The great apostle, with mental power of the first order, writes as an evangelist who would prepare the feeble church of the grand metropolis for his coming. If he was not prepossessing in appearance, he might hold them by his pen till time could form a friendship and make a basis for Gospel service. Paul has been called the apostle to the Gentiles but he was more. He was all that, but it was the Gentile as a man whom Paul sought. The mission rested on the unity of the race. The dignity of man as man went without recognition by both Jew and Greek. Paul was a barbarian to the Roman, save as he appealed from Jewish jurisdiction to Roman and stood upon the rights of his citizenship in the empire. This gave him a higher and broader plane on which to present a still higher citizenship. Men of different races, notwithstanding race prejudice and diverse religions, found harbor at Rome till they used language and methods which were jealously reserved for the emperor and the state. Tolerant urbanity unable to distinguish the Gospel from the various sects of the Jews, regarded it quite as powerless to disturb the social status of the city, as the ordinary observer now believes incapable of doing much good, the houses and social settlements that are being founded in the neglected quarters of our modern cities.

Rome believed in Romans. Paul taught an empire of humanity. Race prejudice was to him one form of universal sinfulness. He found early opportunity to say;

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'He is not a Jew, who is one outwardly; but he is a Jew who 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."

Again the Gentile, and of course the Jew, had the law written in his soul. Sin and virtue were common to both Jew and Gentile. What was the apostle's idea of sin? Evidently it was not an abstraction. He did not give forth an idea that he had derived from the seminary nor a generic thought spun out of speculation. He was a practical man talking to practical men. He knew what was in man better than any other save his great Master. He stood, battered and scarred by his long conflicts with bigotry and passion and dangerous journeys among barbarous peoples. To him sin was nothing like the deliverances about it which Gamaliel and the temple teachers made. It was the dominion of the flesh or animal man. It was a reality. It was a usurper on the throne of every man's soul. Only a mighty conflict could remove this tyrant. Every one knows that this is life, not theology. It is the most certain fact of all our experience. It has followed us not in books, but in business. It is a matter of the street and the store, the market, the mill and the kitchen. This great surging sea casting up its mire and dirt with ceaseless roar at every tide; this was the condition of the soul for which there was but one cure. He was himself rescued, and yet he was able to go down into the depths again with any man and live over those experiences of struggle and agony, when he faced the ideal which lifted before him the grandeur of a manhood leaving all his sensitive soul aspiring and vocative. On the other side was the hungry sea of passion, ambition, pride, avarice, and gratification born of lower self-interest, holding the balance of power. Confident, insolent under the sense of mere possession, the

flesh man gives forth his mandates arbitrarily, unreasonably demanding the service of the spirit man.

It is often thought an advantage to appear interested in righteousness when one's counsels are made in anything but a righteous purpose. A man must be either one whose life is governed by the flesh or the spirit or one who is in constant anarchy without either the stagnant peace of indifference or the active peace of God. One who coins the bullion of conscience to please the flesh, may move in the customary groove of selfishness while the offices of religion are sedative and stupefying, not arousing or inspiring. This is the meaning of the language found in Romans VII: 9 and following; "For I was alive without the law once; but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. And the commandment which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin that it might appear sin, sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful. know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing; for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. O wretched man that I am who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

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that For I

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Now I am aroused, conscious of my true nature and obligation, drawn to better things, but bound to temptations, filled with nerves that are frequented avenues of lower instincts. The blood which runs in my veins is red with the tendencies and heritage of a thousand generations of those who have been driven with lust and appetite. The spiritual seems mystical, vague, unreal. Its voice is drowned by the coarse clamor of the preponderating passions of men. I am chained alive to my long dead companion whose iron wrist-band the lazy guard has not broken. “O wretched man that I am who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

But this is so real that we have forgotten for the moment that the apostle is describing an experience through which he has already passed. The deliverance is the Gospel. He is not going to Rome to reveal the morbid anatomy of melancholly and failure.

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"I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord." There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit."

What then is the Gospel which Paul brings to introduce a new chapter in this real study of the human mind? It is quite evident that it is a great contrast to anything he had learned in the schools. It satisfies the single great demand of his soul. It gives him adequate power to do as he would do and be as he would be. He has discovered how to perform that which is good. The supremacy of the spirit is no longer desired, but insured. A sense of gratitude is his predominant mood.

ney.

There is no suggestion that the apostle regards himself as God's attorHe evidently believes that God has no other thought than to furnish power equal to the demand and need. There is no conscience which introduces a second war between the flesh and the spirit. Given repentance in addition to penitence, performance besides regret, and we shall not be thrown back again into despair, by being assured that God is so conscien

tious that he can not pardon even the best man unless He does on a grand scale, what human nature has ever done on a small scale, namely unless He brings out a gigantic spectacular sacrifice. Yet so strong is this tendency to make the perfect "living sacrifice" the dying one which it fulfills that the Scriptures are often wrested to make Paul a modern theologian by substituting "yet" for " and " in the third chapter and twenty-sixth verse.

To "declare, I say, at this time His righteousness that He might be just, and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus."

