h the Egyptian upon the stage {38} of history[6], as an
example of hardening judgement, is within His right in doing the same
now with (the mass of) the people of His choice. The liberty asserted
for God is wholly consistent with His being found, in fact, to have
'hardened' those only who have deserved hardening by their own
wilfulness. It was for such a moral cause that God hardened the hearts
of the Jews, that 'seeing they might not see, and hearing they might
not hear[7].' We can feel no doubt that some similar moral cause
underlay the hardening of Pharaoh. But this is not St. Paul's present
point. All his argument is directed to asserting God's liberty to show
mercy or harden, irrespectively of considerations of race, when and
where He in His sovereign moral will chooses.

We should notice that St. Paul's method is here, as elsewhere, what is
called ideal or abstract, in the sense that he makes abstraction {39}
of a particular point of view; and, apparently indifferent to being
misunderstood, substantiates his argument upon the particular aspect
which he has taken apart from the whole matter in hand, till it is done
with, and then other points can be taken in their turn. And he does
not, as a modern writer would do, painfully correlate the various
aspects of the subject[8].

By means of the famous simile of the potter St. Paul asserts two
principles about God: (1) that God is free, and condescends to give no
account to His creatures, in absolutely determining the high or low
vocations of men. To one man or nation He gives five talents, to
another two, to another one. He makes vessels to honourable and
vessels to (comparatively) dishonourable uses. He makes men Jews or
Assyrians, Englishmen or Hottentots, at His absolute discretion. (2)
That God is absolutely free, when the human material which He is
moulding for His purposes proves intractable, to repudiate and reject
what has, by its refusal to mould, become a 'vessel of wrath' fit 'to
be taken and destroyed.' And it is only by a voluntary limitation of
this freedom that He exhibits long toleration with the intractable and
{40} obstinate, and is longsuffering with them even when His wrath is
ready and waiting to show itself. These are the two distinct points in
the simile of the potter. We must distinguish carefully between the
'vessels _destined for_ dishonour'--the 'less honourable limbs' of
humanity--and the 'vessels _of_ wrath,' or 'vessels fitted