lements of hostility to St. Paul and his teaching, but
Christianity as St. Paul taught it would have been in the ascendant.
And probably St. Paul's special informants about affairs there would
have been his special friends, Prisca and Aquila[6].

The character of the epistle written to these Christians of the capital
is marked. It has beyond any other of St. Paul's epistles the
character of an ordered theological treatise. Of course it assumes the
existence of accepted Christian principles--the rudimentary instruction
or Christian 'tradition'--in the minds of those to whom it was
addressed[7]. But it takes certain of these principles of the
Christian {4} religion and develops them systematically and
argumentatively; though again, it must be explained, the argument is
very far from being barely logical, but is full of the deepest feeling,
showing itself in passages of memorable eloquence which live in the
hearts of all of us.

Why this particular epistle should have this character of a systematic
treatise is not hard to see. St. Paul was reaching the end of his
great controversy for the catholicity of the Gospel, against the
Judaizers--that is, for the equal position of Gentiles and Jews in the
Church, and against the obligation upon the Gentiles of circumcision
and the ceremonial law. That controversy was the occasion of the
apostolic conference at Jerusalem, which is described both by St. Luke
in the Acts[8] and, from the point of view of St. Paul's own 'apology,'
in the Epistle to the Galatians[9]. It is felt at its whitest heat in
that intensely concentrated and passionate epistle. But by the time
that the Epistle to the Romans came to be written the controversy was
quieting down. The victory of Catholicism over Judaism was as good as
won. The great principle of justification by faith, not by works of
the law, had developed itself lucidly {5} and clearly in St. Paul's
mind, and flowed out in our epistle in an ordered sequence of thought,
rich, profound, and mature.

And there were special reasons why it should have been expressed in
writing at this moment, and to the Roman Christians. Though the heat
of the conflict inside the Church was over, the fierce hostility of
many of the Jews, both within and without the Church, to St. Paul
personally was by no means past. Now St. Paul was on his way up to
Jerusalem with the money collected in the Gentile churches for the poor
brethren there. He attached great