f the best men and women.
For social opinion is with the majority the force which mainly
influences their practice, and social opinion depends largely on
leaders. 'It is when the best men cease trying that the world sinks
back like lead.' Let anything {177} happen which should silence the
moral effort of the best individuals, and disaster would be imminent.
But this is exactly what would be the result if the best men and women
were to cease to be Christian believers. It is the highest level of
our common life that would be depressed. The result all round would be
indirect, but it would be widespread and disastrous.

I do not mean, or think, that this weakening of religious belief in the
best men and women is occurring. I only instance its morally certain
results to make apparent how the general bearing of religious beliefs
on social practice is, in one way, veiled by its indirectness.

But to St. Paul all this is self-evident. He sees quite clearly that
Christianity is to be a new life, a new social and ethical
manifestation in the world, because Christians believe that God has
made plain to them in Jesus Christ His character, nature, and
redemptive purposes, and has given, by His Spirit, a practical power to
their wills to correspond with the truth revealed to their
intelligences and hearts.

So he proceeds from his exposition of the great doctrines of the Church
of the Redemption to its practical moral consequences.

[1] Rom. xii. 1.

[2] 1 Cor. xv. 58.

[3] Col. iii. 5, 12.

[4] Heb. ii. 1; x. 19; xii. 1.

[5] An interesting expression of this sort of feeling is to be found in
George Crabbe's poem, _The Library_. On the whole we must have
improved since his day in our perception of the connexion of Christian
doctrine with Christian practice.

{178}

DIVISION II. Sec. 1. CHAPTER IV. 17-24.

_Christianity a new life._

[Sidenote: _New life in Christ_]

The characteristic words of St. Paul's gospel--grace, forgiveness,
mercy, liberty, justification by faith not by works--may naturally,
when taken by themselves and isolated from their context, lead to a
false thought of God as morally 'easy going,' and to a corrupt laxity
of conduct. Such a result has shown itself within the area of modern
history in the antinomianism of some Protestant bodies. But long
before the Reformation St. Paul's words were 'wrested by the ignorant
and unstedfast to their own destruction[1].' It was probably