The Pulpit Commentary — Romans — Section 320

dist.ing11igJuid from any natural reflective enlightenment; while thi\t • heariu"' cometh by the \Vord of God,' ariseth out of a.n express revela.tion uttered from heaven~ in oon4 tnu:t t-0 every system, devioe, or imagination of unassisted human reason," 1 This being ~o, we can underatand how the apostle quotes the rapturous words of the prophet about the beautiful feet of the heralds of glad tidings. The institution of the preaching of the gospel is the most beaut.iful now existing among men. III. THE GLAD TIDINGS HAVE NOT HAD A UNIVERSAL IIEOEPTION. (Vers. 16-18.) In !'Ome oases the heralds have had small success. As Esaias cries, "Lord, who hath believ8'1 our report?" so ha.s many a minister lamented his scant success. For, amid the multitude of compet.ing things and persons palpable to sense, an unseen Saviour gets ignored by many. The problem was not, in the missionary a~e of Paul, as to many not hearing of a Saviour at all-rather was it that so many hearo. of him, yet gave no heed. For the apostle in this passage quotes what in the nineteenth psalm is applied t-0 nature, as if the gospel message, at least in his day, had been as widely proclaimed as the limits of the world allowed. And when we consider the population of the world in Paul's timP, and how it wa.s practically within the grasp of the Roman empire, and t.hat informa.t.ion filteroo down t-0 the distant colonies more surely perhaps than, though not so speedily as, news does nowadays; and when we add to this the magnificent missionary spirit which animated Paul and his associat.es, he had reason to take up the universal. terms and apply them t.o the propa.,aation of the gospel. So that the gospel was more widely proclaimed in the first century in proportion to the population of the globe than it is as yet in the nineteenth. The contrast which now obtains between the revelation of God in nature and the revelation of God_ in the gospel in their respective relations t.o mankind-the one being universal, the other partial in its application-has been largely, if not entirely, due t.o the lack of enterprise and mis- sionary spirit on the part of the Church. .And yet t.oo much may be made of this coutrast, and men may fail to see that the proclamation of a revealed religion is the one way in which God is likely t.o receive attention from his creatures. The followiog quotation from .Archer Butler upon the point will be welcome. "If God were t.o int.erfere at all, they [the deists] maintain, it would be by some universal agency, simple, gene.ml, and obvious, as the laws of his visible creation. '.!'hey smile at the notion of God's greatest exhibition of his will t.o man being acted upon the reduced theatre of a petty province, and made dependent on the chances of human testimony, • In the moral as in the physical world,' exclaims the leader of the sentimental school of deism, • it is ever on a great see.le, and by simple means, that Deity operates.' But what if we ret.ort that it is those very laws of nature 'on a great scale '-those very • lllimple means '-that have cansed God to be forgotten? Not justly, we admit; for they ougl.t eminently to have convinced men of his presence and power: but what of that? We are not now speaking of argumentative propriety, but of actual fact; not of man as he ought to be, but of man as he is. And it is an undeniable fact that it is the permanence and uniformity of the natural laws of the creation tho.t have beguiled men into specnlative, and, still more, int.o practical atheism; that it is the very per- fection of the laws which has hidden the Legislator. The band that God bas constructed so wondrously can write, • There is no God ; ' let it be smit with sudden paralysis, and the notion of a.n intervening Avenger will arise; nay, let us at any tim~ behold some strange unique in any of the departments of ~xperience, and it s~rtles our habitual slumber. That is to Bay, as long aa the work lB perfect, we recognize no worker; but the moment it becomes deficient (the very thing which ought logically to produce the doubt) we begin t.o conceive and admit his reality, The more apparently capricious the w~ks of nature, the more they resemble man's; and the more they remind us of direct agency a.nalO!!oWI to the human. Now, if this be so, could it be expected that, w produce an ac~wledgmerJ; of his being an~ attributes, the Deity would con_tinue to employ the same medium of regular and ord1nar;v laws, the same vast and uniform procesees in the phyBical and moral world, v.:hlch_ m ~ ~ges have tended _(euoh the miserable subjection of man to an unreasorung 1mag1nat1on) to render hlB agency Slli,ptet..-:d by BOme, and practically forgotten by the many? 'l'o _mak~ hime~lf felt he mUBt dutrwb his law1; in other worda, he must perform or pc·rm1t 'm1ra.cles, But tht:n Le mwst lilu,wi!!e exhibit them ,paringly, a1, if they continued to appear ou 1 Of. Azcher Butler'~ 'Scrmona,' vol. l. f· 39:J, on. n.1-30,] THE EPISTLE OF PAUL TO THE ROMANS. 319