This foremost place which righteousness takes in the order of St. Paul's ideas makes a signal difference between him and Puritanism. Puritanism, as we have said, finds its starting-point either in the desire to flee from eternal wrath or in the desire to obtain eternal bliss. Puritanism has learned from revelation, as it says, a particular history of the first man's fall, of mankind being under a curse, of certain contracts having been passed concerning mankind in the Council of the Trinity, of the substance of those contracts, and of man's position under them. The great concern of Puritanism is with the operation of those contracts on man's condition; its leading thought, if it is a Puritanism of a gloomy turn, is of awe and fear caused by the threatening aspect of man's condition under these contracts; if of a cheerful turn, of gratitude and hope caused by the favourable aspect of it. But in either case, foregone events, the covenant passed, what God has done and does, is the great matter. What there is left for man to do, the human work of righteousness, is secondary, and comes in but to attest and confirm our assurance of what God has done for us. We have seen this in Wesley's words already quoted: the first thing for a man is to be justified and sanctified, and to have the assurance that, without seeking it by works, he is justified and sanctified; then the desire and works of righteousness follow as a proper result of this condition. Still more does Calvinism make man's desire and works of righteousness mere evidences and benefits of more important things; the desire to work righteousness is among the saving graces applied by the Holy Spirit to the elect, and the last of those graces. Denique, says the Synod of Dort, last of all, after faith in the promises and after the witness of the Spirit, comes, to establish our assurance, a clear conscience and righteousness. It is manifest how unlike is this order of ideas to Paul's order, who starts with the thought of a conscience void of offence towards God and man, and builds upon that thought his whole system.
But this difference constitutes from the very outset an immense scientific superiority for the scheme of Paul. Hope and fear are elements of human nature like the love of right, but they are far blinder and less scientific elements of it. 'The Bible is a divine revelation; the Bible declares certain things; the things it thus declares have the witness of our hopes and fears;'—this is the line of thought followed by Puritanism. But what science seeks after is a satisfying rational conception of things. A scheme which fails to give this, which gives the contrary of this, may indeed be of a nature to move our hopes and fears, but is to science of none the more value on that account.
Nor does our calling such a scheme a revelation mend the matter. Instead of covering the scientific inadequacy of a conception by the authority of a revelation, science rather proves the authority of a revelation by the scientific adequacy of the conceptions given in it, and limits the sphere of that authority to the sphere of that adequacy. The more an alleged revelation seems to contain precious and striking things, the more will science be inclined to doubt the correctness of any deduction which draws from it, within the sphere of these things, a scheme which rationally is not satisfying. That the scheme of Puritanism is rationally so little satisfying inclines science, not to take it on the authority of the Bible, but to doubt whether it is really in the Bible. The first appeal which this scheme, having begun outside the sphere of reality and experience, makes in the sphere of reality and experience,—its first appeal, therefore, to science,—the appeal to the witness of human hope and fear, does not much mend matters; for science knows that numberless conceptions not rationally satisfying are yet the ground of hope and fear.
Paul does not begin outside the sphere of science; he begins with an appeal to reality and experience. And the appeal here with which he commences has, for science, undoubted force and importance; for he appeals to a rational conception which is a part, and perhaps the chief part, of our experience; the conception of the law of righteousness, the very law and ground of human nature so far as this nature is moral. Things as they truly are,—facts,—are the object-matter of science; and the moral law in human nature, however this law may have originated, is in our actual experience among the greatest of facts.
If I were not afraid of intruding upon Mr. Ruskin's province, I might point out the witness which etymology itself bears to this law as a prime element and clue in man's constitution. Our word righteousness means going straight, going the way we are meant to go; there are languages in which the word 'way' or 'road' is also the word for right reason and duty; the Greek word for justice and righteousness has for its foundation, some say, the idea of describing a certain line, following a certain necessary orbit. But for these fanciful helps there is no need. When Paul starts with affirming the grandeur and necessity of the law of righteousness, science has no difficulty in going along with him. When he fixes as man's right aim 'love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control,'[30] he appeals for witness to the truth of what he says to an experience too intimate to need illustration or argument.
