It is to produce this acknowledgement that St. Paul now addresses himself. This argument of the first part of the epistle is a very simple one. It elucidates two plain propositions:—
1. that the wrath of God is, and is necessarily according to eternal and unalterable principles of moral government, and in the case of every man without any possibility of exception, upon sin.
2. that all men, Jews and Gentiles, are held in sin, and therefore lie under the divine wrath.
Thus St. Paul immediately follows up his initial statement of the revelation of a divine righteousness with the assertion of another 'revelation' made plain to the consciences of men. 'The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men,' and he proceeds to demonstrate the prevalence of sin first of all in the heathen world and to lay bare its meaning.
Before we read this passage certain points should be plain to our minds.
1. By sin St. Paul means essentially wilfulness—wilful disobedience. There is such a thing as an inheritance of moral weakness or perversity which passes to men without their fault and without their knowledge. This, the real existence of which hardly any one can deny, is what is called original sin; and later on we shall find St. Paul speaking of it. But it is not what is most properly called sin. God is absolutely equitable. 'Sin is not reckoned' as sin in His sight, apart from knowledge and will. Sin, most properly speaking, begins and ends where wilful disobedience begins and ends. St. Paul on this matter is completely at one with St. John when he makes sin and lawlessness identical as realities in the world. 'Sin is lawlessness[1].' And we cannot even make a beginning of advance along St. Paul's line of thought till we recognize the real existence of sin as something different in kind from ignorance or weakness or lack of development, and as an incomparably greater evil than those. Sin is the created will setting itself against the divine will. It is, as a state or an act, the refusal of God. And the recognition of the awful existence of this refusal of God is the main clue to understanding the miseries of the present world.
2. Sin therefore, involving as it does wilful disobedience, can only be spoken of as prevalent over the heathen world because, not merely one chosen race, but all men in general have had the opportunity of the knowledge of God. St. Paul indeed elsewhere modifies the general assertion of the fact which he makes in this place, by broadly recognizing that there are states of human existence which are low in their moral standard, but are rendered comparatively guiltless by the absence of moral knowledge—states of life where sin exists but is not reckoned as sin[2]. For 'sin,' he says, 'is not reckoned' as sin where there is no enlightening law and no consequent condemnation of conscience. But in this passage, looking at humanity in general, he asserts, like the author of the Book of Wisdom or the perhaps contemporary Jewish author of the Apocalypse of Baruch[3], that all men have had the opportunity of knowing God from His works in nature, and that their present state is the result of a wilful refusal of Him. They are 'without excuse.' The sources of the natural knowledge of God are indeed twofold, for there is the moral conscience, individual and social, of which St. Paul speaks later; but here it is the evidence of nature alone of which St. Paul speaks: the witness of the creatures to 'the invisible things' or attributes of their creator, that is to say, to His power and (generally) His divinity.
3. Assuming then the opportunity of the knowledge of God as lying behind human records, St. Paul traces the history of sin. It had its roots in the refusal of the human will to recognize God and give Him the homage of gratitude and service due to Him. Men 'held down the truth in unrighteousness,' that is, restrained it from having free course in their hearts and in the world because of the painful moral obligations which it involves. Knowing God, they refused to acknowledge Him with thankfulness or 'give Him the glory.' Rather they would themselves 'be as gods.' They 'refused to have God in their knowledge.' Then from this root in the rebel will sin passed to the obscuring of the understanding, as is shown in the ridiculous aberrations of idolatry. 'They became vain in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise,' the nations in their worship showed themselves fools. Idolatry had long ago appeared simply ridiculous to Isaiah: he pointed the finger of scorn at the idolaters. 'They know not,' he cried, 'neither do they consider: the Lord hath shut their eyes that they cannot see, and their hearts that they cannot understand. And none calleth to mind, neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, I have burned part of the wood in the fire; yea, also I have baked bread upon the coals thereof; I have roasted flesh and eaten it: and shall I make the residue thereof an abomination? shall I fall down to the stock of a tree? He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand[4]?' Isaiah's language and thought had been elaborated and developed in the Book of Wisdom[5], and St. Paul appropriates it. To mistake creatures for the Creator, or to think of the glorious and spiritual God as if He were in the form of the corruptible body of man or beast or bird or reptile—so St. Paul alludes to the man worship of Greece and the animal worship of Egypt—is simple blindness and folly; blindness and folly in which St. Paul sees the just punishment of the rebellious will in the region of the intellect. But it has another punishment in the region of the appetites or passions. As men deliberately 'repudiated' the knowledge and obedience of God, God 'repudiated' men in penal retribution. He gave them up to become vile in their own eyes and to find out their impotence to control their own lusts. They ran riot even in all sorts of unnatural and lawless ways, so that the world became full of sins of all kinds; sins against God and sins against man; antisocial sins of all sorts, the sins which destroy the state and friendship and commerce and the home: and at the last the very ideal of righteousness had come to be lost. St. Paul, we notice, makes the lowest moral stage of all to consist, not in merely doing these wicked things, but in abandoning all distaste for them—consenting unrestrainedly to those who do them; and this profoundly true remark explains the moral impotence of much that is from other points of view excellent in Greek literature.
