The life and work of St. Paul

EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OF ST. PATTL. 465
L Now, since the Apostle had already dwelt on the universality of the
Gospel, it was necessary to show that it applied equally to Jews and Pagans ;
that the universality of free grace was necessitated by the universality of
wilful sin. Righteousness and sin, soteriology and hamartiology, are the
fundamental thoughts in St. Paul's theological system. The first is a theoretic
consequence of our conception of God's nature ; the second an historic fact
deducible fi'om experience and conscience.
As there is a righteousness of God which is being revealed in the Gospel, so, too,
there is a wrath of God against sin which is ever being revealed from heaven, by
tbe inevitable working of God's own appointed laws, against all godlessness and
unrighteousness of those who in their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 1 And
since the world is mainly Gentile, he speaks of the Gentiles first. Some might
imagine that their ignorance of God made them excusable. Not so. The facts
which render them inexcusable 2 are (i.) that God did in reality manifest Himself to
them, and tbe invisibilities of Has eternal power and Godhead were clearly visible
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in His works and that ;
(ii.) though they knew God, yet by denying Him the due
glory and gratitude, they suffered themselves to plunge into the penal darkness of
ignorant speculation, and the penal folly of self-asserted wisdom, and tbe self-con-
victed boast of a degraded culture, until they sank to such depths of spiritual
imbecility as to end even in tbe idolatry of 4
reptiles ; and (iii.) because mental
infatuation, both as its natural result and as its fearful punishment, issued in moral
crime. Their sin was inexcusable, because it was the outcome and the retribution,
and the natural child, of sin. Because they guiltily abandoned God, God abandoned
them to their own guiltiness. 5 The conscious lie of idolatry became the conscious
infamy of uncleanness. Those " passions of dishonour " to which God abandoned
them rotted tbe heart of manhood with their retributive corruption, and affected
even women with their execrable stain. 6 Pagan society, in its hideous disintegration,
became one foul disease of unnatural depravity. The cancer of it ate into the heart ;
tbe miasma of it tainted tbe air. Even tbe moralists of Paganism were infected
with its vileness. 7 God scourged their moral ignorance by suffering it to become a
deeper ignorance. He punished their contempt by letting them make themselves
utterly contemptible. Tbe mere consequence of this abandonment of them was
a natural Nemesis, a justice in kind, beginning even in this life, whereby their
unwillingness to discern Him became an incapacity to discern8 the most elementary
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