r absence of
responsibility, or the influence of heredity--would dry up and wither
on our lips under the powerful glare of the divine 'letter'--Thou
shalt, Thou shalt not. God hath not 'given any man license to sin,' He
hath given no man exemption from the trouble or the suffering or the
loss involved in doing right. The obligation is peremptory to be just,
to be merciful, to be honest, to be self-denying, to be pure. And if
we do not care to take the trouble to be so, the only alternative is to
have Christ for our adversary, and find at last the horrible depth of
meaning which His words contain--'Thus and thus have ye made void the
word of God by your tradition.' 'Inasmuch as ye did it not, depart, ye
cursed, into eternal fire!' 'It is good for thee to enter into the
kingdom of God maimed or halt or with one eye, rather than having two
hands or feet or eyes to be cast into hell, where their worm dieth not
and the fire is not quenched.' These and the like words are
metaphorical--but metaphors which are intended to teach the heart only
the more vividly because they are metaphorical.

{259}

Indeed, in each age, and therefore in ours, most fertile of excuses, we
need the letter to kill us; the stern, outward, unmistakable
announcement of God's will to assure us that God does not change with
our whims or feelings, and cannot accommodate Himself to immoral
necessities. In each age, and therefore in ours, most capable of moral
self-deception, we need continual and forcible reminders that a quiet
conscience is no adequate guarantee of agreement with God, unless we
have taken pains to keep our conscience enlightened by meditating on
the divine word.

And if St. Paul's account of the function of 'the law' is true, so also
is his account of its necessary failure. It is obviously true if you
confine 'the law' to meaning what in the tradition of the Pharisees it
had come to mean, or what in his ideal way of thinking St. Paul defined
it to mean--that is, not the whole Old Testament with its anticipations
in prophecy and psalm of the temper of sonship and its evangelical
forecasts of the new covenant, but bare precept, expressing externally
and unmistakably the will of God. Mere law, instructing men truly and
searchingly as to God's requirement in thought as well as word and
deed, instructing {260} men and challenging them, and doing nothing
more, is so manifestly incomplete an expression of God's relation to
man, quite