e of his time, and never tried to do anything
else. When, therefore, we want to get at what he meant about the death
of Jesus, we have first of all to get behind the symbolism by which he
illustrates it, and even when we have done this we have to make
allowance for some limiting Pharisaic conceptions about justice and the
punishment of sin. Every now and then he breaks through these and
rises into a rarer, purer region without troubling about consistency.
Paul never dreamed that he was writing theological treatises which
would be numbered off into chapters and verses and lectured upon in
class rooms, or perhaps he would have been more careful about being
exact. How many of us could afford to have our letters, written at
different times and to different readers, analysed and dissected and
taken as a full and permanent statement of our thought upon any
particular subject or group of subjects?

+Paul's view of the death of the Saviour and the forgiveness of
sins.+--The first important thing to be noted in Paul's thought about
sin and salvation is his view that there was a vital connection between
the death of the Messiah and God's forgiveness of sins. But we should
be mightily mistaken if we were to understand this view to be the same
as that of a modern evangelical who talks about the "fountain filled
with blood," for it was quite different. The modern evangelical, of
so-called orthodox opinions, believes that Jesus died to save all men
from hell; but this was not what Paul was thinking about at all.
According to Paul, the wages of sin were actually and literally death.
But for sin there would have been no death, and to break the power of
sin would also be to break the power of death. But in this Paul was
wrong, in company with a good many of his contemporaries, and there is
no reason why we should not frankly say so, for, as we shall presently
see, the great apostle did not confine himself to the literal statement
of this view, but gave it also a mystical form in which it becomes
indisputably true. In his thought the Messiah of Jewish national
expectation was the head and representative of the nation in its
relation to God. For ages men had been dying because of sin--"in Adam
all die"--and so when the Sinless One came into human conditions and in
the likeness of sinful flesh, He also had to pass through death. But
there was a difference between His death and all other deaths in that,
being sinless, death could n