le, St. Paul
can see only a preparatory process through {15} which the eternal
purpose of God could at last be realized, and out of which His eternal
secret could at last be disclosed. That purpose so long kept secret,
and now revealed, is to gather together all nations and classes of men
into the one Church of God, one organized body, one brotherhood in
which all men are to find their salvation, and through which is to be
realized an even wider purpose for the whole universe. In this
doctrine of the catholic church St. Paul finds the expression of all
the length and breadth and height and depth of the divine love. Its
length, for it represents an age-long purpose slowly worked out; its
breadth, for it is a society of all men and for the whole universe; its
depth, for God has reached a hand of mercy down to the lowest gulfs of
sin and alienation from God; its height, for in this society men are
carried up into nothing less than union with God, to no lower seat than
the heavenly places in Christ.

I have spoken of St. Paul's great arguments for the catholicity of the
Gospel as two. The first appears mainly as a polemic against the idea
of justification by works of the law. The second as a positive
argument about the person of Christ and the results which flow from the
right appreciation of it. But in fact there is {16} a necessary
connexion between the two. The narrow Judaism of the Galatian
reactionaries did in fact logically involve a narrow and therefore a
false conception of the person of Christ. As Dr. Hort expresses
it[11], 'to accept Jesus as the Christ without any adequate enlargement
of what was included in the Messiahship could hardly fail to involve
either limitation of His nature to the human sphere, or at most a
counting Him among the angels.' This logical connexion was in fact
verified in history. The Judaizers of the earliest period of Christian
history who insisted on circumcision for all Christians pass into the
Ebionites of the second century who rejected the Church's doctrine of
the person of Christ, as the eternal Son of God. And conversely it
would be scarcely possible to accept the doctrine of the universal
Christ, both divine and human, as St. Paul developes it, without
perceiving that men must be made acceptable to Him and to His Father by
something deeper and wider than any particular set of observances or
'works.' The relation therefore between the argument of St. Paul's
epistles to