4. For the punishment of all this sin St. Paul is not content to look to the 'day of judgement,' though that is to be the final and characteristic expression of divine wrath, and that 'day of wrath' he still probably anticipated in the more immediate future; but he sees already in the actual world of human society as he knows it the manifold evidence of the divine wrath here and now. Men are receiving in themselves the fitting reward of their perversity. Their life has found its own punishment. The divine wrath is actually disclosed in the facts of experience. 'Look,' St. Paul seems to say, 'at the way men are living, and ask yourselves if there is any interpretation but one of the facts you see. There is but one conclusion possible. God has condemned and is showing His wrath on the human nature which He made.' Just in the same way in an earlier epistle St. Paul speaks of the Jews, even before the destruction of Jerusalem, as already judged, already the subject of the divine wrath[6]. And God's method of judgement is this. The punishment lies in the natural consequences of the lawless actions. The wages of sin is also its fruit[7]. And further, this punishment of sin involves the increased liability to sin again. One sin 'gives us over' to another, as one good action facilitates another. This idea was familiar to Jewish teachers. Among the 'sayings of the Fathers' we find, 'Every fulfilment of duty is rewarded by another, and every transgression is punished by another[8].' St. Paul, in fact, in this chapter, may be said to be concentrating for the Christian Church all that is best and deepest in the moral philosophy of Judaism.
Now we are in a position to read the first section of St. Paul's argument without perhaps finding any single idea to the interpretation of which we have not a clue.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold down the truth in unrighteousness; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse: because that, knowing God, they glorified him not as God, neither gave thanks; but became vain in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness, that their bodies should be dishonoured among themselves: for that they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.
For this cause God gave them up unto vile passions: for their women changed the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another, men with men working unseemliness, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was due.
And even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, hateful to God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, unmerciful: who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they which practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them.
1. Perhaps the first question which arises in our minds when reading this passage is, whether St. Paul's general account of the heathen world is not unjustifiably severe. Does he not paint it too black? In fact, the account he gives coincides with the account given by other Jews of the Gentile world as in their experience they found it; and this, we must remember, means the Gentile world of the great cities of the empire. They thought, as they moved about the world and saw what they could not but see, that God had forsaken the Gentiles because they refused to acknowledge His law. There was sin enough in Israel, but it was remediable. The sin of the Gentiles was irremediable. God had forsaken them[9]. This last idea is of course one entirely alien to St. Paul's mind. To him all God's judgements, at least in this world, have one intention—to awaken men to recognize the truth and to stir them to conversion, 'that he may have mercy upon all.' But otherwise St. Paul's view of the Gentile world, as he experienced it in the cities of mixed Greek and Asiatic population of the Roman Empire, and especially in the notoriously wicked Corinth where he was writing[10], was the ordinary Jewish view. And a contemporary Stoic philosopher, who wrote at Ephesus under the name of Heracleitus, gives a picture of society in that city fully as black[11].
At the same time, if we are to be fair, we must recognize that the account, while true, is not complete. The Gentile life was not without its 'salt.' There was a great deal of virtue, both domestic and philosophical, in the empire—more perhaps in the country, of which St. Paul knew little, than in the towns. And the existence of this salt he acknowledges when, in the second chapter of this epistle, he speaks of Gentiles which have no revealed law but do by nature the things of law, being a law unto themselves, and having the effect of the law written in their hearts, and a witnessing conscience, individual and social, to help them[12]: and again, when he intimates that there is an uncircumcision which puts the circumcision to shame by keeping the law[13]. But it is not St. Paul's way to exactly correlate the different aspects of his subject as a modern writer would do. He is a prophet and preacher, not a formally systematic writer. It is enough for him that the sin which he is describing is a reality: that its tendencies are what he describes them to be: that, whatever other counter tendency there may be, sin is so dominant in the world that its results are as he represents them, and that the conscience and experience of those to whom he writes will respond to his indictment.
