ea--accepted and elaborated by Dr. Lightfoot--that St. Paul first
wrote the epistle down to xvi. 23, as his Epistle to the Romans, and
subsequently, perhaps during one of his sojourns at Rome, turned it
into a circular letter, omitting for this purpose the last two
chapters, with their personal matter, and adding the doxology in {203}
the rich manner of the Epistle to the Ephesians. Subsequently the
doxology would have been added also to the complete epistle. There are
many difficulties in such a theory. Especially why should the
beginning of chap. xv be cut off from the end of chap. xiv, when there
is no break in thought? But I do not pursue the subject here[4], for
it would be out of place, and alien to our practical purpose. There is
no ground for doubting that the whole of what we receive as the epistle
was written by St. Paul; and no ground for thinking that any part of
the whole, down to xvi. 23, was not found in the letter as originally
carried by Phoebe; but it cannot be denied that some mystery, not
easily solved, hangs about the manifold and interrupted conclusions of
the epistle; and that the rich style of the doxology is somewhat unlike
both the rest of the epistle, and the other epistles of this period.
However, whether or no it was written at a later date, at least it
forms a splendid summing up of what is probably the greatest and most
influential letter ever written.

And there is no teaching which we more {204} urgently need to-day than
the teaching of this epistle. Whether the need be to expand our
personal religion into social service, and also to reinvigorate our
social service with the power of personal religion; or so to reassert
the divine authority of the Church as never to forget that it depends
for its vitality upon personally converted hearts; or to teach men to
remember the inexorable severity of divine judgement, as well as the
depth of the divine compassion; or to rebuke the shallowness which
attempts to separate Christian character from Christian doctrine; or to
harmonize individual freedom with the social claim; or to impart to
self-sacrifice the spirit of humility and gladness and indomitable
hope; or at once to exalt and restrict the function of the State; or to
emphasize the true grounds and limits of toleration in a catholic
church--whatever, one may almost say, be the need to which the special
deficiencies and perils of our church and age give rise, or of which at
the moment we