t their position and become apostates in rejecting the
Christ. This result in the first place cuts St. Paul to the heart, for
his religious patriotism was peculiarly intense. But in the second
place it furnishes an objection in the mouth of the Jew against St.
Paul's whole message. For if God had really rejected His chosen
people, He had broken His word in so doing. God had pledged Himself to
Israel: the Old Testament scriptures were full of passages which might
be quoted to this effect. Thus--

'My mercy will I not utterly take from David
'Nor suffer my faithfulness to fail.
'My covenant will I not break,
'Nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.
'Once have I sworn by my holiness;
'I will not lie unto David;
'His seed shall endure for ever,
'And his throne as the sun before me.
'It shall be established for ever as the moon,
'And as the faithful witness in the sky[1].'

But according to St. Paul's teaching, had not God 'broken His
covenant'? What had {4} become of the 'faithful witness'? To this
objection, then, St. Paul sets himself to reply. The chapters we are
now to consider may be best represented as an animated defence of his
teaching directed toward a Jew who pleads this objection. St. Paul, no
doubt, had heard too much of it since he began to preach the gospel,
and had felt it too deeply in his own mind in the earlier days, when
the word of Jesus was as a goad against which he was kicking, for it to
be possible for him to pass it by. And his defence--his 'theodicy' or
justification of God--is in brief this: God never committed Himself or
tied Himself to Israel physically understood. He always kept hanging
over their heads declarations of His own freedom in choosing His
instruments, and warnings of possible rejection, such as ought to have
prevented their resting satisfied with merely having 'Abraham to their
father' (ix). And if the question be asked: Why has Israel been
rejected? The answer is: That so far as actual Israel has fallen out
of the elect body, it is because they refused to exhibit the
correspondence of faith (x); but also Israel, as such, has not been
rejected; for, as of old, so now there is a faithful remnant. Nor
again is the partial alienation of Israel which {5} has occurred final.
God is simply waiting for their recovery of faith, to restore them to
their ancient and inalienable position of election. Meanwhile He uses
their temporary a