DIVISION IV. § 4. CHAPTER XI. 1-12.
God's judgement on Israel neither universal nor final.
But if Israel has thus by her own fault fallen from her high estate, are we then to suppose that God has simply rejected His own chosen people? Such a thought cannot be entertained. How could it have been in the mind of such an Israelite as St. Paul, one who came of Abraham's genuine seed, and of the tribe which held so fast by Judah? No: the people on whom from eternity God's eye rested, to mark them out for Himself and for His purposes, assuredly cannot, as a people, have been cast away[[1]]. What has happened now is only what is recorded long ago in the history of Elijah. Then, as now, a general unfaithfulness in the bulk of the nation concealed the existence of a faithful remnant. Yet God had, as He assured the prophet, reserved for Himself such a remnant, and of very considerable numbers. And now also such a remnant of true Israelites exists in accordance with the selective action of grace—that is to say, God's gratuitous and unmerited good will. Yes: let there be no mistake about it; their position is due to nothing else than the original and continuous action of God's grace; and grace means God's absolutely gratuitous and unmerited good will (which may therefore come upon Gentiles equally with Jews). It excludes the idea of these remnants owing their position to previous merits, or of its being in any way God's response to an antecedent claim[[2]].
This then is what we have to recognize. What Israel in bulk sought for (by way of its supposed merit), that it did not get, but a select remnant got it; and upon the rest there fell that judicial hardening—that reversal of their true relation to God—which Moses and Isaiah already discerned in the chosen people[[3]]: an abiding stupor, and deafness, and blindness, with regard to God's purpose and will for them. David too, as God's righteous servant, demands, as a divine requital upon his bitter and cruel enemies, that their very abundance should betray them into captivity and prove their stumblingblock; that their spiritual vision should be lost and their backs bent downward to the ground. Which is just what has happened to Israel through their rejection of the Son of David.
The bulk of the people then has stumbled. But we must not exaggerate what has happened. As it is not all of them who have stumbled, so also it is not for ever. Their stumbling is not equivalent to a final fall. Already we can perceive how it may be reversed. The refusal of the Jews to recognize the Christ has been the occasion for a turning to the Gentiles. Thus the salvation of the Christ has come to them. And this has happened in the divine providence in order that, as Moses anticipated, they may in their turn provoke the Jews to jealousy—to a jealous determination not to lose their old privileges. Thus if even the transgression of Israel has proved the occasion for enriching the world as a whole, if even the deficiency of Israel (leaving vacant space, as it were, in the Church) has proved the occasion for enriching the Gentiles, how much more enrichment is to be expected when the chosen people are recovered in their full number?
I say then, Did God cast off his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God did not cast off his people which he foreknew. Or wot ye not what the scripture saith of Elijah[[4]]? how he pleadeth with God against Israel, Lord, they have killed thy prophets, they have digged down thine altars: and I am left alone, and they seek my life. But what saith the answer of God unto him? I have left for myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to Baal. Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace. But if it is by grace, it is no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. What then? That which Israel seeketh for, that he obtained not; but the election obtained it, and the rest were hardened: according as it is written, God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear, unto this very day. And David saith,
Let their table be made a snare, and a trap,
And a stumblingblock, and a recompense unto them:
Let their eyes be darkened, that they may not see,
And bow thou down their back alway.
I say then, Did they stumble that they might fall? God forbid: but by their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy. Now if their fall is the riches of the world, and their loss the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness?
1. We learn a little more exactly about St. Paul's doctrine of election in this chapter. God's final purpose for good is, as we shall see at the end of the chapter—and in what sense we shall have to consider—upon all men whatsoever. But this universal purpose is worked out through special 'elect' instruments. Thus God recognized[[5]] Israel beforehand, i.e. in His eternal counsels, as the people to bear His name in the world. This was the selection of Israel, and was an act of which the initiative was wholly on God's side. It was a pure act of the divine favour. This 'selection of grace' was upon Israel as a whole, but at later stages of the history, frequently enough, owing to the disobedience and apostasy of the majority, it is found to rest in an effective sense only upon a 'remnant' whom God has reserved for Himself, because they have not utterly refused to correspond to the original and continuous call of the divine grace. For the rest their privileges become the occasion of their fall: their light becomes their darkness. For judgement always and inevitably waits upon any form of misused privilege. Thus, when the Christ came, only an elect remnant of the nation welcomed Him. The rest fell under judgement. But God overrules even this apostasy. He takes the opportunity of the absence of those who should have been at the marriage supper of the king's son, to fill the great vacancy from the Gentile world. They are brought within the scope of the selecting call. But God's original vocation is still irrevocably upon apostate Israel. The new Gentile converts are to stimulate them to recover their lost privileges. Their wilfulness and obstinacy is to give place to humility and faith; and Jew and Gentile all together are to constitute the elect catholic church.
