The life and work of St. Paul

EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OP ST. PAUL. 483
therefore, St. Paul's painful and difficult task to sever the Law finally from
all direct connexion with salvation, by showing that, theologically consideredand
this was the point which to the Jew would sound so paradoxical and so
wounding God had expressly designed it, not for the prevention of sin, and
the effecting of righteousness, but for the increase of sin, and the working of
ivrath. 1
It multiplied sin, because, by a psychological fact, which we cannot
explain, but which St. Paul here exhibits with marvellous insight into human
nature, the very existence of a commandment acts as an incitement to its
violation (" Permission fit vile nefas ") ; and it worked wrath by forcing all
2
sin into prominent self-consciousness, and thus making it the source of acute
misery ; by bringing home to the conscience that sense of guilt which is the
feeling of disharmony with God ; by darkening life with the shadows of dread
and self-contempt ; by creating the sense of moral death, and by giving to
physical death its deadliest sting. 3
iii. The third proposition that "we are not under the Law, but under
grace"* has been already sufficiently illustrated; and it must be borne in
mind that the object of St. Paul throughout has been to show that the true
theological position of the Law its true position, that is, in the Divine
reconomy of salvation is to come in between sin and grace, to be an impulse
in the process of salvation. He has already shown this, historically and exe-
on the fact that
getically, in the fifth chapter, as also in Gal. iii., by insisting
the Law, as a supplementary ordinance, 6 cannot disannul a free promise which
was prior to it by 430 years, and which had been sanctioned by an oath. The
Law, then, shows (1) the impossibility of any oilier way of obtaining the ful-
filment of the promise, except that of free favour ; and (2) the impossibility
of regarding this promise as a debt (o