.

_The true seed of Abraham._

St. Paul has been repudiating the principle of justification by works
of the law. To those with whom he had been brought up, this was in the
highest degree to dishonour the Jewish law, and indeed the principle of
divinely-given law at all. But in the last words of the previous
chapter he refuses to admit this inference. 'God forbid that we should
make law of none effect. Nay, we establish law.'

This idea of the Gospel, rightly understood, establishing the law even
while it superseded it, is with St. Paul a very favourite one, and he
elaborates it in different ways. Sometimes he shows how the function
of the written law, or 'the letter,' is only to awaken the conscience
and make men know their sinfulness. It can give men no help in
corresponding to the moral requirement which it expresses. Having
{156} convicted the conscience of sin, it has done its work, and must
yield its place to a more effective spiritual agency. The letter
killeth, in order that the Spirit may give life to those whom it has
killed. And, on the other hand, the one object of this new spiritual
agency, this life-giving Spirit, is to infuse the power of moral
obedience, which the law could not give, into men's lives, 'that the
requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk after the
Spirit.' In this place, however, St. Paul only alludes to this
argument and in the main adopts another. He shows from the Book of the
Law, that the father of the faithful, himself the typical instance of a
justified man, was justified, not by works which he had done, but
simply because he believed; not upon the basis of any law or covenant,
but as a man simply and not as a circumcised man; and again, that
David, the man after God's own heart, living under the law, would have
us rest our hopes of blessedness, not on our merits as having kept the
law, but simply on the forgiving bounty of divine grace.

Let us inquire, he says, into the case of Abraham, whom we Jews are
proud to own for our national ancestor. What are we to say of him? If
Abraham approached God in virtue {157} of his merits in having kept a
law, and so was accepted by God because of what he had done of himself,
there is something for him to boast of. But this in fact is not his
relation to God according to the scripture at all. There--

'merit lives from man to man,
But not from man, O Lord, to thee.'

The whole initiation is God's. H