y nature, if it fulfil the law,
judge thee, who with the letter and circumcision art a transgressor of
the law? For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that
circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew, which is
one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not
in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.

1. As at the end of the first chapter we asked whether St. Paul was
fair to the Gentile world, so now we ask whether he is fair to those of
his own race whose religious tendencies he had known so well from
inside. And the answer again is that he undoubtedly represents aright
the dominant tendency and temper among them. The prophets had always
had to fight against the natural but false idea of divine election,
which held the Jewish race secure in the favour of Jehovah, simply
because He was their God and they were His people. They bring to bear
{95} all the activities of an inspired intelligence and heart to make
their fellow-countrymen perceive that they are only secure in God's
favour so long as they are like Him in character. Now down to the
period of the Captivity, the prophets could also denounce the people
because they were constantly false to Jehovah in matters of worship as
well as of morality. After the Captivity, however, the tendency to
idolatry is gone for ever. After the Maccabean period the exclusive
and legitimate worship of Jehovah becomes a matter of passionate
enthusiasm in the Jewish race. Henceforth therefore their danger from
the false idea of election passes into a new phase. We must be in the
favour of God, they now could plead, because we have Abraham to our
father, and because we keep to the worship of our God with an
irreproachable zeal for His law. Against this sort of strengthened
pleading John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, aims his bare
moral teaching. God's wrath is just about to fall upon His people he
declares, because it lacks in real moral righteousness. Repent ye, be
changed, get you a new heart--is his one word of preaching. This
keynote passes intensified into the teachings and the denunciations of
Christ. Nothing {96} more surely stamps the narrative of 'the woman
taken in adultery' as historically genuine[3], than its profound truth
to the moral attitude of Christ in face of Scribes and Pharisees. The
point of His reply to their trial question is that they who would
enforce a divine law, and