lienation as the opportunity of the Gentiles, who in
their turn can only retain their newly won position by maintaining the
correspondence of faith with the purposes of God, and who also wait for
their fulfilment and the perfecting of their joy upon the recovery of
Israel as a body. Thus through all stages of election and
rejection--by both methods of mercy and of judgement--God, in His
inscrutable wisdom, works steadily for the opportunity of showing His
mercy upon all men.

When we have a brief analysis of the argument of these chapters under
our eyes, we may well rub them in astonishment, and look again, and ask
why, in the reaction against Calvinism[2], we had come (to put it
frankly) to dislike these chapters so much. We know that as a fact
these chapters have been taken as a stronghold of the Calvinistic
position by both its {6} friends and foes. They have come to
constitute in modern literature a sort of reproach upon
Christianity[3], just on the ground on which the best Christian
conscience of our time is most sensitive. Many of us would have to
admit that we have shrunk from these chapters as we have heard them
read, and probably avoided them in our own reading. We have shrunk
from the sound of the words--'the children being not yet born, neither
having done anything good or bad, that the purpose of God according to
election might stand, not of works but of him that calleth'--'Jacob
have I loved, and Esau have I hated'--'Whom he will he
hardeneth'--'Hath not the potter power over the clay.' Yet these
texts, with their arbitrary, unfair and narrow sound, appear as steps
in an argument which has for its conclusion the most universal
conception possible of the purpose of the divine love. 'God shut up
all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all.' The
conclusion of the argument is so unmistakable, and so plain against any
Calvinistic attribution to God of {7} a narrow and arbitrary
favouritism, that there must have been some great mistake in our
understanding of its main point and drift. It is worth while then to
indicate at starting where the error has lain.

1. It has been in part owing to our mistaken habit of taking isolated
'texts' out of their connexion, as if they were detached aphorisms.
Now St. John, in his meditative method, does very generally round off a
fundamental Christian truth into an aphorism which really admits of
being detached and quoted apart from its context. And no d