Nor, if we give its metaphorical meaning to 'idolatry,' is there a word which St. Paul says in this chapter which would not be true of our modern civilization in London or Paris or New York. With us indeed Christianity has been sufficiently vigorous to provide a counteracting force, of infinitely stronger power than existed in the Roman world, to resist corruption. The agencies of divine strength and recovery, the centres of health and light, are infinitely more numerous, stronger, more constant, more progressive. But the world of sin is still what it was: and always there lies upon it the same stamp of the divine condemnation. We look around on the life of our city, with its selfish and disgusting lusts, with its drunkenness, with its enervating luxury, with its selfish wealth, with its reckless and immoral gambling, with its dishonest commerce, with its grasping avarice so neglectful of the lives of those whom it makes its instruments: we look round, I say, not on the whole life, but on the sinful life of our city, and we see what human nature is plainly meant not to be, either in its characteristics or in its miserable issues. And by the interval between what we see life to be and what we know it was meant to be, we can measure the reality of the divine judgement. The facts press upon us the truth which St. Paul would teach. The sinful life is a condemned life. Here is an actual disclosure of the wrath of God upon all unrighteousness and sin.
2. But what will 'science' say to St. Paul's account of human degeneracy and degradation? Does not St. Paul seem to talk, as moralists in general have been disposed to talk, as if the course of the world's history had been a downward course? and is not this the religious view? and is it not directly opposed to the scientific view of a gradual process of development and advance? This is a very common form of question to suggest itself to our minds. And the answer to it appears to be this[14]:—The biblical view of the world is not by any means that as a whole it has gone from bad to worse. It recognizes periods and areas of degradation, and suggests periods and areas of stagnation. And this is what anthropology and history equally suggest. But its main concern is with the history of one particular line of human advancement under divine guidance through Abraham and Moses and prophets and kings, through Christ and His Church: an advancement which is to be finally world-wide, and even more than world-wide, in its effects. Other lines of progress in civilization and knowledge the Bible recognizes but is not largely concerned with. But it is in its general effect thoroughly in accord with science, which suggests not general and equable advance over the whole region of humanity, but advance in special departments along the line of select races, continually impeded in its progress by counter tendencies, by periods and areas of degradation, and still more of stagnation[15]. Science, indeed, utters no word of promise at all as to the ultimate result of all this evolution[16]. It is faith, of whatsoever sort, not science, that can make us optimistic as to the issue of human history.
But no doubt the Bible does throughout postulate the existence of sin; and it claims that sin everywhere, and from the first, has been a cause of degradation in the individual and the race. Now here is the real point at issue in the relations of religion and science. The main question is not about human origins or a primaeval fall. It is simply on the comparatively easy field of actual human existence. Is human freedom—freedom within limits to choose and act—a reality? Can man therefore misuse this freedom to do what he need not have done and ought not to have done? And has he, in fact, constantly been doing morally wrong things, wilfully and knowingly, which he need not have done? Does, therefore, the area of human history present at every stage a result or product which human wilfulness and lawlessness, that is, sin, has contributed to spoil and to degrade below its natural level? Now it is this—the real existence of countless human actions which need not have been and ought not to have been—which contemporary science, with a necessitarian bias, is largely occupied in denying. Granted the reality within limits—limits which have no doubt often been grossly exaggerated, but granted the reality within due limits—of human freedom, and therefore the possibility and reality of actual sin and guilt and degradation which need not have been, I do not believe there remains any serious conflict in the moral region between religion and science. The conflict, I say, is continually being taken back into the region of original sin or the original fall. But this is a quite secondary area of debate, in which I believe there can be no serious disagreement, if there is agreement in the primary area of actual human sin. The universal moral consciousness and common sense of man bears witness to the fact that we can do and do do what we ought and need not. It recognizes, moreover, the moral truth of St. Paul's idea that this lawlessness of the will has its perverting effects on the intelligence and on the passions. The human conscience then responds to St. Paul's account of the origin and history of human sin, and of its fruits both in the individual and in society. And if psychological science is inclined to deny the very existence of any faculty of free choice such as makes sin possible, it will be found on examination to be going very far beyond what it can prove. For the reality of guilt and sin, and the degradation which results from it, we have the human consciousness; against it we have no positive evidence: nothing in fact but the habitual unwillingness of specialist science, physical or theological, to recognize its limits.
