ending to all mankind a Pharisaic, legal, forensic relation to God: he
did it by rising above such conceptions, even though as a Pharisee he may
have had to start from them, to the conception of a relation of all men
to God expressing itself in a moral constitution--or, as he would have
said, but in an entirely unforensic sense, in a law--of divine and
unchanging validity. The maintenance of this law, or of this moral
constitution, in its inviolable integrity was the signature of the
forgiveness Paul preached. The Atonement meant to him that forgiveness
was mediated through One in whose life and death the most signal homage
was paid to this law: the very glory of the Atonement was that it
manifested the righteousness of God; it demonstrated God's consistency
with His own character, which would have been violated alike by
indifference to sinners and by indifference to that universal moral
order--that law of God--in which alone eternal life is possible.

Hence it is a mistake to say--though this also has been said--that
'Paul's problem was not that of the possibility of forgiveness; it was
the Jewish law, the Old Testament dispensation: how to justify his breach
with it, how to demonstrate that the old order had been annulled and a
new order inaugurated.' There is a false contrast in all such
propositions. Paul's problem was that of the Jewish law, and it was also
that of the possibility of forgiveness; it was that of the Jewish law,
and it was also that of a revelation of grace, in which God should
justify the ungodly, Jew or Gentile, and yet maintain inviolate those
universal moral relations between Himself and man for which law is the
compendious expression. It does not matter whether we suppose him to
start from the concrete instance of the Jewish law, and to generalise on
the basis of it; or to start from the universal conception of law, and to
recognise in existing Jewish institutions the most available and definite
illustration of it: in either case, the only Paul whose mind is known to
us has completely transcended the forensic point of view. The same false
contrast is repeated when we are told that, 'That doctrine (Paul's
"juristic doctrine") had its origin, not so much in his religious
experience, as in apologetic necessities.' The only apologetic
necessities which give rise to fundamental doctrines are those created by
religious experience. The apologetic of any religious experience is just
the definitio