ir inevitable fruit. Nor does He disclose
to us any necessary limit to the ruin which we may work in our being.
This stern principle of natural religion is taken up into, and indeed
intensified in, the gospel. {111} St. Paul, however, neither here nor
elsewhere uses 'immortality' to describe the future state of those whom
God condemns. He uses it only of God and of those who enjoy the vision
of God. The 'immortality of the soul'--the idea that every soul as
such necessarily and consciously exists to all eternity--is an idea
which the language of Scripture does not seem to warrant.

4. There are also two less prominent points in the second chapter that
we must not entirely pass over.

St. Paul, we should find, if we were to investigate the matter, is
wholly true in his interpretation of the Old Testament in general. He
interprets its spirit and meaning with perfect insight. But he is not
always what we should call critically exact, any more than the other
interpreters of his day, in his use of particular texts. Thus, in this
chapter he gives to some words of Isaiah[13] a meaning which is indeed
to be found elsewhere in the prophets[14], but does not really belong
to the original of this particular passage. Isaiah is saying that
God's name is being blasphemed _by the oppressors of {112}
Israel_--'Continually all day long my name is blasphemed.' But the
Greek version of the Bible inserted the words 'through you' (the
Jews[15]); and St. Paul interprets this insertion to mean that it was
the moral inconsistency of the chosen people themselves which caused
God's name to be blasphemed. Perhaps the fact that he uses the formula
of quotation 'as it is written' after the words referred to, is a sign
that he had employed the words in his own sense before he became
conscious that they were in fact a quotation. But in any case he shows
no anxiety to follow critically the original meaning of a particular
passage which he cites.

At the end of this passage occurs the antithesis familiar in modern
language of 'the letter and the spirit.' In its modern sense it is
used as equivalent to the literal and the metaphorical, or the definite
and the vague. But this is not at all its sense in St. Paul. With him
'the letter' means the written law, and 'spirit' means, in this
connexion, what we may broadly describe as vital moral energy. Thus,
{113} in its most characteristic use with St. Paul, the antithesis
distinguishes the