towards God which sets
God free, so to speak, to accept it and work upon it? And the answer
is, The attitude of faith. When he speaks of sanctification, or rather
consecration, he is answering the implied question, How is the
individual to be thought of when he has been admitted by baptism into
the Christian community? And the answer is, He is to be thought of as
consecrated, or as sharing the life of a consecrated people[34]. St.
Paul's language in one place would suggest that if 'justification'
qualifies for admission into the life in Christ, the result of this
admission is again a justification, not now merely of our persons, but
of our whole moral being--a 'justification of life[35].' But this is,
at least, not his usual use of the word.

And now we approach the question of the relation of our individual
justification to membership in the Church and all that goes with that.
To put the question in a rough controversial way--Is the Epistle to the
Romans, as it has been {33} frequently held to be, a thoroughly
Protestant work?

The Prophet Ezekiel first clearly discerned and expressed the truth
that the new covenant of God with man must be based upon the conversion
of individual wills and hearts. So it was realized. The basis of the
Church was a profound movement of individual faith and love and
allegiance, in the apostles and first disciples. And that on which it
is based is that by which it must progress--the real assent and
correspondence of individual wills and hearts. They that receive the
testimony must set to their seals that God is true. Thus one cannot
possibly exaggerate the importance in Christianity of the individual
spiritual life, or of individual conversion and faith, if he does not
isolate it. He cannot possibly exaggerate the stress laid in the
Epistle to the Romans on individual faith and its results, if he does
not forget its context. But what is meant by this proviso? This
simply. St. Paul, in his doctrine of justification by faith, is
describing the basis of the new covenant of God with man which is, as
truly as the old, a covenant with a community, an Israel of God. The
faith which justifies, therefore, means the faith which qualifies for
the community as truly {34} as it admits into the favour of God. The
very evidence that God accepts the first movement of faith is that the
believing man is admitted by baptism into the body of Christ. The idea
of a faith in Jesus which does n