nees, but that, for his acceptance, the righteolllm.ess of God must oome down to him and take him into itself. And he maintains that this is the very thing that the gospel means and accomplishes for man. The Jew went o.bout to establish hie own righteousness by imagined strict conformity to Lo.w. But the apostle well knew the vanity of this pretenaion; how it was a delusion, put man in a false position before God, and lowered the true ideal of Divine righteousness. He himself had once been" touching the righteousness which is in the Law, blameless." But he wa.e painfully conscious how, when he would have done good, evil was present with him. The Jew might trust to sacrifices to expiate his own shortcomings. But St. Paul felt, and Scripture itself confirmed his feeling, how impossible it was for the blood of bulls and goats to be in themselves of avail in the spiritual sphere of things. He had, we may suppose, long been on en.eh grounds dissatisfied with the religious system he had been trained in, a.nd may possibly have thrown himself into the :fierce excitement of persecution the more eagerly in order to drown uneasy thoughts. And he may have been impressed by what he had heard of Jesus and his teaching, and of what his followers held about him, more than he acknowledged to himself. For his sudden illumination on his conversion implies surely some prepara- tion for receiving it; the material that burst into a flame must surely have been ready for the kindling spark. On that memorable journey to Damascus the spark fell, and the illumination came. Jesus, whose voice at length penetrated his soul from heaven, now rose clearly before his eye of :fa.ith as the King of righteousness, foretold of old, who was to bring the righteon.g.. ness of God to man. Thenceforth (his creed in its completeness becoming, we may suppose, further settled and matured during his sojourn in Arabia, and through subsequent" visions and revelations of the Lord") he saw in the human life of Jesus a manifestation at last even in man of Divine righteousness ; and in his offering of himself a true atonement, not made by man, but provided by God, of a. character to avail in the spiritual sphere ot things: in his resurrection from the dead (the evidence of which he no longer resisted) he perceived him declared the Son of God with power, ordained for accomplishing the perpetual reconciliation of mankind ; and in his gospel, proclaiming pardon, peaoe, regeneration, inspiration, and immortal hopes, to all alike, without distinction of rank or race, he saw opening before him the glorious prospect of a realization at last of the prophetic anticipation of a kingdom of righteousness to come. To complete our view of his conception, we must further note that the full manifestation of God's righteousness is regarded by him as still future: the gospel is but the dawning of the full day: "the earnest expectation of the creature,. still "waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God; " "Even we our- selves groan within ourselves, waiting for the o.doption, to wit, the redemp- tion of our body" (oh. viii.); it is not till" the and" the.t "all things shall be subdued unto him," "that God may be e.ll in all" (1 Car. xv.). But mean- while believers a.re regarded BB already partaking in the righteousness of .xh- INTRODUCTION TO
God, revealed &nd brought home to them in Christ ; faith, &spire.tion, e.nd earnest endeavour (which are all man ie oa.pable of now) being aooepted in Christ for righteousness. The above is by no mea.ne intended 11.B a full exposition of St. Pe.ul'e doctrine of God's righteousn~, such e,s to lll&ke his lines of thought in all places clear, or to remove a.II difficulties; but only to eot forth what is conceiv-ed to have been hie fundamental conception. There he.d, we may suppose, been in the first place borne in upon him a. grand idea of e. realiza- tion in Christ of the predicted Messianic kingdom, as a.t length vindicating and exhibiting to man God's own eternal righteousness. To him, &a a devout Jew a.nd a. student of the Scriptures, this conception would na.tnrally first present it.,elf, so soon a.s he came to recognize the Messiah in Jesus. But then, the ordinary Jewish conception-a.a of the purport of the promise to Abraham, so also of the chara.cter of the Messianic kingdom-having to his mind become enlarged and spiritualized, he seems to have interwoven with Jewish ideas others suggested by his own contemplation of human consciousness, of the condition of the world as it is, and the general problems of existence; and to have fonnd in Christ a.n answer to his various diffi- culties a.nd his various cravings. But it is not always easy to trace or define exactly his lines of thought; and hence arises one main difficulty in the way of a clear interpretation of this Epistle, in which there, are certainly, as is said of his Epistles generally in the Second Epistle of St. Peter, "some things hard to be understood." Perhaps even he himself could hardly have defined euctly a.11 that "the Spirit of Christ which was in him did signify•• on a subject eo transcendent; while his style of writing-often abrupt, unstudied, a.nd pregnant with undeveloped thonghts-incren.ses our difficulty in the way of & clear interpretation. 2. Unir,ersalism. The doctrine a.a above set forth seems to lead logically to unirersalinn, i.e. the reconciliation in the end of all things to the righteous- ness of God. Without Sllch sequel it is not easy t-0 see how the supposed id.ea.1 of God's righteousness embracing all can be regarded as fulfilled. Nor can it be denied, except by the prejndiced, that St. Paul, in some pusages of his writings, does more or less distinctly intimate such an expectation; cf. 1 Cor. xv. 24-28; Eph. i. 9, 10, 22, 23; Col. i. 15-21; and in this Epistle eh. v. 18, seq_.; :ri. 26, 32, seq_. (see notes under these two passages). Without here entering on this mysterious subject (at present occupying so many minds) we may observe, as to the intimations respecting it found in this Epistle (which are all that concern us here), firstly, that, whe.tever hope may seem to be held out of the salvation of a.11 at last, it must be in the undefined ages of eternity, beyond the range of our present view; faith a.nd walking in the Spirit being, at any rate for enlightened Christians, insist.ed on as the condition of partaking in the eternal life of God; and secondl1, that punishment after this life is as distinctly spoken of as reward (eh. ii.. 8, 9), e.nd death in a spiritua.l sense as distinctly regarded as being the proper result of sin, a.a is life tlll being the result of holiness (eh. vili.13). THE EPISTLE OF PAUL TO THE ROMANS. 1V