redestination_]

St. Paul's mind is full of the idea of predestination. He delights to
contemplate the eternal purpose of God as lying behind what seems to us
the painfully slow method by which divine results are actually won.
What age-long processes have been necessary both among the Jews and
among the Gentiles before this young church, this divine society of man
with God has become possible! What slow working through 'times of
ignorance,' what infinite delay in the divine forbearance--as we should
now say, what age-long processes of developement! But St. Paul is
quite certain that the result is no afterthought, no accident of the
moment; but that from end to end of the universe there reaches a method
of the divine wisdom, and that here in the catholic church it has
arrived at an issue. 'God chose us in Christ before the foundation of
the world that we should be holy and without blemish (as spotless
victims) before him in love: having foreordained us unto adoption as
sons through Jesus Christ unto himself.' 'Fore-ordained {64} to be a
heritage according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after
the counsel of his will.' So he asseverates and repeats and insists.
There are, we may say, two ideas commonly associated with
predestination which St. Paul gives us no warrant for asserting. The
one is the predestination of individuals to eternal loss or
destruction. That God should create any single individual with the
intention of eternally destroying or punishing him is a horrible idea,
and, without prying into mysteries, we may say boldly that there is no
warrant for it in the Old or New Testaments. God is indeed represented
as predestinating men, like Jacob and Esau, to a higher or lower place
in the order of the world or the church. There are 'vessels' made by
the divine potter to purposes of 'honour,' and 'vessels' made to
purposes (comparatively) of 'dishonour[12]': there are more honourable
and less honourable limbs of the body[13]. But this does not prejudice
the eternal prospects of those who in this world hold the less
advantageous posts. With God is no respect of persons. Again God is
represented as predestinating men to moral hardness of heart where such
hardness is a judgement on previous wilfulness. Thus {65} men may be
predestined to temporary rejection of God, as in St. Paul's mind the
majority of the contemporary Jews were. That was their judgement, and
their punishment[14]. It was ho