ard under the law for the word of
God, on the part of the Pharisees, the religious representatives of
Israel, is precisely what the pages of the Gospel record. Therefore
the 'corner stone of sure foundation' for the divine building became to
them the stone on which they stumbled and fell. And yet that the law
was a temporary expedient, and not the whole counsel of God, was the
deepest witness of the Old Testament; and in being false to the further
revelation of the will of God in Christ, they were false to their own
deepest principles. All this ground we have gone over already, and
need not traverse again[13].

So also we have already become familiar with the simplicity of the
message of God in Christ, and the simplicity of the faith which, {54}
rooted in the consciousness of sin and need, and equally possible for
all men who can share this consciousness, is required to welcome God's
offer, and so be brought by Christ into living union with Him. All
this St. Paul has already elaborated, and is here only resuming and
recapitulating by the way. But one or two points in the recapitulation
require notice.

1. St. Paul takes the basis of his statement of the principle of grace
and faith out of the heart of the books of Moses--the idea of the 'word
very nigh thee,' of the simple message claiming only to be simply
accepted, and of the 'very present help' of a gracious God needing only
to be welcomed. The fact is that St. Paul usually idealizes when he
treats of 'the law of Moses'; as, for example, when he here says that
'Moses writeth that the man that _doeth_ the righteousness ... shall
_live_ thereby,' as if that was all that Moses said. The principle of
law, as Saul the Pharisee had learned to understand it, is the dominant
principle in the five Books of the Law, but not the only one. 'Grace,
already existing in the Jewish theocracy, was the fruitful germ
deposited under the surface, which was one day to burst forth and
become the peculiar character {55} of the new covenant[14].' The God
of the new covenant is the God also of the old, and was there already
intimating His truer and deeper character. To this St. Paul bears
witness by resting his statement of the principle of the new covenant
upon the words of the old.

2. In this passage we have the germ of what we call the creed. The
lordship of Jesus, in the sense which implies His proper divinity, and
His resurrection and triumph over death--was already mat