community[1].' God's dealings with us in redemption thus
follow the lines of His dealings with us in our natural developement.
For man stands {103} out in history as a 'social animal.' His
individual developement, by a divine law of his constitution, is only
rendered possible because he is first of all a member of some society,
tribe, or nation, or state. Through membership in such a society
alone, and through the submissions and limitations on his personal
liberty which such membership involves, does he become capable of any
degree of free or high developement as an individual. This law, then,
of man's nature appears equally in the method of his redemption. Under
the old covenant it was to members of the 'commonwealth of Israel' that
the blessings of the covenant belonged. Under the new covenant St.
Paul still conceives of the same commonwealth as subsisting (as we
shall see directly), and as fulfilling no less than formerly the same
religious functions. True, it has been fundamentally reconstituted and
enlarged to include the believers of all nations, and not merely one
nation; but it is still the same commonwealth, or polity, or church;
and it is still through the church that God's 'covenant' dealings reach
the individual.

It is for this reason that St. Paul goes on to describe the state of
the Asiatic Christians, {104} before their conversion, as a state of
alienation from the 'commonwealth of Israel.' They were 'Gentiles in
the flesh,' that is by the physical fact that they were not Jews; and
were contemptuously described as the uncircumcised by those who, as
Jews, were circumcised by human hands. And he conceives this to be
only another way of describing alienation from God and His manifold
covenants of promise, and from the Messiah, the hope of Israel and of
mankind. They were without the Church of God, and therefore presumably
without God and without hope.

Wherefore remember, that aforetime ye, the Gentiles in the flesh, who
are called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision, in the
flesh, made by hands; that ye were at that time separate from Christ,
alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the
covenants of the promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
But now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in the
blood of Christ.

This alienation of Gentiles from the divine covenant was represented in
the structure of the temple at Jerusal