ull of the thought
of man's relation through his reason to the universal and divine law.

Of this type of thought and language then St. Paul avails himself, in
spite of the immense differences which disclose themselves below the
surface between the Stoic and the Christian ideas of God. He avails
himself of Stoic phraseology about men being God's offspring in his
speech at Athens, as being in accordance with what he, the Christian
apostle, had to teach. And here he adopts in substance the Stoic
language with regard to conscience. As by inference from {103} nature
all men can know of God's power and divine attributes, so, St. Paul
says, from the witness of conscience they may know the principles of
His moral government[9]. St. Paul, however, rightly refuses to be
satisfied with the individual conscience. The social judgement--the
social verdicts of condemnation or acquittal continually being
passed--co-operate with it to anticipate the judgements of God. And in
virtue of the inward light of reason, and the conscience[10] both
individual and social, he held that men who lie outside the region of
special revelation can possess the moral law in effect in their hearts,
and, it is implied, can keep it.

St. Paul is mainly occupied in this epistle in contrasting the
Christian Church, as a region where spiritual power is given in
response to faith to enable a man to fulfil the divine law, both with
the heathen world, plunged in moral wickedness, and with the Jewish
Church in its failure to attain to divine righteousness by the law of
works--of which more hereafter. {104} But there were among the Jews
true sons of Abraham: and there were among the Gentiles good men
acceptable to God, like righteous Job. St. Paul does not theorize
about this. But there is at least no reason to deny that he would have
declared these righteous men to be justified by faith and sanctified by
grace, i.e. justified by that degree of truthful correspondence with
God which was possible for them; and kept in harmony with the will of
God by His Spirit. There is no reason to believe that St. Paul would
not have admitted some action of faith and grace among the
non-christian Gentiles, as he undoubtedly does among the prae-christian
Jews who lived under or before the law. When he says of the good
heathen that they do '_by nature_ the things contained in the law,' he
uses the expression not as equivalent to 'by their own unassisted
powers, without