without possibility of recovery, to
eternal misery. Such a conception is utterly abhorrent to modern
consciences: and we shall have occasion to observe with how little
reason any conception of God predestinating man to eternal misery has
been attributed to St. Paul[39].

Luther again, who identified himself, as no other teacher has ever
done, with St. Paul's epistles of justification, was so zealous to
separate the faith in virtue of which God justifies us from all idea of
merit, that he represented it as a bare acceptance of the divine offer
without any moral quality at all--a bare believing ourselves to be
saved, without any moral reason in it. Thus, accepting an existing
scholastic distinction between an 'informed' faith, i.e. a faith
ensouled {39} by love, and a 'formless' or bare faith, he held the
faith on account of which God justifies us to be rigidly of the
formless kind; and while fully recognizing the richer sort of faith as
the God-given quality of those already justified, declared that it had
nothing to do with their justification. But this conception of two
separate sorts of faith, of which only the loveless sort, that involves
no moral worth, has to do with our acceptance with God, is not only a
high road to moral laxity or antinomianism, but is also utterly alien
to the spirit of St. Paul, in whom the whole life of faith is one and
continuous[40]. It could only have arisen at a particular moment of
theological controversy which is past and gone. And the same must be
said of the allied doctrine of the total depravity of our fallen
nature, which drove men to violent misinterpretations alike of
scripture and of their moral instincts.

And what of the Tridentine theology? No doubt in its general view of
our fallen human nature it is far more reasonable and Pauline than the
Lutheran; and it is also truer to St. Paul in laying the main stress on
a divine righteousness {40} actually imparted to us, and not on
Christ's merits imputed and not imparted; or, in other words, in
recognizing that forgiveness is only a prelude to the development of a
new life of holiness. But on the other hand it puts itself hopelessly
out of relation to St. Paul's language and thought by interpreting
justification as the being made righteous, and accordingly speaking of
baptism as the instrument by which we are justified, whereas to St.
Paul justification means our preliminary acceptance without regard to
what we have been,