hrist': imputes His merits to them,
so we may legitimately say: that is, sees them and deals with them in
view of the fact that Christ's Spirit is at work in them; sees them and
deals with them 'not as they are, but as they are becoming.' _This_
doctrine of imputation, instead of being full of moral unreality, is in
accordance with all that is deepest in the philosophy of evolution.
For are we not continually being taught that in order to take a true
view of the value of any single thing, we must view it not as it is at
a particular moment, but in the light of its tendency? We must ask not
merely 'what,' but 'whence' and 'whither.'

(4) It is all pure grace--the free outpouring of unmerited love. The
Christians are 'God's workmanship,' His new creation. He, in Christ,
had wrought the work all by Himself. They, the subjects of it, had
contributed nothing. It remained for them only to welcome and to
correspond. This is the summing up of man's legitimate attitude
towards God. This is faith. It is at its first stage simply the
acceptance of a divine mercy in all its undeserved and unconditional
largeness; but it passes at once, as {101} soon as ever the nature of
the divine gift is realized, into a glad co-operation with the divine
purpose.

This then is, in outline, the method of the great salvation, of which
the Asiatic Christians had been and were the subjects.

[1] On the virtuous aspect of the contemporary empire, see Renan, _Les
Apotres_, pp. 306 ff.

[2] Rom. ii. 14.

[3] See app. note B, p. 255.

[4] Is. xxxiii. 14, 15.

[5] Cf. app. note C, p. 263, for a similar thought in a contemporary
Jewish book.

{102}

DIVISION I. Sec. 4. CHAPTER II. 11-22.

_Salvation in the church._

[Sidenote: _The salvation social_]

God's deliverance or 'salvation' of mankind is a deliverance of
individuals indeed, but of individuals in and through a society; not of
isolated individuals, but of members of a body.

It is and has been a popular religious idea that the primary aim of the
gospel is to produce saved individuals; and that it is a matter of
secondary importance that the saved individuals should afterwards
combine to form churches for their mutual spiritual profit, and for
promoting the work of preaching the gospel. But this way of conceiving
the matter is a reversal of the order of ideas in the Bible. 'The
salvation' in the Bible is supposed usually 'to reach the individual
through the