The best confirmation of the scientific validity of the importance which Paul thus attaches to the law of righteousness, the law of reason and conscience, God as moral law, is to be found in its agreement with the importance attached to this law by teachers the most unlike him; since in the eye of science an experience gains as much by having universality, as in the eye of religion it seems to gain by having uniqueness. 'Would you know,' says Epictetus, 'the means to perfection which Socrates followed? they were these: in every single matter which came before him he made the rule of reason and conscience his one rule to follow.' Such was precisely the aim of Paul also; it is an aim to which science does homage as a satisfying rational conception. And to this aim hope and fear properly attach themselves. For on our following the clue of moral order, or losing it, depends our happiness or misery; our life or death in the true sense of those words; our harmony with the universal order or our disharmony with it; our partaking, as St. Paul says, of the wrath of God or of the glory of God. So that looking to this clue, and fearing to lose hold on it, we may in strict scientific truth say with the author of the Imitation: Omnia vanitas, præter amare Deum, et illi soli servire.
But to serve God, to follow that central clue in our moral being which unites us to the universal order, is no easy task; and here again we are on the most sure ground of experience and psychology. In some way or other, says Bishop Wilson, every man is conscious of an opposition in him between the flesh and the spirit. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor, say the thousand times quoted lines of the Roman poet. The philosophical explanation of this conflict does not indeed attribute, like the Manichæan fancy, any inherent evil to the flesh and its workings; all the forces and tendencies in us are, like our proper central moral tendency the desire of righteousness, in themselves beneficent. But they require to be harmonised with this tendency, because this aims directly at our total moral welfare,—our harmony as moral beings with the law of our nature and the law of God,—and derives thence a pre-eminence and a right to moderate. And, though they are not evil in themselves, the evil which flows from these diverse workings is undeniable. The lusts of the flesh, the law in our members, passion, according to the Greek word used by Paul, inordinate affection, according to the admirable rendering of Paul's Greek word in our English Bible,[31] take naturally no account of anything but themselves; this arbitrary and unregulated action of theirs can produce only confusion and misery. The spirit, the law of our mind, takes account of the universal moral order, the will of God, and is indeed the voice of that order expressing itself in us. Paul talks of a man sowing to his flesh,[32] because each of us has of his own this individual body, this congeries of flesh and bones, blood and nerves, different from that of every one else, and with desires and impulses driving each of us his own separate way; and he says that a man who sows to this, sows to a thousand tyrants, and can reap no worthy harvest. But he talks of sowing to the spirit; because there is one central moral tendency which for us and for all men is the law of our being, and through reason and righteousness we move in this universal order and with it. In this conformity to the will of God, as we religiously name the moral order, is our peace and happiness.
But how to find the energy and power to bring all those self-seeking tendencies of the flesh, those multitudinous, swarming, eager, and incessant impulses, into obedience to the central tendency? Mere commanding and forbidding is of no avail, and only irritates opposition in the desires it tries to control. It even enlarges their power, because it makes us feel our impotence; and the confusion caused by their ungoverned working is increased by our being filled with a deepened sense of disharmony, remorse, and dismay. 'I was alive without the law once,'[33] says Paul; the natural play of all the forces and desires in me went on smoothly enough so long as I did not attempt to introduce order and regulation among them. But the condition of immoral tranquillity could not in man be permanent. That natural law of reason and conscience which all men have, was sufficient by itself to produce a consciousness of rebellion and disquietude. Matters became only worse by the exhibition of the Mosaic law, the offspring of a moral sense more poignant and stricter, however little it might show of subtle insight and delicacy, than the moral sense of the mass of mankind. The very stringency of the Mosaic code increased the feeling of dismay and helplessness; it set forth the law of righteousness more authoritatively and minutely, yet did not supply any sufficient power to keep it. Neither the law of nature, therefore, nor the law of Moses, availed to blind men to righteousness. So we come to the word which is the governing word of the Epistle to the Romans,—the word all. As the word righteousness is the governing word of St. Paul's entire mind and life, so the word all is the governing word of this his chief epistle. The Gentile with the law of nature, the Jew with the law of Moses, alike fail to achieve righteousness. 'All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.'[34] All do what they would not, and do not what they would; all feel themselves enslaved, impotent, guilty, miserable. 'O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?'[35]
Hitherto, we have followed Paul in the sphere of morals; we have now come with him to the point where he enters the sphere of religion. Religion is that which binds and holds us to the practice of righteousness. We have accompanied Paul, and found him always treading solid ground, till he is brought to straits where a binding and holding power of this kind is necessary. Here is the critical point for the scientific worth of his doctrine. 'Now at last,' cries Puritanism, 'the great apostle is about to become even as one of us; there is no issue for him now, but the issue we have always declared he finds. He has recourse to our theurgy of election, justification, substitution, and imputed righteousness.' We will proceed to show that Paul has recourse to nothing of the kind.