3. St. Paul finds the root of sin in the refusal of man in general to recognize God. He asserts that they might have known Him, or rather did know Him, but declined to act on that knowledge. Now it is noticeable that he does not ascribe this knowledge of God, which he declares to have been possible to man everywhere, to an original revelation, nor even in this place to the moral conscience, but to the evidence of nature. In this, as in his ridicule of idolatry, he is in accordance, not only with Jewish thought, but with contemporary Greek philosophy. The argument from design had become habitual in the schools, having been stated first of all with transparent simplicity by Xenophon in his account of the reasoning of Socrates. St. Paul then finds in this instinctive inference from nature up to nature's God, 'a testimony of the soul naturally Christian.' He is able, at Lystra and Athens, to assume that men will respond to it.
It is another question, into which St. Paul does not specifically enter, how far back in human history the appreciation of this reasoning goes. But it is worth noticing that among our contemporary investigators of the history of religion, some at least of the most acute have been coming back to what we may call a modified form of the doctrine of an original monotheism[17]. They think that even savage religions generally bear traces, that are plainly independent, of a belief in one great and mostly good God; and that there is no evidence that this higher belief was developed out of the lower belief in manifold spirits of more ambiguous characters. They see no reason to suppose that the higher belief has been gradually arrived at within any period into which the human mind can penetrate with its investigations or its well-grounded conjectures. Humanity appears to them to have been haunted from its origins with this belief in the one God; and they regard all the higher religious movements as attempts not so much to arrive at, as to retain hold on, a belief which is continually in danger of being overlaid and forgotten. It does not appear that anthropological science is at all likely to disprove such a view which on the other hand has a great deal of evidence to justify it. At least, the evidences of deterioration in the history of religion are manifold and conspicuous. The lowest view of God and man is not by any means always the oldest. And the recognition of such facts is quite consonant with the doctrine of the evolution of religion in its more reasonable forms.
Meanwhile, every one is in sufficient harmony with St. Paul's argument who recognizes the universal facts of sin and guilt and needless moral deterioration among men; and who recognizes also that the secret of sin is the wilful refusal on men's part to know God as they might have known Him, and obey Him as they might have obeyed Him.
4. Besides these difficult questions, we should mark what is both plain and instructive, that St. Paul regards man as necessarily living either above himself or below himself. Man's true nature is to be in dependence upon God. Therein is his true liberty and dignity of sonship. When he tries to be independent, to be his own master simply, he loses the true principle of self-government and becomes the victim of his own passions. God 'gave men up,' handed them over as slaves to dishonouring passions. This theory of human nature is intimately bound up with all St. Paul's teaching about grace and redemption, and we shall hear more of it.
5. We shall do well to notice, finally, one consequence which follows from recognizing that the lowest stage of moral degradation lies, not merely in doing what is wrong, but in having ceased to disapprove of it. That is to say, the lowest moral stage carries with it a complete loss of ideal, or absence of the standard of right and wrong; and this lowest stage is anticipated before it is reached. It follows, therefore, and we must not forget it, that the actual conscience of the individual, or of the society, at any particular moment affords no adequate standard of right and wrong. The moral conscience, like the intelligence in general, requires enlightenment. It supplies no trustworthy information, except so far as we are at pains to keep it enlightened. More than this, its capacity to keep us admonished depends on our habitually observing its injunctions. To disobey conscience is to dull it, and finally to make it obdurate and insensitive. The absence of conscientious objection to a particular course of action may therefore be due either to our having neglected to enlighten our conscience or to having refused to obey it. The duty of an individual to himself is not only to obey his conscience, but also take pains to enlighten it. And the duty of the individual to society is to make continual efforts to keep the corporate conscience up to standard.
[1] 1 John iii. 4. The Greek phrase implies exactly that all sin is lawlessness, and all lawlessness is sin.
[2] Rom. v. 13, 14.
[3] Cf. Wisd. xiii. 1-9: 'For verily all men by nature were but vain who had no perception of God, and from the good things that are seen they gained not power to know him that is, neither by giving heed to the works did they recognize the artificer.... For from the greatness of the beauty even of created things in like proportion does man form the image of their first maker.... But again even they are not to be excused. For if they had power to know so much ... how is it that they did not sooner find the Sovereign Lord of these his works?' Apoc. Bar. liv. 17, 18: 'From time to time ye have rejected the understanding of the Most High. For his works have not taught you, nor has the skill of his creation which is at all times persuaded you.'
