for
destruction,' i.e. those which have proved themselves unfit for the
vocation to which they were destined and have to be rejected. We note
that St. Paul does not say that _God fitted_ vessels for destruction,
but that He bore long with those which had so _become fitted_. St.
Paul never gives us any real justification--if we look at his language
carefully--for the idea of any predestination to _rejection_, as
distinct from predestination to higher or lower purposes. And the New
Testament is full of assurances that a predestination to a low vocation
in this world may be a predestination to high glory in eternity, if the
humble calling is faithfully followed.

It ought not to be denied, however, that in all this passage St. Paul's
feet, as he moves along his argument, are dogged by the metaphysical
difficulty of finding room for human free-will inside the universal
scope of the divine action and the prescience of the divine wisdom.
This {41} is a perennial difficulty. But St. Paul does not touch it.
He does not even touch the question of whether God does actually (in
our sense) _foreknow_ the final destiny of every individual, and how he
will act on each occasion[9]; he does not touch the question how or how
far human wilfulness can be allowed to disturb the divine order. In
the Pharisaic schools he would certainly have been brought up, as
Josephus tells us, both to 'attribute everything to fate and God,' and
also to recognize that it 'lay with men for the most part to do right
or wrong': to believe that 'everything was foreseen,' and also that
'free-will was given'; or, as Josephus elsewhere puts it (as if it made
no difference), to believe 'that some things, but not all, are the work
of fate, and other things are in men's own power and need not
happen[10].' That is to say, he would have been educated to believe
both in predestination and in freedom, without any {42} special attempt
to reconcile the two. We can tell for certain that this inherited
belief was further moralized in St. Paul's case by his enlarged view of
the divine purpose as working through high and low estates alike, for
the final good of all men; and by his deepened perception of the
correspondence with God's purpose, which, in the exercise of our
freedom, is required of us. But, so far as we know, St. Paul left the
strictly metaphysical question exactly where he found it--as an
imperfectly reconciled antithesis. And there perhaps we men shal