importance to this expression of
Gentile goodwill, and almost more importance to its acceptance at his
hands by the Jerusalem Christians[10]. It was to be a link of mutual,
practical love to bind the divergent elements in the Church together.
But he felt, and as experience showed rightly, that his enterprise
would be attended with great peril to his life. This epistle
therefore, like his speech at Miletus, has something of the character
of 'last words[11].' He is in writing it committing to the future the
fruits of his labours, so far as they can be expressed in a doctrine,
at a moment when he feels that their continuance is being {6} seriously
imperilled. And this summary of his life's teaching in its most
characteristic aspect is most fitly addressed to the Christians of the
great city which was the centre of the then world. St. Paul already
conceived of Christianity as, in prospect at least, the religion of the
empire. It was vastly important, therefore, that the capital should
know it and hold it in its full glory and richness. He himself, if he
escaped safe through the visit to Jerusalem, was bent on immediately
going thither and securing this great end by his personal ministry[12].
But he could not depend on the future. He must seize the golden
moment--buying up the opportunity at least by a letter.

This, in very brief words, is an account of the circumstances and
conditions under which the Epistle to the Romans was written, and it
must suffice for the moment till some of the details are presented to
us in its later chapters.

ii.

There are men of whom it is especially true that their teaching is the
outcome of their own {7} personal experience. If a man's teaching is
to have any real force this must be in a measure true in any case. But
in some men the personal experience has set an exceptionally strong
impress upon the intellectual convictions, and so upon the teaching.
Such men--otherwise very different from one another--are Augustine,
Dante, Luther, Bunyan, Newman. Such an one was St. Paul. His
intellectual theory is on fire with the emotions bred of a personal
experience, both bitter and sweet, but always intense. And if there is
professedly more of autobiography in the Epistle to the Galatians, yet
in fact we know St. Paul's interior life, both before and after his
'conversion,' so far as we know it at all, mainly through the
generalized account of it in the Epistle to the Romans. For th