This is very simple and cheerful teaching. It leaves for us to consider later the question whether God's original and special vocation resting upon the Jews is finally to constrain them all to conversion, and whether in the same way His ultimate purpose of salvation for all men is to take place infallibly in all cases. This question is still to be considered. But at any rate the doctrine of election has lost all that gave it a colouring of arbitrariness and injustice and narrow sympathies.
We ought to notice in the above passage how St. Paul, in recalling the continual obstinacy and hardening of the majority of the chosen people, is following on the lines of St. Stephen's speech (Acts vii. 51).
2. The imprecatory psalms are, especially in our Anglican public services, a great stumblingblock to many—especially the 69th (here cited by St. Paul) and the 109th. These psalms do not represent barely the cry of an individual sufferer invoking God's curse upon his private enemies. The sufferer, who is the psalmist, or with whom at least the psalmist identifies himself, represents afflicted righteousness. It is God's people, His 'servant' and 'son' according to the language of the Old Testament, that is under persecution from the enemies of God. And he calls upon God to vindicate Himself by punishing the adversary; to let it be seen that His word and promise is truth. 'How long, O God, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge?' Even from this point of view, however, when with the assistance of the modern critics we have in the main purged away the element of private vindictiveness, these psalms no doubt remain with the stamp of narrowness and bitterness upon them. They have none of the larger New Testament sense that the worst enemies of the Church may be converted and live: that our attitude towards all men is to wish them good, purely good and not evil, even though it be under the form of judgement: 'Rejoice when men revile you and persecute you'; 'Bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, pray for them which despitefully use you'; 'That by your good works which they shall behold, they may glorify God in the day of visitation.'
But granted the limitation and bitterness still remaining in these psalms, their citation in the New Testament shows us what is for us the right use of them. They are by implication taken up—where we should least expect them—into the mouth of the Son of Man[[6]]. That is to say, it is His enemies on whom the judgements are imprecated. There is a wrath of the Lamb. There is a divine sword of judgement which proceeds out of His mouth. He, the administrator of the righteousness of God, expects from His Father judgement on His enemies. It is not necessarily, as St. Paul here indicates, final judgement: the judgement upon the Jews was not yet that; but judgement of some sort—temporal or final—upon His wilful adversaries, the Son expects of the Father. And we men, as we repeat these psalms, are, like the first Christians in face of the suicide of Judas, to identify ourselves with the divine righteousness and accept the law of just retribution. This is the deepest and truest sense in which we can still say the imprecatory psalms; and in these days of a philanthropy that often lacks the stern savour of righteousness, it is very necessary that we should make this sense our own.
[[1]] Three times—1 Sam. xii. 22, Ps. xciv. 14, xcv. 3 (in the Greek)—the promise occurs 'The Lord will not cast away His people.'
[[2]] The vocation and election which made Israel the chosen people were absolutely of God. What distinguished the faithful remnant from the bulk of the nation was simply that they had not altogether failed in faith, so that the unchanging election was not in their cases practically suspended, but God 'reserved them for Himself.'
[[3]] St. Paul refers chiefly to Isa. xxix. 10—the description of a besotted people whose prophets are eyes that cannot see, and their seers ears that cannot hear; so that the word of God has become as a sealed book; cf. also Isa. vi. 9. But there is a similar passage in Deut. xxix. 4, which partly moulds his language, and supplies the words 'unto this day.'
[[4]] Rather, as margin, in Elijah, i.e. the passage of Scripture about Elijah.
[[5]] This—to recognize or mark out beforehand—is the meaning of divine 'foreknowing' in St. Paul. See vol. i. pp. 317 f.
[[6]] Both in this passage and in Acts i. 20.
DIVISION IV. § 5[[1]]. CHAPTER XI. 13-36.
God's present purpose for the Jews through the
Gentiles: and so for all humanity.
