had come to be understood among themselves,
they could accumulate merits altogether out of proportion to their
failures or demerits. They could even be helped by the merits of the
old saints[9]. Thus they could {165} stand before God on the basis of
a certain engagement or covenant, into which God had entered with His
people, and claim their due reward.

This utterly demoralizing attitude--leading as it does to formalism and
hypocrisy, or, at the best, unprogressive stagnation--this attitude,
which left out of sight all the higher and infinite elements in the Old
Testament, was the actual attitude of contemporary Pharisaic Jews. The
characteristics with which it endowed them were pride in the law; a
sense of personal merit coupled with a contempt for 'sinners of the
Gentiles,' or the common 'people which knew not the law'; a
self-satisfied stagnation which made them utterly resent the new light
of the gospel; a regard for the public opinion of their class, which
made them slaves to convention; and moral hollowness and rottenness
within. It was because this was their attitude that they rejected the
Christ. 'Going about to establish their own righteousness, they did
not submit themselves to the righteousness of God.' It was because St.
Paul had been brought up in the school of the Pharisees, but had come
to perceive its moral rottenness and to accept Jesus as the Christ,
that he bases all his {166} doctrine on the substitution of
justification by faith for justification by works.

By 'works' or 'works of the law' he means an attitude towards God which
left a man largely independent of Him. Under the divine covenant the
man of the covenant has a certain task to do, a certain law to keep:
that kept, especially in its external requirements as contemporary
authority enforces it, he is his own master. He is entitled to resent
any further claims upon him. This religious ideal means, as we have
seen, pride, stagnation, conventionalism, hypocrisy. And the more it
is considered the more unnatural it appears. For

(1) It ignores the fundamental relation of man to God, viz. that, as a
creature, he depends absolutely and at every stage on God. He has no
initiative in himself. Thus the only attitude towards God which
expresses the reality is one in which God is recognized as continually
supplying, or promising, or offering, or claiming, and man is
continually accepting, or believing, or corresponding, or obeying.

(2