ensed
{75} unto him again? For of him, and through him, and unto him, are
all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.

1. There is a true patriotism which must at times be content to wear
the guise of disloyalty; and not even Jeremiah 'weakening the hands of
the men of war[8]' in the conflict with the power of Babylon, while all
the time his very heart was bleeding for Jerusalem, presents a more
pathetic and moving picture of such patriotism than does St. Paul as he
here shows himself to us. While he was shaking off the dust of his
feet, as he left the synagogues to turn to the Gentiles, while he was
throwing all his tremendous energy into the apostolate of the nations,
and vindicating their cause, even to fierceness, against the narrowness
of his own nation, all the time the thought which buoyed him up was
that when the catholic church had become an established fact--when it
should have become plain, even to Jewish eyes, that the elect people of
God is now a fraternity of all nations, and not their own race
only--then it could not fail to happen, that the members of the ancient
people, finding themselves in their turn 'alienated,' 'strangers,' and
'far off,' while {76} they knew so well, and needed so deeply, the
fellowship of the covenant, should be stimulated to resume their former
privileges. Surely then at last Israel 'should remember her way and be
ashamed,' and 'receive' her Gentile 'sisters,' though they had been to
her as 'Sodom and Samaria,' and though they were now given to her for
'daughters, but not by her covenant'--not by any means on her own
terms[9]. All the time that St. Paul is fighting Judaism and
vindicating Catholicism, laying down the lines of the great church of
the nations, this is the vision that cheers him--an Israel, penitent,
humbled, worshipping the Christ whom she had crucified, and therefore
welcomed back again with the honour due to her great memories and her
inextinguishable vocation. But we notice by the way, as throwing an
unmistakable light on the circumstances of Roman Christianity, that
while St. Paul thus shows his own Jewish feeling, he speaks to the
Roman Christian as in the mass Gentile[10].

2. If so miserable an event, one so revolting to the divine heart, as
the apostasy of Israel, had yet in the determinate counsel and
foreknowledge of God been overruled so as to {77} become the occasion
for the calling of the Gentiles, it must needs be, St. Paul argues,
th