St. Paul would not have it supposed that, in his zeal for the recovery of Israel, he was proving faithless to his vocation as the apostle of the Gentiles. On the contrary, he explains (assuming the Roman Christians to be Gentiles in the mass) that he is, by this very zeal, fulfilling that vocation. The conversion of the Gentiles was meant to react as a stimulus on the Jews. When St. Paul magnifies his Gentile ministry, he does so always with the motive of stinging the jealousy of his own people, and so bringing some of them to salvation. How can such a consummation be too eagerly desired? For if even so pitiable an event as their rejection has yet, in God's providence, been overruled for a good end—the bringing back of the outside world into the fellowship of God[[2]]: can we doubt that so happy an event as their recovery would be indeed (what Ezekiel saw in vision in the valley of the dry bones) a veritable resurrection? For the consecration of God is still upon them. The holy (i.e. consecrated) people they still remain. As the 'heave offering' of the 'first of the dough'[[3]] consecrates the whole lump, so the first of the nation offered to God—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—have consecrated the whole nation. The holiness of the root of God's olive tree[[4]] has passed to the latest branches. It is quite true that some of these branches of the Jewish olive tree were broken off, and that the Gentiles were introduced in their place; like a wild olive grafted upon the root of a cultivated plant, and so sharing its rich sap. But that—to let the metaphor continue—gives the wild olive no ground for an insolent contempt of the branches which naturally belonged to the tree. What advantage it now has it wholly derives from that which it is affecting to despise. It is the root that supports it, not it the root. And are the Gentiles disposed to argue that these rejected Jewish branches were broken off in order that they might take their place; and that they, the Gentiles, are thus plainly preferred by God to the Jews? The answer is plain. Why were they broken off? Because they would not maintain the correspondence of faith with the purpose of God; and it is simply by maintaining this attitude that the newly introduced Gentiles can hope to retain their place. They had better exhibit, not a groundless pride, but a reasonable fear. Is God likely to be more sparing towards them than towards His first chosen? God has displayed before their eyes both His attributes of severity and goodness, and they must take note of both. At the present moment it is severity towards Jews, goodness towards Gentiles. Yes, goodness towards Gentiles; but so long only as they abide faithfully in His goodness, no longer. When they fail of faithfulness, they too, like their Jewish predecessors, shall be cut off. And, on the other hand, when those Jews change their attitude, and their hardness melts and faith returns, they shall be recovered and reingrafted into the old olive tree. If God could graft into it branches cut out of an alien and inferior stock, how much more easily can He reingraft into it what is really part of its very self?
Here then we have a real disclosure of a divine secret[[5]], to which the Gentiles would do well to keep their eyes open, lest (like the Jews before them) they mistake for wisdom their own self-conceit. The hardening of the Jews has been used by God as an opportunity for the gathering in of the full number of the nations of the earth; and that with the further purpose that, when the nations are gathered in, Israel in all its completeness should be recovered too. And so shall be fulfilled Isaiah's prophecy of a redeemer from Zion, who should restore Israel, and of a new covenant with them, based on a fresh forgiveness of their sins[[6]]. Thus if we think of the actual relation of the Jews to the present preaching of the Gospel, we must think of them as God's enemies, and as having by their very enmity secured the Gentiles their opportunity; but if we think of them in relation to God's eternal choice, they still must appear as sharing the divine love which rests on the people of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God's gifts and vocation do not admit of being repented of and recalled. Thus we know what to expect. As the Gentiles passed out from disobedience under the divine compassion through the opportunity afforded by the disobedience of the Jews; so now the divine compassion which rests on the Gentiles is intended (by stimulating the Jews to recover their lost privileges) to prove the means of recovering them too out of their disobedience into the shelter of the divine compassion which is the common heritage of all. We see, in fact, all men in turn shut up in disobedience to God, as in a prison house: it is God who has so shut them up; but it is done in view of the largest and most compassionate purpose which can be even conceived. It is done that (when men have become wearied of their own wilfulness, and have experienced their own need) the divine mercy may welcome and embrace all alike at last.
And if this is the purpose of God disclosed to us, how can we fail to adore the fathomless resourcefulness of His wisdom in determining how to act, and His skill in executing what He has determined? How can we fail to recognize our utter incompetence to explore His judgement, or track out His ways? Like inspired men of old[[7]] we must recognize that the absolute initiative is His, and our only reasonable attitude the humblest correspondence. Truly in counsel and operation we have contributed to God nothing of our own: we have no claim with which to approach Him. He is the unique source of whatever is, and the sole executor of whatever takes place, and the only end to which all things tend: and to Him, therefore, alone all praise is due, and shall be given.
