r that an opposite conclusion was as unequivocally drawn
from them. Then Paul said, "By faith ye are justified, without the
deeds of the law." Now he says, "For not the hearers of the law
are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified
in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus
Christ." Is there a contradiction, then, in Paul? Only in
appearance. Let us distinguish and explain. In the two quotations
above, the apostle is referring to two different things.

First, he would say, By the faith of Christ, the free grace of God
declared in the gospel of Christ, ye are justified, gratuitously
delivered from that necessity of imprisonment in Hades which is
the penalty of sin doomed upon the whole race from Adam, and from
which no amount of personal virtue could avail to save men.
Secondly, when he exclaims, "Know ye not that the unrighteous
shall not inherit the kingdom of God?" his thought is of a
spiritual qualification of character, indispensable for positive
admission among the blest in heaven. That is to say, the impartial
penalty of primeval sin consigned all men to Hades. They could not
by their own efforts escape thence and win heaven. That fated
inability God has removed, and through Christ revealed its
removal; but, that one should actually obtain the offered and
possible prize of heaven, personal purity, faith, obedience,
holiness, are necessary. In Paul's conception of the scheme of
Christian salvation, then, there were two distinct parts: one,
what God had done for all; the other, what each man was to do for
himself. And the two great classes of seemingly hostile texts
filling his epistles, which have puzzled so many readers, become
clear and harmonious when we perceive and remember that by
"righteousness" and its kindred terms he sometimes means the
external and fulfilled method of redeeming men from the
transmitted necessity of bondage in the under world, and sometimes
means the internal and contingent qualifications for actually
realizing that redemption. In the former instance he refers to the
objective mode of salvation and the revelation of it in Christ. In
the latter, he refers to the subjective fitness for that salvation
and the certitude of it in the believer. So, too, the words
"death" and "life," in Paul's writings, are generally charged, by
a constructio proegnans, with a double sense, one spiritual,
individual, contingent, the other mechanical, common, absolute.
Dea