sufficient evidence of their election. Those who love God are also
those who are 'called according to His purpose.' But, we ask, Have
none received the call and rejected it? were none called, who do not
love God? is it not true, that 'Many are called and few chosen'? St.
Paul says not a word to the contrary. But that is not the question he
is considering. The members of the Christian Church, devoted to God,
to whom he is writing _have_ been called. This call of which they have
become the subject is, St. Paul assures them, no afterthought, no
momentary act of God, which as it came into being in a moment so may
pass away. It is not a being taken up by God and then perhaps dropped
again. His gifts and calling are without repentance on His side,
because they represent an eternal will. In the eternal mind God
'foreknew' this chosen body. To 'know' as used of God (in contexts
where it is implied that others are not 'known') means to 'take
knowledge of or mark out for a divine purpose, as God said of the Jews,
'You only have I known of all the families of the earth[20],' that is,
your {318} nation only have I singled out or designated[21]. This
divine marking out then was an eternal act. God eternally marked out
certain persons, those presumably whom a certain preparatory discipline
and moral education, Jewish or heathen, should have made apt for His
purpose, such aptitude being of course again His gift. Anyway, for
reasons which we cannot probe, God did eternally foreknow or mark out
beforehand a body of men to be His catholic church. And those so
marked out were in the eternal counsels appointed for a high spiritual
vocation, to be made like the divine Son, who was to be made man, so
that, with Christ as heir and elder brother, they together might
represent in the world the divine ideal for man. And upon those so
marked out and foreordained, in due time the divine call came by the
apostolic preaching. And, at the first movement of corresponsive
faith, they had been acquitted of all their old sins and planted all at
once upon a new basis in Christ Jesus. And those thus set upon the new
basis God also had already in His divine counsels clothed with glory,
their share in the glory of the divine Son which is only waiting to be
fully manifested. Every {319} Christian therefore who has felt a
movement of God in his heart, under which he has become a Christian,
knows that he is in God's keeping. God will not fail h