But I speak to you that are Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle of Gentiles, I glorify my ministry: if by any means I may provoke to jealousy them that are my flesh, and may save some of them. For if the casting away of them is the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead? And if the firstfruit is holy, so is the lump: and if the root is holy, so are the branches. But if some of the branches were broken off, and thou, being a wild olive, wast grafted in among them, and didst become partaker with them of the root of the fatness of the olive tree; glory not over the branches: but if thou gloriest, it is not thou that bearest the root, but the root thee. Thou wilt say then, Branches were broken off, that I might be grafted in. Well; by their unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by thy faith. Be not highminded, but fear: for if God spared not the natural branches, neither will he spare thee. Behold then the goodness and severity of God: toward them that fell, severity; but toward thee, God's goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off. And they also, if they continue not in their unbelief, shall be grafted in: for God is able to graft them in again. For if thou wast cut out of that which is by nature a wild olive tree, and wast grafted contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which are the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree?
For I would not, brethren, have you ignorant of this mystery, lest ye be wise in your own conceits, that a hardening in part hath befallen Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in; and so all Israel shall be saved, even as it is written,
There shall come out of Zion the Deliverer;
He shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob:
And this is my covenant unto them,
When I shall take away their sins.
As touching the gospel, they are enemies for your sake: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers' sake. For the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance. For as ye in time past were disobedient to God, but now have obtained mercy by their disobedience, even so have these also now been disobedient, that by the mercy shewn to you they also may now obtain mercy. For God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all.
O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgements, and his ways past tracing out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor? or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.
1. There is a true patriotism which must at times be content to wear the guise of disloyalty; and not even Jeremiah 'weakening the hands of the men of war[[8]]' in the conflict with the power of Babylon, while all the time his very heart was bleeding for Jerusalem, presents a more pathetic and moving picture of such patriotism than does St. Paul as he here shows himself to us. While he was shaking off the dust of his feet, as he left the synagogues to turn to the Gentiles, while he was throwing all his tremendous energy into the apostolate of the nations, and vindicating their cause, even to fierceness, against the narrowness of his own nation, all the time the thought which buoyed him up was that when the catholic church had become an established fact—when it should have become plain, even to Jewish eyes, that the elect people of God is now a fraternity of all nations, and not their own race only—then it could not fail to happen, that the members of the ancient people, finding themselves in their turn 'alienated,' 'strangers,' and 'far off,' while they knew so well, and needed so deeply, the fellowship of the covenant, should be stimulated to resume their former privileges. Surely then at last Israel 'should remember her way and be ashamed,' and 'receive' her Gentile 'sisters,' though they had been to her as 'Sodom and Samaria,' and though they were now given to her for 'daughters, but not by her covenant'—not by any means on her own terms[[9]]. All the time that St. Paul is fighting Judaism and vindicating Catholicism, laying down the lines of the great church of the nations, this is the vision that cheers him—an Israel, penitent, humbled, worshipping the Christ whom she had crucified, and therefore welcomed back again with the honour due to her great memories and her inextinguishable vocation. But we notice by the way, as throwing an unmistakable light on the circumstances of Roman Christianity, that while St. Paul thus shows his own Jewish feeling, he speaks to the Roman Christian as in the mass Gentile[[10]].
2. If so miserable an event, one so revolting to the divine heart, as the apostasy of Israel, had yet in the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God been overruled so as to become the occasion for the calling of the Gentiles, it must needs be, St. Paul argues, that an event so dear to the heart of God as the recovery of Israel, would have a result even more blessed, nothing less than 'life from the dead.' What does this last expression mean? Does St. Paul mean that when once the chosen people was recovered into a really catholic church, there would be no further delay—the consummation would be reached, the resurrection of the dead which is to accompany the (second) coming of the Christ would take place at once? This thought would be very natural to St. Paul, and thoroughly agreeable to the old Messianic expectation; and it would give, as nothing else gives so well, the needed climax to the sentence. Moreover it cannot be said that the idea of the resurrection was not intimately associated among Christians with the return of the Christ in glory. But, on the other hand, nowhere else does St. Paul speak of 'the resurrection' so absolutely and without explanation as the goal of all things; and, if he had meant so to speak of it here, he would surely have said 'the resurrection,' and not used the vaguer expression 'life from the dead.' As he has used this we must interpret it in terms of Ezekiel's vision[[11]]: the recovery of Israel will be nothing less than a case of dead men coming to life again, of dry bones revivified. The only drawback to this interpretation is—what need not trouble us much—the failure of rhetorical climax. This revival of dead Israel is hardly a greater thing than the reconciliation of an alienated world. And, though it would improve the rhetorical climax to interpret the phrase as meaning that the whole catholic church would have new life put into it by Israel's recovery, and though we should expect this idea to prove true, yet I do not think it is natural to introduce it here.
