Israel neither universal nor final._

But if Israel has thus by her own fault fallen from her high estate,
are we then to suppose that God has simply rejected His own chosen
people? Such a thought cannot be entertained. How could it have been
in the mind of such an Israelite as St. Paul, one who came of Abraham's
genuine seed, and of the tribe which held so fast by Judah? No: the
people on whom from eternity God's eye rested, to mark them out for
Himself and for His purposes, assuredly cannot, as a people, have been
cast away[1]. What has happened now is only what is recorded long ago
in the history of Elijah. Then, as now, a general unfaithfulness in
the bulk of the nation concealed the existence of a faithful remnant.
Yet God had, as He assured the prophet, {60} reserved for Himself such
a remnant, and of very considerable numbers. And now also such a
remnant of true Israelites exists in accordance with the selective
action of grace--that is to say, God's gratuitous and unmerited good
will. Yes: let there be no mistake about it; their position is due to
nothing else than the original and continuous action of God's grace;
and grace means God's absolutely gratuitous and unmerited good will
(which may therefore come upon Gentiles equally with Jews). It
excludes the idea of these remnants owing their position to previous
merits, or of its being in any way God's response to an antecedent
claim[2].

This then is what we have to recognize. What Israel in bulk sought for
(by way of its supposed merit), that it did not get, but a select
remnant got it; and upon the rest there fell that judicial
hardening--that reversal of their true relation to God--which Moses and
Isaiah already discerned in the chosen people[3]: an abiding {61}
stupor, and deafness, and blindness, with regard to God's purpose and
will for them. David too, as God's righteous servant, demands, as a
divine requital upon his bitter and cruel enemies, that their very
abundance should betray them into captivity and prove their
stumblingblock; that their spiritual vision should be lost and their
backs bent downward to the ground. Which is just what has happened to
Israel through their rejection of the Son of David.

The bulk of the people then has stumbled. But we must not exaggerate
what has happened. As it is not all of them who have stumbled, so also
it is not for ever. Their stumbling is not equivalent to a final fall.
Already we can perceive h