rked out through special 'elect' instruments. Thus God recognized[5]
Israel beforehand, i.e. in His eternal counsels, as the people to bear
His name in the world. This was the selection of Israel, and was an
act of which the initiative was wholly on God's side. It was a pure
act of the divine favour. This 'selection of grace' was upon Israel as
a whole, but at later stages of the history, frequently enough, owing
to the disobedience and apostasy of the majority, it is found to rest
in an effective sense only upon a 'remnant' whom God has reserved for
Himself, because they have not utterly refused to {64} correspond to
the original and continuous call of the divine grace. For the rest
their privileges become the occasion of their fall: their light becomes
their darkness. For judgement always and inevitably waits upon any
form of misused privilege. Thus, when the Christ came, only an elect
remnant of the nation welcomed Him. The rest fell under judgement.
But God overrules even this apostasy. He takes the opportunity of the
absence of those who should have been at the marriage supper of the
king's son, to fill the great vacancy from the Gentile world. They are
brought within the scope of the selecting call. But God's original
vocation is still irrevocably upon apostate Israel. The new Gentile
converts are to stimulate them to recover their lost privileges. Their
wilfulness and obstinacy is to give place to humility and faith; and
Jew and Gentile all together are to constitute the elect catholic
church.

This is very simple and cheerful teaching. It leaves for us to
consider later the question whether God's original and special vocation
resting upon the Jews is finally to _constrain_ them all to conversion,
and whether in the same way His ultimate purpose of salvation for all
men is to take place infallibly in all cases. This {65} question is
still to be considered. But at any rate the doctrine of election has
lost all that gave it a colouring of arbitrariness and injustice and
narrow sympathies.

We ought to notice in the above passage how St. Paul, in recalling the
continual obstinacy and hardening of the majority of the chosen people,
is following on the lines of St. Stephen's speech (Acts vii. 51).

2. The imprecatory psalms are, especially in our Anglican public
services, a great stumblingblock to many--especially the 69th (here
cited by St. Paul) and the 109th. These psalms do not represent barely