Please notice that the words "righteousness," "just," and "justifier" all translate the same common original root. Put the verse into the following more accurate rendering and see the meaning shine forth in the light of the soul's aspiration and the announcement of the Gospel as a make-weight against other wise controlling evil.

“To declare, I say at this time His righteousness that He might be righteous and the rightener, or rectifier, of him who appropriates Jesus.”

People in Paul's time dreaded innovation even more than they do now. They felt that the apostle in preaching Christ was somehow doing violence to the past. They accused him of heresy. Some sought to put him to death and pursued him with a religious hatred by which he himself had once been driven. "What" they said "becomes of the law? Shall we abandon Moses?" By Moses and the law they meant the whole body of religious teaching moral and ceremonial. There is no injury done to the law, says Paul. On the other hand it is respected as regards its object. All that it tried to do, the Gospel does. Where it failed the Gospel succeeds. Sin abounds. To what extent it would be difficult to describe. It outruns calculation. The more important fact is that “grace" does "much more abound." This grace is of such sort that it generates its like. It gives the true nature its rightful sovereignty. Sin in the sense of the dominion of the lower nature, is conquered. The purpose and deed are according to the Spirit. Sin, in the sense of a slip, a surprise, an incident, a temporary stepping aside, still recurs according to circumstances. But how wide the difference between sin as a slip and sin as a habit. How far apart are two people one of whom is a sinner trying to do right and the other is a sinner who does not try at all. Oh scorner! who points out some infirmity or slip in a church member whose main design and course is right, you are the hypocrite, you who assume to be so much better than others, you who have no purpose or high aim in life, but pour your scorn on those whose remnants of habits like your own occasionally take them captive! They are on the way to manhood and the general momentum of their lives will bring them back into the path. The momentum of their lives is the momentum of God.

It is not contended by the apostle that there is for all natures or for the masses of mankind a quick transition from conflict to victory. There is however an immediate change from despair to hope. The spirit by which one fights is one related no longer to a long tried and long-failing method of rightening the soul. The battle is ever on, but the circumstances of the conflict are those which lead the apostle to a sublime assurance, to the defiance of all the powers of evil in this world and the world to come;

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, for thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay in all these things, we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

"But what shall become of Israelites who reject Jesus Christ?" God hath not cast away his people. "I also am an Israelite" said the apostle. It is not for us to fall into the pessimism of Elijah, who found occasion to say that all the prophets were dead save himself and his life unsafe. His despondency is rebuked by the Lord's declaration that “seven thousand men” had "not bowed the knee to Baal." Paul can not give up his own people. He falls back on the love of God, and the Providence which orders human affairs.

"For God hath concluded them all in unbelief that He might have mercy upon all. Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out." * * * * "For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things: to whom be glory forever, Amen. I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God (by the prevenient mercies of God,) that ye present your bodies (the whole physical and serviceable nature below the spiritual,) a living sacrifice (of faith hope and love not a dead ceremonial observance,) holy (as servant,) acceptable unto God (God's creation) which is your reasonable (rationally ordered and chosen) service " (of love).

This is the culminating cogency by which the apostle appeals to our reason. The Christian life is the only reasonable life. What is more reason able than the acceptance of the love of God our Heavenly Father? God from and in whom we have our very being, whose breath is in our nostrils, whose spirit is never absent from us, who gives force and direction to all our powers. The full development of man is coincident with the facts and claims of the New Testament. Christianity is identical with all that is normal and true. Nature consists with Deity and is explained by personal moral force at the center of and behind all phenomena. Man can not fully know what is natural till he realizes the destiny provided for him. It is not unreasonable to put the soul in alliance with the spiritual forces as they are already disclosed. A perfect theology will never be the attainment of a finite being. It remains reasonable for us to apply our knowledge as a means of further progress, and to rest in the vision of faith with more repose than those who trust to their sense perception. It is not more true that there is a flesh man than it is true that there is a spirit man. The most practical, the most rational thing possible for any man to do, is to give and secure dominion to the spirit by alliance with the Divine Spirit. The result of such an alliance is abundant life. The soul grows to full dimensions. It takes on courage to do things before deemed impossible. Men who before blushed to be known as followers of the Galileean, become proud to suffer for His sake. Men highly esteemed for being men of affairs, whose

names are in the papers as all-powerful managers, are becoming more willing to be known and verbally heard on the subject of their personal devotion to the Saviour of mankind. It is their reasonable service. It is the duty and delight of every large soul to prove its devotion in a love for service which has its tap-root in the perfect reason. We are called to a religion, which by the terms of its definition, is universal. It includes all the truth. It excludes only the false. It awaits the unknown. If then we own our racial unity and common origin; if we are loyal to that method of righteousness which history has confirmed as the power and wisdom of God; if reversion to other methods have since the apostle's day but repeated the startling inefficiency of reformation by law; if ideals alone still leave us in despair; if the pessimist is wrong; if the love of God teems with plans for the rejectors of the Gospel; and if allegiance to God insures victory, it remains to present ourselves, in consecration to the reasonable service of right living under the inspiration of God's love. Will you not rise into this light and openly walk in this eminent reason?