h
other--righteousness and sin, atonement and forgiveness, would all alike
be words without meaning.

In connection with this, reference may be made to an important point in
the interpretation of the New Testament. The responsibility for what is
called the forensic conception of the Atonement is often traced to St.
Paul, and the greatest of all the ministers of grace is not infrequently
spoken of as though he had deliberately laid the most insuperable of
stumbling-blocks in the way to the gospel. Most people, of course, are
conscious that they do not look well talking down to St. Paul, and
occasionally one can detect a note of misgiving in the brave words in
which his doctrine is renounced, a note of misgiving which suggests that
the charitable course is to hear such protests in silence, and to let
those who utter them think over the matter again. But there is what
claims to be a scientific way of expressing dissent from the apostle, a
way which, equally with the petulant one, rests, I am convinced, on
misapprehension of his teaching. This it would not be fair to ignore.
It interprets what the apostle says about law solely by reference to the
great question at issue between the Jewish and the Christian religions,
making the word law mean the statutory system under which the Jews lived,
and nothing else. No one will deny that Paul does use the word in this
sense; the law often means for him specifically the law of Moses. The
law of Moses, however, never means for him anything less than the law of
God; it is one specific form in which the universal relations subsisting
between God and man, and making religion and morality possible, have
found historical expression. But Paul's mind does not rest in this one
historical expression. He generalises it. He has the conception of a
universal law, to which he can appeal in Gentile as well as in Jew--a law
in the presence of which sin is revealed, and by the reaction of which
sin is judged--a law which God could not deny without denying Himself,
and to which justice is done (in other words, which is maintained in its
integrity), even when God justifies the ungodly. But when law is thus
universalised, it ceases to be legal; it is not a statute, but the moral
constitution of the world. Paul preached the same gospel to the Gentiles
as he did to the Jews; he preached in it the same relation of the
Atonement and of Christ's death to divine law. But he did not do this by
ext