification of Law with the conscience of mankind, its com- prehensive scheme of Christian legislation, based on the eternal principles of righteousness, truth and love, its maturity of Christian thought, proved that the Apostle had passed beyond the earlier stage of controversy with Judaism into a region of spiritual conflict with evils of faith and practice, and grasping the conception of a universal religion had braced himself to meet its demand for a new Law and a new life of the Spirit in Christ.