3. St. Paul's language—'beloved for the fathers' sake,' 'if the root be holy, so are the branches'—comes very close to the current Jewish language about 'the merits of the fathers,' and yet is deeply distinguished from it. The Jews as represented in the Talmud—and the belief goes back to St. Paul's time[[12]]—believed that no prayer was so effective as that which was offered in the name of 'the fathers.' Thus: 'How many prayers did Elijah speak on Mount Carmel that fire might fall from heaven, and he was not heard; but when he mentioned the name of the dead, and called Jehovah the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, then at once he was heard. So was it in the case of Moses. When the Israelites had accomplished that bad work, Moses stood up and spoke for their justification forty days and forty nights, and was not heard. But when he mentioned the dead, he was at once heard.... Therefore as the living vine supports itself on a dead stock (i.e. grows out of a stock dry and seemingly dead), so Israel lives and supports itself on the fathers since they are dead[[13]].' The individual Israelite, moreover, could supply his own deficiencies in righteousness out of the treasury of merits which belonged to him in virtue of his descent from the common fathers of the race, or the holy progenitors of his own family. In other words the Israelites in various ways and senses depended for salvation on having 'Abraham to their father.' And it has already appeared sufficiently how dangerous this belief was; and how utterly St. Paul, like Ezekiel[[14]] and John the Baptist before him, repudiated this idea of genealogical and traditional merit as a ground of confidence before God.
On the other hand, this belief in the transference of merit was based on a true idea of the organic unity of the race. The Jewish race was bound up into one with its great progenitors; and it is these men who are its true representatives. They show what their race can be and is meant to be, and along what lines it is meant to move. Their election and walk with God laid a consecration on all who came after them; as St. Paul elsewhere says that the children of a Christian parent in a mixed marriage are holy, i.e. have a consecration laid upon them by their partly Christian parentage[[15]]. The patriarchs exhibit Israel as God means it to be. And God, so to speak, cannot forget that every Israelite is a child of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and that in their faith and religion lies his possibility and his glory.
Thus stated, the idea of the 'communion of saints' in the Jewish race is nothing else than a ground of hope, and a stimulus to recovery. And the idea admits at once of being transferred to the catholic Israel, as in fact its Jewish parody has, at certain periods, been only too fully and fatally transferred. I say, the true idea admits of being transferred. We belong to the same body as the apostles and martyrs, the virgins and saints, the Jewish patriarchs and prophets also. Their possibilities are ours. Their God is our God for ever and ever. And God looks on us as in one body with them. We too are beloved for these our fathers' sakes. And they too, we cannot doubt, are conscious of our fellowship with them, and if we are trying to live in the same spirit with them, we must believe, all the limitations of our knowledge notwithstanding, that they are supporting and helping us, as in Christ our sympathetic advocates and allies.
4. The metaphor of the olive and the grafting is intelligible enough without explanation. We know how often the olive and the vine are taken in the Old Testament and in other Jewish writings—as in the passage just quoted from the Talmud—for a symbol of Israel; we must frankly recognize that St. Paul, apparently in forgetfulness and not by design, accommodates the physical process of grafting to its spiritual counterpart; for in physical fact, of course, the ingrafted shoot (which represents the Gentiles), and not the stock upon which it is grafted (which represents the Jews), would determine the character and produce of the tree: but when this is once recognized it may be forgotten, and the metaphor is as intelligible to us as if the physical process of grafting were really as St. Paul represents it.
