ares Himself absolutely free. In the same way God
implicitly asserts His sovereign freedom when He brings Pharaoh out
upon the stage of history as an example of the way in which He hardens
men's hearts with a hardening which is the prelude to overthrow, that
men all over the world may see and tremble at the divine power. It is
not because Pharaoh is an Egyptian that he is hardened. He is
hardened, as Moses has compassion shown him, simply because it is the
will of God so to do in his case.

But the objector comes forward again (ver. 19): 'If this is the
arbitrary method of God--if we are simply powerless puppets in the
hands of an absolute and arbitrary will, to be saved or be
destroyed--at any rate He has no reason to complain of us. If all the
power is His, so is the responsibility.' Now St. Paul has it in his
hand to show that there remains to man a very real power to retain his
position, and consequently a very real responsibility and room for {33}
being blamed or praised: for if we cannot create our vocation, we can
and we are required to correspond with it in a reverent and docile
faith; and it was exactly here that the Jews had failed, in spite of
all their prophets had taught them. But he keeps back this answer
awhile, because he finds the attitude of such an objector toward God in
itself so reprehensible. Such an one has not given consideration to
what the relation of man to God really is--the creature to the creator.
His critical, complaining attitude is nothing better than foolish.

Thus he takes his antagonist back upon the old prophetic metaphor of
the potter and his clay, with which Isaiah and Jeremiah had rebuked the
arrogance and impatience of men long ago: 'Shall the thing framed say
of him that framed it, He hath no understanding; and shall the clay say
to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou[1]?' He follows, however,
most closely upon the later writer of the Book of Wisdom: 'For a
potter, kneading soft earth, laboriously mouldeth each several vessel
for our service: nay, out of the same clay doth fashion both the
vessels that minister to clean uses, and those of a contrary sort. All
in {34} like manner; but what shall be the use of each vessel of either
sort, the craftsman himself is the judge[2].' The thought was often in
St. Paul's mind of the inequality of lots in the world and the Church.
There are more and less honourable limbs in the body politic: there are
vessels for honourable