[4] Isa. xliv. 18-20.
[5] Wisd. xi. 15; xiii, xiv, xv. St. Paul's debt to the Book of Wisdom is apparent (1) in the kinds of idols he mentions; (2) in the way in which the thought of idolatry leads on to that of uncleanness and sexual immorality; and (3) in the idea of retribution by the natural law of results.
[6] 1 Thess. ii. 16.
[7] Butler's Analogy, part i. ch. 2.
[8] Pirqé Aboth, iv. 2 (cited by S. and H.).
[9] S. and H. p. 49.
[10] He implies, as Dr. Farrar points out, 1 Cor. v. 9-10, that pure society did not exist in Corinth.
[11] See my Ephesians, pp. 91, 92, 255.
[12] Rom. ii. 13-15.
[13] Rom. ii. 26.
[14] See also app. note E on physical science and the fall.
[15] Cf. F. B. Jevons, Introd. to the Hist. of Religion (Methuen), pp. 394, 395: 'Everywhere it is the many who lapse: the few who hold right on. The progressive peoples of the earth are in a minority.' 'Though evolution is universal, progress is exceptional.'
[16] Cf. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (Romanes Lecture, 1893, Macmillan), p. 36: 'The theory of evolution encourages no millennial anticipations. If, for millions of years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet, some time, the summit will be reached, and the downward route will be commenced.'
[17] The allusion is to (1) Jevons (op. cit. cap. xxv), who seems to think some 'amorphous' form of monotheism may very probably lie behind totemism. He strongly repudiates the notion that the lower form is necessarily the older. (2) Andrew Lang, Making of Religion (Longmans, 1898), chaps. ix and xv. Cp. also Orr's Christian view of God and the World (Elliot, 1893), pp. 212 ff., and notes E, F, G.
St. Paul in his judgement of the Gentile world is but repeating, with more of moral discernment, what he would have learned in his Jewish training. But the strict Jews who had taught St. Paul, though some among them must have been good men, ready to enter into the deeply penitential spirit of their psalmists and prophets, do not seem as a rule to have liked to think of their own people as liable to divine condemnation. They chose to suppose that the Gentile world alone was the area upon which divine vengeance would light, while the Jews were to appear as the instruments of God's judgements, or at least themselves exempt from them. They had forgotten all the superabundant warnings against such a spirit which the prophets from Amos to John the Baptist had let fall. This frame of mind—censorious when it looks without, lenient to the point of blindness when it looks within—sometimes appears when one thinks of things in the abstract as almost impossible, in the form at least in which St. Paul here proceeds to attribute it to the Jews. We can hardly believe that any responsible beings could be so blind as St. Paul implies that his pious fellow-countrymen were. But it needs only experience to convince us that even in its grosser forms this frame of mind is extraordinarily common in individuals, in nations, and in churches. Certainly the nation of England is not, and the representatives of religious England too often are not, exempt from the common failing. And in the case of the Jews we have also the witness of our Lord. He represents the religious Jewish world as honeycombed with hypocrisy of a plain and gross sort. They are to Him very types of the men who behold the mote that is in their brother's eye, but consider not the beam that is in their own eyes. St. Paul's witness then is only the same as the Christ's.