5. As we read the words, 'And so all Israel shall be saved,' we cannot help asking ourselves—Does St. Paul mean us to believe this of all Israelites without exception, or even of Israel in general with an absolute necessity? I think the answer should be a negative in both cases[[16]]. Just above St. Paul says, looking at the matter from the side of Israel, 'They also, if they continue not in unbelief, shall be grafted in.' Here he is looking at the matter from the side of God. It lies in the divine purpose that the establishment of the catholic church, and the experience of alienation on the part of the Jews, should stimulate them to regain their ancient privileges on a new basis; 'and so,' looking at the matter from the point of view of the divine intention, 'all Israel shall be saved.' Just below, from the same point of view, it is stated to be God's purpose 'to have mercy upon all men.' But, in interpreting this latter passage, we are doing violence to what St. Paul says elsewhere with emphatic distinctness, if we imagine that he asserts that all individual men without exception shall ultimately attain the end of their being and the fellowship of God. In these passages, as elsewhere, St. Paul looks at things from two points of view, without attempting to present us with a harmony of them. From one point of view we have spread out before us the 'mystery,' or revealed secret of God, and discern the purpose of His love working on, and finding its opportunities even in the gravest moral disasters. From the other point of view we detect human wilfulness, able in a measure, but never completely or on the whole, to baffle and thwart the divine purpose. St. Paul, I say, is content to recognize both points of view, and not to hold them in complete combination. He uses the perception of the divine purpose—in this case, the recovery of the Jews—as a motive for hope and thankfulness and renewed energy; but he does not, apparently, ask himself the metaphysical questions whether God foreknows how particular individuals or groups of men will act, or, if we must say that God does so foreknow how each man will act, how this is reconcilable with his moral freedom. He is content to adore the divine purpose, and rest upon it; and recognize, on the other hand, the thwarting power of human wilfulness.
From the point of view of God's patiently loving purpose, then, a great and fresh opportunity is being prepared for the recovery of the whole of Israel, when 'the times of the Gentiles' are fulfilled and the Church stands really catholic before their eyes. Just in the same way, in the larger field of all mankind, the purpose of God is at work through all rejections, and all judgements of hardening, to convince all men of their need of God, and so prepare their hearts 'that he might have mercy upon all.' But from the other point of view God respects human freedom. Thus over against the divine purpose stands the ambiguous human 'if'—'if they continue not in their unbelief.'
This ambiguous human element is a prominent feature in Old Testament prophecy, though there too the thwarting power of man's perverseness is limited. If not in one way then in another, if not through one set of agents then through others—on the whole the purpose of God finds its sure way to accomplishment.
Retrospect over the argument
And now that we have given all the pains we can to entering into the spirit of these chapters, may we not say that they have become no longer repellent but deeply attractive? Where could we find a more liberating outlook over the wide purpose of God in redeeming the world? Sin is a stern fact, and demands stern dealing to overcome it by moral discipline. Men of all sorts must be brought to realize their need of God, utterly to expel the false dream of independence, and humbly to welcome the unmerited bounty of the divine 'mercy,' the free gift of pardon and new life. This then is the way in which the fundamental purpose of God for man shows itself in a world of sin; it is by a discipline preparing men to welcome a divine mercy of which they have learnt to know their need. 'That he may have mercy upon all'—this is the generous end upon which all the divine dealings with men converge. The Jews by one kind of discipline while they still were standing together as the elect people of God, and by another when, having rejected the Christ and fallen out of their religious leadership, they were to be stirred to jealousy by the spectacle of a divine fellowship from which they were excluded: the Gentiles by a different sort of discipline, and each separate race by its own; nay more, every individual, Jew and Greek, Englishman or Hindoo, by a distinctive personal chastening, in as many ways as man is various and God is resourceful: all men are so to be dealt with as that all men shall be brought to confess themselves to be as they are in God's sight, and surrender themselves to Him to be refashioned after the divine image. Through all national and personal vocations realized, by which human character is educated: through all national and personal humiliations, which are divine judgements by which human character is corrected and made docile: God's untiring patience and forbearance, in sternness and in love, works on to the one universal end—that He might have mercy upon all. The uttermost and most pitiable collapse, even the imminence of death itself, may be, nay certainly in God's intention is, His remedy for human wilfulness: a means by which—
'God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain, which must not be[[17]].'
