d not
merely of man[5], which should accompany the coming of the Messiah.
This was a most popular idea in Jewish hearts. 'I will transform the
heaven and make it an eternal blessing and light. And I will transform
the earth and make it a blessing and cause mine elect ones to dwell
upon it: but the sinners and evil-doers shall not set foot thereon[6].'

Here then we have the common belief which St. Paul inherits and uses.
He lays indeed very little stress upon the connexion of the earth's
present condition with human sin, if he {305} even alludes to it. He
only says it was 'subjected to vanity' by the decree of the Creator,
and that with a glorious prospect. It is upon the present aspect of
the creation and its great prospect that his eyes are set. And his
superiority to contemporary Jewish thought is shown by the fact that in
his vision of the future he is catholic and cosmic. What he is
contemplating is not a world renovated in order that one chosen race
may be happy and glorious, but a renovated world for a perfected
humanity. And in his representation of the present aspects of nature
he strikes an extraordinarily modern note by exhibiting, as it were
unintentionally, a deep and real sympathy with nature in her pain from
her own point of view. The Psalms can supply examples of a real
sympathetic fellowship in the happiness of creation--a happiness which
modern pessimists strangely ignore. But here we have, as nowhere else
in the Bible--perhaps nowhere in ancient literature--a man who feels
with the pain of creation[7]. He notes how much 'vanity' there is in
nature--how much that is ineffective and disappointing, how much waste
and sadness--by reason of the omnipresent law of corruption, {306}
dissolution and decay under which she is laid. He feels this as from
nature's own heart. And he has an ear for the universal cry of
positive pain, pain as of a woman in travail, which is one at least of
the most unmistakeable voices of nature. But he has got an explanation
of this universal pain which makes it tolerable to him. It is the pain
which accompanies a birth. The pain, as in the case of the woman, is
to be justified by the issue. Nature 'eagerly expects' as well as
'groans': and will doubtless 'remember no more the anguish, for joy' of
that which is the fruit of her agony. For there is a destiny for the
whole material world which includes man. As man is to be perfected and
spiritualized in body no less