so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto sanctification. For when ye were servants of sin, ye were free in regard to righteousness. But

now being made free from sin and made servants to God, ye have your fruit unto sanctification, and the end everlasting life.' Indeed there is no one of the Apostles of Christ who dwells so frequently, so repeatedly, so strongly on the duties of morality as St. Paul. Could he believe that the greater part of his hearers were unable to perform those duties ? that they were banished before their birth from all hope of seeing God? that his lessons would be to them utterly vain and useless? It would be absurd to indulge such a supposition.

These passages contain the whole of the doctrines of Paul. He never speaks of the old Pagan times without coupling with them disbelief in God; he never speaks of the Christian dispensation without its fruit, righteousness, love, joy, peace, everlasting life.

The error of those who have wrested the words of Paul to their own condemnation is, that they have separated the two things, faith and righteousness, which Paul kept in all his teachings united and inseparable. They have erected an idol of faith without its fruits, and have disjoined righteousness and everlasting life. A greater or more fatal perversion of the Apostle's doctrine could not be. On the subject of foreknowledge and predestination St. Paul says, 'Moreover we know that to them that love God all things work together for good, to them who are called according to

1 Alford's New Testament, Romans, chap. i. vol. ii. part 1, pp. 51, 52.

[his] purpose. Because whom He foreknew them He also pre-ordained to bear the likeness of the image of his Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren; and whom He pre-ordained, them He also called; and whom He called, them He also justified; and whom He justified, them He also glorified.'1

This text has been the cause of much difference of opinion. Those He foreknew would believe' is the sense accepted by Origen, Chrysostom, and Augustine. The sense of adopted, whereby God has ever distinguished his sons from the wicked,' is the meaning according to Calvin, who teaches that the words imply not mere prescience, as some persons ignorantly suppose. What seems certain is, that mere prescience is the only sense consistent with the free will of man. Yet to reconcile logically free will and foreknowledge, is a task above human faculties.

What St. Paul meant precisely it is difficult to discover, but we cannot imagine or infer that he meant to differ from the declaration of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in the Sermon on the Mount proclaimed, 'Not every one that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.'2 These words evidently suppose that men can, by the exercise of their own free will, do the will of God. Thus the whole doctrine of predestination, in the sense that some men are born to be eternally punished, whatever

1 Alford's New Testament, Paul's Epistle to the Romans, chap. viii. The quotations from St. Paul are all from Alford's Revised Version in his New Testament.

2 St. Matthew, chap. vii.

they may do, is explicitly and by anticipation condemned by Christ.

From this summary, however brief and imperfect, it appears that the religion taught by Christ and by his Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, agreed with the religion taught by Paul, an apostle joined by revelation to the Apostles of Christ.

It appears, moreover, that the religion thus taught to the Roman world conveyed to mankind the great truth, that there is one God, the Maker of heaven and earth. It taught, moreover, that Christ was the only Son of God, sent by God upon the earth, and crucified at Jerusalem in the reign of Tiberius. By the lessons revealed to mankind, by natural and revealed religion, men were taught to love God with all their hearts, and their brethren as themselves. To the righteous was promised eternal life, and to the penitent who led a new life, admission to the happiness promised to the righteous.

It has been said that, as St. Paul was the Apostle of Faith, St. John was the Apostle of Love. But this is not the true distinction. St. Paul said that all the commandments were condensed in this, Love one another;' and when he said, 'These three, Faith, Hope, and Love,' he added not, the greatest of these is Faith, but the greatest of these is Love.’1

We

may now proceed to some of the most remarkable of St. Paul's Epistles.

The Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians, as it is one of

1 See Dean Stanley's St. Paul; Epistles to the Corinthians, chap. xiii.; and the Commentary, p. 239.

the earliest, so also it is one of the most important of the epistles of that great Apostle of the Gentiles.

Galatia, as it is described by historians, was a district in the northern part of Asia Minor, occupied by a mingled population. The descendants of the Gaulish invaders, from whom the region derived its name, retained to a late period vestiges of their original race in the Celtic dialect, and evidently great numbers of Jews had settled in those quarters. Paul twice visited the country; and his epistle was written, probably, at no long period after his second visit. There are no more authentic works, in all the literature of Greece and Rome, than the greater part of the epistles of Paul.1 The Epistle to the Galatians begins with some account of the gospel which Paul preached, and the manner in which he had received it.

'I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews' religion, how that, beyond measure, I persecuted the Church of God and wasted it; and profited of the Jews' religion above many mine equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers. But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach Him among the heathen; immediately I conformed not with flesh

1 Alford's New Testament; Paley; Milman's Christianity. Dean Stanley's Apostolical Sermons.

and blood, neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were Apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus. Then, after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days. But other of the Apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother.'

Again, in the second chapter, he relates as follows: 'Then fourteen years after, I went up again to Jeru salem with Barnabas, and took Titus with me also. But neither Titus, who was with me, being

a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised. they who seemed to be somewhat in conference added nothing to me; but contrariwise, when they saw that the gospel of the uncircumcision was committed to me, as the gospel of the circumcision was unto Peter (for He that wrought effectually in Peter to the apostleship of the circumcision, the same was mighty in me towards the Gentiles), and when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship; that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision.'1

Having thus established his title to be the Apostle of the Gentiles, he shows in a subsequent passage how he asserted that title, and how he sought to unite the converts of the circumcision and the converts of the Gentiles in one body of the Church. But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed. For before that certain came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles; but,

1 Galatians, chap. ii.