—must not be, that is, so far as the resourcefulness of divine love, going all lengths short of destroying the fundamental moral choice of the soul, can avail to prevent it. This teaching of St. Paul suggests a wonderful way of reading human history, and inspires us with the right sort of patience and hopefulness in our attitude towards the wider problems of missionary work and our own dealings with individuals. The races to whose conversion we would fain minister seem so immovable and so indifferent. The men and women whom we would fain help seem so hardened or so weak. But 'the gifts and callings of God' within them and about them, 'are without repentance.' God's remedies for them are not yet exhausted. We therefore have a right to hope and labour on, 'never despairing[[18]].'
And where is a nobler presentation to be found than here of the idea of divine election? That in the great household of the world there are magnificent and (comparatively, at least) ignominious vocations among races and individuals; that some men are born for the top, and other men for the bottom of society; that there are 'honourable' and 'dishonourable' limbs in the body of humanity, the latter fulfilling their necessary function no less than the former, is an indisputable fact. It is no use challenging it, any more than any other fundamental law of the universe. And, if we can see why certain races and certain individuals are fitted for certain tasks, yet on the whole we can advance but a very little way in seeing the reason of human inequalities as in fact they exist. All that lies in the inscrutable and free counsels of God, and the responsibility is—in spite of the modifying effects of human sin—ultimately His[[19]]. But in St. Paul's treatment of it, the recognition of the fact that God works universal ends through selected races and individuals, is robbed of all that ministers to pride and narrowness in the elect, or to hopelessness and a sense of injustice in the rest.
The New Testament writers in general would teach us that with God is no respect of persons; so that the lowest vocation may result in the highest glory, where it is faithfully fulfilled, and the highest vocation, misused, in the deepest degradation; but St. Paul in particular makes us feel the humbling responsibility which attaches necessarily to any state of election. The Jews failed because they lacked the faith and docility which would have enabled them to correspond to God's larger leading. The time came when God who had, 'through the Jews, prepared the Christ for the world,' had also, 'through the Gentiles, prepared the world for Christ'; but the Jews were ready neither to welcome the Christ, nor to 'receive' the world. Thus the richest ministry ever vouchsafed to a race was waiting for the Jews, and they proved false to it, because they had turned their privileges into an occasion for pride and selfishness, and would not learn the new truth or rise to the new opportunity.
Here is a serious warning to the 'elect' of every age. How often has the church at large, or a national church, refused the call to expansion, and lost some rich part of its heritage because it was self-satisfied, and therefore blind? How often does a 'good catholic' fail to recognize that he is utterly misusing the gifts of grace, if his Catholicism does not mean a generous and self-sacrificing desire to win the lost and save the world? How often has the profession of being 'saved' put an end to spiritual growth and the struggle with sin? How many religious orders and societies have lived on the reputation of the past, and appeared to fancy that the achievements of their founders—'the merits of the fathers'—would justify the apathy and carelessness of those who had inherited an honourable name? Indeed, to whatever we are elect—whether national, or ecclesiastical, or personal privileges—the temptation dogs us to rest on our inherited merits and have no open ear to the guiding voice of God, as it calls us to fresh ventures and renewed sacrifices, like those which laid the basis of the position of which we now make our empty or insolent boast. But thus to evade the uncomfortable requirements of the present by an appeal to the achievements of the past—whether it be the past of catholic tradition or 'the Reformation settlement'—is to expose ourselves inevitably to divine condemnation.
Those who keep the open ear are the 'remnant' in every age and church and nation. They are the men who refuse to 'make the word of God of none effect,' because of the blinding, deadening force of social tradition. They are alive and awake to 'buy up the opportunity,' as it presents itself. And for such St. Paul's teaching, inherited from the prophets, of the function of the remnant is full of encouragement. The Bible is a book contemptuous of majorities. The mass of men, conventional, easily satisfied, self-centred, accomplish nothing, redeem and regenerate nothing. But those who have ears to hear have every motive, though they be few in number, to live at the highest level possible, and believe to the full that the purpose of God can be realized. God's purpose can work, and has in history worked, through small minorities, through single individuals. They are the true representatives of their church, their nation, their class. And when the inner history of any epoch comes to be known, while the inert mass of people, 'important' or 'unimportant,' is lost in the dim background, they will be seen distinctive in the foreground: the real movement of God in history, the real witness of the truth, the real spiritual succession of the kingdom of God, will be seen to have been carried on through them for the enriching of the whole world.
