cation in the later parts of his epistle,
he applies it in words which spring glowing from a heart on fire with
the gospel he loves, to reassure disheartened and nervous Christians.
It was a natural feature of the apostolic age that the disciples should
lose their first courage and become afraid, when the hard experience
they were to expect became plain to them. The Epistle to the Hebrews
is written full in face of this failure of courage among Jewish
Christians. For the Gentiles whom St. Paul has more particularly in
view there were manifold causes of alarm--fears derived from their own
weakness, from spiritual uncertainty, and from their precarious
position. It was not only that outward calamity--famine and
pestilence--might {322} come on them like other people. They plainly
felt--St. Paul plainly felt, as he thought of the bitter hostility of
the Jews actually ready to break out upon the Church, and of the
jealousy of the Empire, not yet hostile but easily capable of becoming
so--that times of persecution were at hand: that the Christians were
truly in the world as 'lambs in the midst of wolves.' Therefore he
would have them realize the whole secret of that invincible strength,
that power to endure and triumph, which ought to be theirs.

What is to be our practical conclusion, he asks, from all this
theology, from all this consideration of revealed facts and truths?
The sum of it all is that God is not our taskmaster and critical judge.
He is altogether on our side. And if this be so, whose hostility can
by comparison come into consideration at all? God showed His mind
toward us by the greatest possible act of self-sacrifice, the giving up
of His own divine Son to die for us. And, plainly, if of His free love
He gave us His greatest gift, He will not fail to accompany it with
everything that love can suggest. Or, to put the matter in another
way, if God, in full knowledge of what we were thought proper to take
us for His chosen {323} people and to put us in a position of
acceptance with Him, who can with any hope of success bring a charge
against us or pass condemnation on us? For we know the mind of the
only judge. Or, once again, what can be so reassuring as to consider
the person of our advocate or mediator? It is Christ Jesus, God's own
Son in our nature, who died a sacrifice for our sins, but so far from
being conquered by death, was raised from among the dead, and exalted
to the right hand of God, a