judicial acceptance of one another[3]. And so far as real
righteousness is necessary for judicial {125} acquittal, the word
implies real righteousness, but it does not primarily mean it.

3. Here we find briefly stated St. Paul's apparently wholly original
view of 'the law,' as given simply to enlighten the conscience by
keeping men informed as to their duty, without supplying them with any
moral assistance in performing it. Thus the ultimate aim of the law
was to make man know his own sinfulness; to convince him that his
attempted independence was a failure, and that he could not save
himself; and so to prepare him to cry out for the gift of grace, and to
welcome it when it was given. 'The law was given,' as St. Augustine is
fond of saying, 'that grace might be sought, and grace was given that
the law might be kept.' This antithesis is thoroughly after St. Paul's
mind.

This first division of our epistle gives us as a whole a great deal to
think about. There are, we may say, two spiritual evils conspicuous
to-day. People with consciences in any degree awakened are apt to be
nervous, anxious, despondent, complaining, sullen. The second division
of our epistle supplies the antidote to this error by consolidating the
awakened conscience in divine peace. But there is another, {126} and
perhaps more conspicuous, spiritual evil of our day which this first
division is calculated to meet--the habit of excusing oneself--the
absence of the sense of sin.

Hold thou the good: define it well:
For fear divine philosophy
Should push beyond her mark, and be
Procuress to the lords of hell.

Because philosophy and science have been bringing into prominence the
influence of heredity and physical environment on character, we use
this consideration, and often with little enough knowledge of real
science, to obliterate the sense of sin. We are apt to regard sin as
it appears in the world at large as a result of ignorance, or social
conditions--as in one way or another a form of misfortune. And so
viewing it in the world, we view it in ourselves. We make excuses for
ourselves. We have largely lost the sense that sin is wilfulness; that
it is an inexcusable offence against God; that it does, and necessarily
does, bring us under God's indignation; that necessarily, because God
is what He is, the consequences of sin in this life, and much more
beyond this life, are inconceivably terrible. It is this sense of si