Here then St. Paul turns abruptly upon a Jew who may be supposed to have been listening to the indictment of the Gentiles with expressions of sympathy, and bids him look within and recognize that the Jew also falls under the same indictment and on the same grounds. And he proceeds sternly to cut away any possible ground of confidence which he might derive from the thought that he had 'Abraham to his father.' God's judgement is directed by an absolutely impartial 'truth' or estimate of the facts in their inner reality. If in any particular case of persistent sin His judgement seems to linger, it is not that He has forgotten or will overlook; it is only that He is merciful and forbearing, and gives long space for repentance[1]. But, meanwhile, if the opportunity is not taken, if the heart is hard and impenitent, a store is being laid up against the offender in the place of judgement, which will break out in the great day in manifested wrath. God's principle of judgement is absolutely free from partiality. There are men who have steadily in view the true aim of human life, its imperishable glory, its final and permanent honour, and, therefore, preferring eternal to temporal things, patiently go on doing good; they may be Jews or Greeks, but in either case indifferently, the reward that they have sought will be theirs with the accompaniment of inward peace. There are other men who are contentious, and refusing the leading of the truth, make themselves servants to unrighteousness. They may be Jews or Gentiles, but the divine wrath, showing itself in outward suffering and inward anguish, will be upon them all equally. For God judges men impartially in the light of their opportunities. Those who have the advantage of a revealed law shall be judged and acquitted according as they have, not listened to it merely, but obeyed it. For a law known and not kept, so far from commending us to God, is but the instrument of our judgement. And those who have not this advantage are yet not without an inward light in the natural moral consciousness of mankind. Those who have sinned against this light shall find nothing else was needed to bring them to their ruin. And those, on the other hand, who by its help keep the moral law in effect, without any assistance from a revealed law, are their own law for themselves. They have the law in its practical result written in their hearts as their conduct shows, and their natural conscience bears its accompanying witness. For conscience, both individual and social, reflecting on all human actions to condemn, or, more rarely, to acquit, anticipates the final divine judgement which, as St. Paul continually announces, it will be the office of Jesus the Christ to pass unerringly upon things secret as well as open in the 'day of the Lord.'
The specially revealed law on which the Jew relied, which it is his boast to have received from God, and in virtue of which he could rightly claim to have a knowledge of divine things which other men had not, and to be the teacher of the nations, the interpreter to other men of the divine will—this law finds its first application to those themselves to whom it is given. How can they preach the commandments, whether it be the eighth or the seventh or the second that is in question, so long as they have so bad a reputation for keeping them? They cannot deny that as of old, so now, their moral conduct causes the heathen to blaspheme their religion, instead of being drawn towards it. To have received circumcision in physical fact is of no profit at all, unless it be accompanied by the obedience of which the mark in the flesh is but the symbol. Disobedience is in God's sight uncircumcision. And where the obedience is, God will reckon it as if the symbol were there also. The morally obedient Gentile will sit in judgement on the morally disobedient Jew. For that is the divine principle. God everywhere and always looks to the spiritual reality as it is seated in heart and will, and is satisfied never by outward distinctions. Jew (Judah) means 'praise.' But if the Jew is to merit his name, he must not be satisfied with the applause of men. He must commend himself to God who sees the heart.
Wherefore thou art without excuse, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest dost practise the same things. And we know that the judgement of God is according to truth against them that practise such things. And reckonest thou this, O man, who judgest them that practise such things, and doest the same, that thou shall escape the judgement of God? Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance? but after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up for thyself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgement of God; who will render to every man according to his works: to them that by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honour and incorruption, eternal life: but unto them that are factious, and obey not the truth, but obey unrighteousness, shall be wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that worketh evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Greek; but glory and honour and peace to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek: for there is no respect of persons with God. For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned under law shall be judged by law; for not the hearers of a law are just before God, but the doers of a law shall be justified: for when Gentiles which have no law do by nature the things of the law, these, having no law, are a law unto themselves; in that they shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith[2], and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them; in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men, according to my gospel, by Jesus Christ.
But if thou bearest the name of a Jew, and restest upon the law, and gloriest in God, and knowest his will, and approvest the things that are excellent, being instructed out of the law, and art confident that thou thyself art a guide of the blind, a light of them that are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of babes, having in the law the form of knowledge and of the truth; thou therefore that teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou rob temples? thou who gloriest in the law, through thy transgression of the law dishonourest thou God? For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you, even as it is written. For circumcision indeed profiteth, if thou be a doer of the law: but if thou be a transgressor of the law, thy circumcision is become uncircumcision. If therefore the uncircumcision keep the ordinances of the law, shall not his uncircumcision be reckoned for circumcision? and shall not the uncircumcision which is by nature, if it fulfil the law, judge thee, who with the letter and circumcision art a transgressor of the law? For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.
