There is no idea in this doxology with which this epistle has not made us familiar in substance. We have been led to think of the gospel, now proclaimed and entrusted to St. Paul, as the disclosure of a divine purpose long working secretly: we have been bidden to adore the unfathomable resourcefulness of the wisdom of God: we have been constantly referred to the testimony borne by law and prophets to the gospels: we have been made familiar with the object of the evangelical preaching, as being to secure 'the obedience of faith among all the nations.' And a particular phrase in an epistle written about the same time[[2]]—'We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the wisdom that hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory, which ... unto us God revealed by his Spirit,'—is strikingly parallel to the beginning of the doxology. At the same time the elaborate richness of the style, as well as many of the ideas, reminds us irresistibly of the Epistle to the Ephesians[[3]]. This, coupled with the fact that there is considerable authority for placing the doxology at the end of chap. xiv, has led some scholars to adopt the idea—accepted and elaborated by Dr. Lightfoot—that St. Paul first wrote the epistle down to xvi. 23, as his Epistle to the Romans, and subsequently, perhaps during one of his sojourns at Rome, turned it into a circular letter, omitting for this purpose the last two chapters, with their personal matter, and adding the doxology in the rich manner of the Epistle to the Ephesians. Subsequently the doxology would have been added also to the complete epistle. There are many difficulties in such a theory. Especially why should the beginning of chap. xv be cut off from the end of chap. xiv, when there is no break in thought? But I do not pursue the subject here[[4]], for it would be out of place, and alien to our practical purpose. There is no ground for doubting that the whole of what we receive as the epistle was written by St. Paul; and no ground for thinking that any part of the whole, down to xvi. 23, was not found in the letter as originally carried by Phoebe; but it cannot be denied that some mystery, not easily solved, hangs about the manifold and interrupted conclusions of the epistle; and that the rich style of the doxology is somewhat unlike both the rest of the epistle, and the other epistles of this period. However, whether or no it was written at a later date, at least it forms a splendid summing up of what is probably the greatest and most influential letter ever written.
And there is no teaching which we more urgently need to-day than the teaching of this epistle. Whether the need be to expand our personal religion into social service, and also to reinvigorate our social service with the power of personal religion; or so to reassert the divine authority of the Church as never to forget that it depends for its vitality upon personally converted hearts; or to teach men to remember the inexorable severity of divine judgement, as well as the depth of the divine compassion; or to rebuke the shallowness which attempts to separate Christian character from Christian doctrine; or to harmonize individual freedom with the social claim; or to impart to self-sacrifice the spirit of humility and gladness and indomitable hope; or at once to exalt and restrict the function of the State; or to emphasize the true grounds and limits of toleration in a catholic church—whatever, one may almost say, be the need to which the special deficiencies and perils of our church and age give rise, or of which at the moment we are most conscious, the teaching of St. Paul in this epistle is found to meet it full face.
Truly we may thank God with a continually growing gratitude for the gift to us of a letter so inexhaustibly full of spiritual wealth, and so complete in its provision for the whole of life.
[[1]] If we retain the words 'to whom' the grammar of the sentence breaks down, but the object to whom praise is ascribed is probably the Father.
[[2]] 1 Cor. ii. 7, 10.
[[3]] See especially Eph. iii. 1-13. Cf. also 2 Tim. i. 9-11; Titus i. 2, 3.
[[4]] It is fully treated in Lightfoot's Biblical Essays (Macmillan, 1894), pp. 287 ff, by Lightfoot himself and Hort from different points of view, and by S. and H., pp. lxxxv. ff.