m God than any
Gentile, and cast him into a deeper condemnation. How, then, could it
profit the Gentiles to be placed in this position? In obtaining the
righteousness in which he was now rejoicing he had done nothing which
was not competent to any human being.

62. It was this universal love of God revealed in the gospel which
inspired Paul with unbounded admiration for Christianity. His
sympathies had been cabined, cribbed, confined in a narrow conception
of God; the new faith uncaged his heart and let it forth into the free
and sunny air. God became a new God to him. He calls his discovery
the mystery which had been hidden from ages and generations, but had
been revealed to him and his fellow-apostles. It seemed to him to be
the secret of the ages and to be destined to usher in a new era, far
better than any the world had ever seen. What kings and prophets had
not known had been revealed to him. It had burst on him like the dawn
of a new creation. God was now offering to every man the supreme
felicity of life--that righteousness which had been the vain endeavor
of the past ages.

63. This secret of the new epoch had not, indeed, been entirely
unanticipated in the past. It had been "witnessed by the law and the
prophets." The law could bear witness to it only negatively by
demonstrating its necessity. But the prophets anticipated it more
positively. David, for example, described "the blessedness of the man
unto whom God imputed righteousness without works." Still more clearly
had Abraham anticipated it. He was a justified man; and it was by
faith, not by works, that He was justified--"he believed God, and it
was imputed unto him for righteousness." The law had nothing to do
with his justification, for it was not in existence for four centuries
afterward. Nor had circumcision anything to do with it, for he was
justified before this rite was instituted. In short, it was as a man,
not as a Jew, that he was dealt with by God, and God might deal with
any human being in the same way. It had once made the thorny road of
legal righteousness sacred to Paul to think that Abraham and the
prophets had trodden it before him; but now he knew that their life of
religious joy and psalms of holy calm were inspired by quite different
experiences, which were now diffusing the peace of heaven through his
heart also. But only the first streaks of dawn had been descried by
them; the perfect day had broken in his