1. As at the end of the first chapter we asked whether St. Paul was fair to the Gentile world, so now we ask whether he is fair to those of his own race whose religious tendencies he had known so well from inside. And the answer again is that he undoubtedly represents aright the dominant tendency and temper among them. The prophets had always had to fight against the natural but false idea of divine election, which held the Jewish race secure in the favour of Jehovah, simply because He was their God and they were His people. They bring to bear all the activities of an inspired intelligence and heart to make their fellow-countrymen perceive that they are only secure in God's favour so long as they are like Him in character. Now down to the period of the Captivity, the prophets could also denounce the people because they were constantly false to Jehovah in matters of worship as well as of morality. After the Captivity, however, the tendency to idolatry is gone for ever. After the Maccabean period the exclusive and legitimate worship of Jehovah becomes a matter of passionate enthusiasm in the Jewish race. Henceforth therefore their danger from the false idea of election passes into a new phase. We must be in the favour of God, they now could plead, because we have Abraham to our father, and because we keep to the worship of our God with an irreproachable zeal for His law. Against this sort of strengthened pleading John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, aims his bare moral teaching. God's wrath is just about to fall upon His people he declares, because it lacks in real moral righteousness. Repent ye, be changed, get you a new heart—is his one word of preaching. This keynote passes intensified into the teachings and the denunciations of Christ. Nothing more surely stamps the narrative of 'the woman taken in adultery' as historically genuine[3], than its profound truth to the moral attitude of Christ in face of Scribes and Pharisees. The point of His reply to their trial question is that they who would enforce a divine law, and thus stand for God before the world, must themselves be morally sound. 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.' It is moral conformity, not merely orthodoxy, which qualifies us to act for God. It is then precisely this attitude of Christ towards the Jews zealous for the law, which St. Paul is reproducing in the passage which we have just read.
He suggests also in its last words—where he is playing on the meaning of the name of Judah—another deep element in Christ's depreciation of the religious spirit of the Jews. Their religion was a matter of public opinion—with all the stagnancy which belongs to the public opinion of a compact society—not a matter which lived with ever fresh life in the inner relation of the conscience to God. 'How can ye believe which receive glory one of another, and the glory which cometh from the only God ye seek not?' St. Paul then is certainly right in his estimate of Jewish religion. One indeed who describes with as vivid reality as he does the pride of a Jew in his religious privileges—one who had all the reason that Saul of Tarsus had for knowing what it was to feel this emotion from within—could hardly have been wrong in his estimate of its weaknesses.
And if the particular moral defects which St. Paul attributes to the religious Jew are surprisingly grave—theft, adultery, and temple-robbery—here too what he says out of his own experience is confirmed from other quarters. Avarice was a notorious sin of Jews. Our Lord accuses the Scribes of 'devouring widows' houses[4]' under cloak of religion, and denounces the Pharisees also for leaving their outwardly purified cups and platters inwardly full of 'extortion.' It is only a subtler form of theft that He alludes to when He denounces them for sanctioning the practice of dedicating property as a 'corban' to the purposes of religion in order to evade the righteous claims of parents. The story of Susanna, the brief but stern words of our Lord about the seventh commandment in His Sermon on the Mount, and His significant language on the occasion already alluded to of the woman taken in adultery, interpret St. Paul's language as to sins of the flesh. And the language of the town clerk at Ephesus in exculpating St. Paul and his company, suggests that 'temple-robbery' was a not unfamiliar imputation upon Jews. It appears that with all their horror of idols—and though everything connected with an idol was expressly declared to be 'an abomination,' unless it had been already desecrated by Gentiles[5]—they could not always resist the opportunity of appropriating the rich stores of the temples. The 'religious' Scribes and Pharisees (though not of course the best of them) were, in fact, as a body truly hypocrites, as our Lord summarily said they were.
And there lies in the moral failure of the Jews a very much needed warning to us nineteenth-century Christians against censoriousness. 'Judging' occupies so large a part in our ordinary conversation. In the religious world, we condemn so freely—Romanists, Dissenters, those who are of a different party to ourselves: in the social world—those of a different class, those who employ us, or whom we employ, those whom in any way we do not like or who go contrary to us. We are always judging. But to judge, we are taught, is a great responsibility. With what judgement we judge, we shall be judged. It is of the utmost consequence that before we judge others we should have judged ourselves. And to have done that truthfully has a tendency to make us charitable in our estimate of others, because we are deeply conscious of our own need of merciful and lenient consideration.
2. What St. Paul teaches about the moral consciousness, and possibility of moral goodness, among the Gentiles has not a Jewish sound at all. The Jewish teachers generally would not have admitted any goodness acceptable to God in the heathen world. In fact, St. Paul is here, as in his speech at Athens, accepting the principle of a universal presence and operation of God in the human heart, outside the limit of any special revelation, and he accepts it in terms largely derived from current Stoic philosophy.