I would add two reflections on subordinate, but still important points. It is the function of the catholic church to let its light so shine before men that it shall 'provoke to jealousy,' by the manifest presence of God in the midst of it, the ancient and now alienated people, the Jews. At the moment, with the anti-semite cry strong throughout Europe, and on the morrow of the 'affaire Dreyfus,' these words ring with a bitter irony. And in our own East London how utterly unlikely it is that the spectacle of our Christianity should make the Jews feel that Christian society cannot but be divine! Indeed, the unfulfilled debt Christendom owes to the Jews is appalling. That ancient and indomitable race retains, with all its faults, its close-knitting sense of brotherhood, its faith, its frugality, its industry, its patience, its heroism. We are meant to show it the greater glories of the New Covenant, the splendour of the purity, the unworldliness, the expansiveness, the love of the brotherhood of Christ. And we do show it—what? Is there that in our common Christianity, as they see it, which should obviously make Judaism ashamed of itself? Could St. Paul, looking at our Christendom, have expected 'all Israel to be saved' by the spectacle of a catholic church? These are considerations which indeed should drive us to bitter penitence and earnest prayer.
Finally, before we leave these chapters, we shall do well to look steadily at St. Paul's habit of mind in dealing with antithetic or complementary truths. No one could believe with a more glorious conviction than St. Paul in the dominance of the purpose of God in the world: in the certainty of the accomplishment of what God has predestined. If the very rejection of the Christ by the Jews was turned into an opportunity for the conversion of the Gentiles, what crime can be too great for the divine wisdom to overrule it for good? No one, on the other hand, could realize more deeply the responsibility which lies upon men: their strange power to correspond with God, or partly thwart His purpose for them and through them. My point is only this: he is true to both sides of an antithesis, even though the exact relationship and interworking of the twin truths is necessarily and finally obscure. He refuses to be one-sided at the requirement of an incomplete human logic. It has been often pointed out, and in many directions, how prone we all are to take up with one side of truth—with predestination or free-will, with the divinity or the manhood of Christ, with the unity or the trinity of the Godhead, with sacraments or conversion, with authority or personal judgement; and if we are intellectually disposed, we call our one-sidedness 'being logical.' But we had better let St. Paul teach us once for all that impartiality is a greater thing than this cheap logic; even as Church history teaches us that a sharp-witted but one-sided zeal for truth is one main cause of bitterness, narrowness, and schism.
[[1]] I follow, by preference, the paragraphs of the R.V., unless there is very strong reason to the contrary.
[[2]] Cf. 2 Cor. v. 19, 'God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.'
[[3]] Num. xv. 20, 21.
[[4]] 'The Lord called thy name A green olive tree.' Jer. xi. 16; Hos. xiv. 6.
[[5]] On 'mystery,' see Ephesians, p. 73. It means a divine secret disclosed to the elect.
[[6]] Isa. lix. 20, according to the Greek, and xxvii. 9. Cf. Ezek. xxxvi. 25, 26.
[[7]] Isa. xl. 13. Cf. Job xxxviii. 4; xli. 11; Wisd. ix. 13.
[[8]] Jer. xxxviii. 4.
[[9]] Ezek. xvi. 61.
[[10]] See above, vol. i. 3.
[[11]] Ezek. xxxvii.
[[12]] See my Ephesians, pp. 258 ff.
[[13]] Quoted, with much other illustrative matter, by Weber, l.c., pp. 293 ff. The fancy is based on 1 Kings xix. 36; Exod. xxxii. 13. Cf. on Cant. i. 5, 'I am black but comely'—'The congregation of Israel speaks: I am black through mine own works, but lovely through the works of my fathers.'
[[14]] Ezek. xiv. 14.
[[15]] 1 Cor. vii. 14.
[[16]] 'All Israel,' in 1 Kings xii. 1, 2 Chron. xii. 1, Dan. ix. 11, means 'Israel in general.'
[[17]] These words (which in their full sense seem to go beyond what we have a right to say) occur in Browning's Ring and the Book. It is the Pope's final reflection, when he condemns Guido to death, that his execution may be the one chance for his spiritual recovery—
'In the main criminal I see no chance
Except in such a suddenness of fate.'
[[18]] Luke vi. 35, or 'despairing of no man,' marg. R.V.
[[19]] We hold, therefore, with regard to the lots of men in this world, exactly the opposite of what Plato suggested under the impulse of the doctrine of transmigration, 'It is the man's own choice, God is blameless.'