he ground that Jewish
unfaithfulness had but given {205} God a background upon which to
reveal Himself and His righteousness more effectively. St. Paul, we
saw, indignantly crushed that attempt to use logic against conscience.
Now, however, a similar suggestion makes itself heard, only from the
side not of Jewish factiousness, but of Gentile lawlessness. Would it
not give divine grace a still better opportunity to show its quality
if, now that we are Christians, we go on living our old life of sin?
The more it has got to forgive in us, the more superabundant will its
mercy appear. Shall we not then continue in sin that grace may abound?
We have other reasons, besides this passage, for believing that St.
Paul's teaching about divine grace and justifying faith not only
admitted of being misunderstood, but was misunderstood, in his own
time[1] as at later periods, in such a way as to cut the roots of moral
effort. 'Unlearned and unstable men were wresting his words to their
own destruction.' And to any lawless suggestions based upon the misuse
of God's free grace, St. Paul had already given the easiest answer when
he had laid it down {206} as an absolutely universal truth that God
will at last 'render to every man according to his works ... to them
that are factious and obey not the truth but obey unrighteousness,
wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man
that worketh evil'; or when he had met the developed logic of the
self-excusing Jew with the sharp and final rejoinder--'whose
condemnation is just.'

Here however St. Paul gives not the easiest answer to the antinomian
suggestion, but a deep, fruitful, and decisive one. He demonstrates
the absolute incompatibility of principle between the life of sin and
the Christian state. By the very nature of the case no man can belong
to both. As St. John said, 'he that is begotten of God' in the new
life in Christ 'cannot sin' without thereby abandoning his new
standing-ground. At the moment when we became Christians by the act of
baptism, we said good-bye to the old life of sin as completely as a
dying man says good-bye to the familiar scenes and passes over to
'yonder side.' We were admitted by baptism into Christ Jesus; that is,
we were admitted into a certain sort of human life with a certain law
or character. What is then the character and law of Christ's life?
'We believe that {207} Jesus died and rose again[2].' That is the
central a