The Stoics, arising when the Greek city life was decaying, contemplated man as an individual, and undertook to show him how to lead a good life. A good life means a 'life according to nature,' or 'according to reason': the reason of the individual being a part of the universal reason or God. And as a help in living according to reason, the Stoics laid stress upon the conscience in each man, i.e. a faculty lying behind his ordinary surface self, passing judgement according to reason upon his actions, and 'making cowards of us all,' inasmuch as we all do wrong.
'No one,' said Seneca, St. Paul's contemporary, 'will be found who can acquit himself; and any man calling himself innocent has regard to the human witness, not to his own conscience.' He quotes an 'admirable saying of Epicurus,' 'The beginning of safety is the knowledge of sin.' He inculcates the duty of strict self-examination, and tells us how he performed it himself at night: 'when the light is removed, and my wife, who is by this time aware of my practice, is now silent, I pass the whole of my day under examination.' Then he 'opens out his conscience to the gods.' And this conscience is to every man a sort of inward God[6]. It is in fact the representative in each man of the universal, immutable, and divine moral law, the law of nature, in conformity with which is the only true freedom and citizenship of the world. 'For this' (the world of the moral order), said another contemporary of St. Paul, also a philosopher, 'is the common home of all, and its law is no written document (letter), but God. And if a man transgresses what the law imposes, he will be impious; or rather he will not dare transgress, for he could not escape. Justice has many furies, watch-dogs for sins[7].' There is in Cicero's Republic a magnificent expression of the principle of the law of nature: 'There is a true law which is right reason, agreeable to nature, diffused among all men, constant, eternal, which calls us to duty by its injunctions, and by its prohibitions deters us from wrong; which upon the good lays neither injunction nor prohibition in vain; while for the bad, neither its injunctions nor its prohibitions avail at all. This law admits neither of addition nor subtraction nor abrogation. The vote of neither senate nor people can discharge us from our obligation to it. We are not to look for some other person to expound or interpret it; nor will there be one law for Rome and another for Athens, nor one at this date and another later on; but one law shall embrace all races over all time, eternal and immortal; and there shall be hereby one common master and commander of all—God, who originated this law and proposed it and arbitrates concerning it; and if any one obeys it not, he shall play false to himself and shall do despite to the nature of man, and by this very fact shall pay the greatest penalties, even if he should escape all else that is reckoned punishment.' It is of interest to notice that the words cited by St. Paul before the Areopagus[8], 'We are also God's offspring,' occur in a hymn of the Stoic Cleanthes, full of the thought of man's relation through his reason to the universal and divine law.
Of this type of thought and language then St. Paul avails himself, in spite of the immense differences which disclose themselves below the surface between the Stoic and the Christian ideas of God. He avails himself of Stoic phraseology about men being God's offspring in his speech at Athens, as being in accordance with what he, the Christian apostle, had to teach. And here he adopts in substance the Stoic language with regard to conscience. As by inference from nature all men can know of God's power and divine attributes, so, St. Paul says, from the witness of conscience they may know the principles of His moral government[9]. St. Paul, however, rightly refuses to be satisfied with the individual conscience. The social judgement—the social verdicts of condemnation or acquittal continually being passed—co-operate with it to anticipate the judgements of God. And in virtue of the inward light of reason, and the conscience[10] both individual and social, he held that men who lie outside the region of special revelation can possess the moral law in effect in their hearts, and, it is implied, can keep it.
St. Paul is mainly occupied in this epistle in contrasting the Christian Church, as a region where spiritual power is given in response to faith to enable a man to fulfil the divine law, both with the heathen world, plunged in moral wickedness, and with the Jewish Church in its failure to attain to divine righteousness by the law of works—of which more hereafter. But there were among the Jews true sons of Abraham: and there were among the Gentiles good men acceptable to God, like righteous Job. St. Paul does not theorize about this. But there is at least no reason to deny that he would have declared these righteous men to be justified by faith and sanctified by grace, i.e. justified by that degree of truthful correspondence with God which was possible for them; and kept in harmony with the will of God by His Spirit. There is no reason to believe that St. Paul would not have admitted some action of faith and grace among the non-christian Gentiles, as he undoubtedly does among the prae-christian Jews who lived under or before the law. When he says of the good heathen that they do 'by nature the things contained in the law,' he uses the expression not as equivalent to 'by their own unassisted powers, without the help of God,' but simply to mean 'without the help of any special revelation[11].'