'The theory of evolution encourages no millennial
anticipations. If, for millions of years, our globe has taken the
upward road, yet, some time, the summit will be reached, and the
downward route will be commenced.'

[17] The allusion is to (1) Jevons (_op. cit._ cap. xxv), who seems to
think some 'amorphous' form of monotheism may very probably lie behind
totemism. He strongly repudiates the notion that the lower form is
necessarily the older. (2) Andrew Lang, _Making of Religion_
(Longmans, 1898), chaps. ix and xv. Cp. also Orr's _Christian view of
God and the World_ (Elliot, 1893), pp. 212 ff., and notes E, F, G.

{87}

DIVISION I. Sec. 2. CHAPTER II. 1-29.

_Judgement on the Jews._

St. Paul in his judgement of the Gentile world is but repeating, with
more of moral discernment, what he would have learned in his Jewish
training. But the strict Jews who had taught St. Paul, though some
among them must have been good men, ready to enter into the deeply
penitential spirit of their psalmists and prophets, do not seem as a
rule to have liked to think of their own people as liable to divine
condemnation. They chose to suppose that the Gentile world alone was
the area upon which divine vengeance would light, while the Jews were
to appear as the instruments of God's judgements, or at least
themselves exempt from them. They had forgotten all the superabundant
warnings against such a spirit which the prophets from Amos to John the
Baptist had let fall. This frame of mind--censorious when {88} it
looks without, lenient to the point of blindness when it looks
within--sometimes appears when one thinks of things in the abstract as
almost impossible, in the form at least in which St. Paul here proceeds
to attribute it to the Jews. We can hardly believe that any
responsible beings could be so blind as St. Paul implies that his pious
fellow-countrymen were. But it needs only experience to convince us
that even in its grosser forms this frame of mind is extraordinarily
common in individuals, in nations, and in churches. Certainly the
nation of England is not, and the representatives of religious England
too often are not, exempt from the common failing. And in the case of
the Jews we have also the witness of our Lord. He represents the
religious Jewish world as honeycombed with hypocrisy of a plain and
gross sort. They are to Him very types of the men who behold the mote
that is in their brother's eye, but