in the commonplace about the potter and the vessels of wrath. A commonplace which is so entirely a commonplace to him, that he contradicts it even while he is Judaising; for in the very batch of chapters we are discussing he says: "Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." Still more clear is, on this point, his real mind, when he is not Judaising: "God is the saviour of all men, specially of those that believe." And anything, finally, which might seem dangerous in the grateful sense of a calling, choosing, and leading by eternal goodness,—a notion as natural as the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination is monstrous, -Paul abundantly supplies in more than one striking passage; as, for instance, in that incomparable third chapter of the Philippians (from which, and from the sixth and eighth chapters of the Romans, Paul's whole theology, if all his other writings were lost, might be reconstructed), where he expresses his humble consciousness that the mystical resurrection which is his aim, glory, and salvation, he does not yet, and cannot, completely attain.

The grand doctrine, then, which Calvinistic Puritanism has gathered from Paul, turns out to be a secondary notion of his, which he himself, too, has contradicted or corrected. But, at any rate, "Christ meritoriously ob

tained eternal redemption for us."

"If there be any

thing," the quarterly organ of Puritanism has lately told us in its hundredth number, "that human experience has made certain, it is that man can never outgrow his necessity for the great truths and provisions of the Incarnation and the sacrificial Atonement of the Divine Son of God." God, his justice being satisfied by Christ's bearing according to compact our guilt and dying in our stead, is appeased and set free to exercise towards us his mercy, and to justify and sanctify us in consideration of Christ's righteousness imputed to us, if we give our hearty belief and consent to the satisfaction thus made. This hearty belief being given, "we rest," to use the consecrated expression already quoted, “in the finished work of a Saviour." This is now, as predestination formerly was, the favourite thesis of popular theology. And, like the doctrine of predestination, it professes to be specially derived from St. Paul.

But whoever has followed attentively the main line of St. Paul's theology, as we have tried to show it, will see at once that in St. Paul's essential ideas this popular notion of a substitution, and appeasement, and imputation of alien merit, has no place. Paul knows nothing of a sacrificial atonement; what Paul knows of is a reconciling sacrifice. The true substitution, for Paul,

is not the substitution of Christ in men's stead as victim on the cross to God's offended justice; it is the substitution by which the believer, in his own person, repeats Christ's dying to sin. Paul says, in real truth, to our Puritans with their magical and mechanical salvation, just what he said to the men of circumcision : "If I preach resting in the finished work of a Saviour, why am I yet persecuted? why do I die daily? then is the stumbling-block of the cross annulled.* That hard, that well-nigh impossible doctrine, that our whole course must be a crucifixion and a resurrection, even as Christ's whole course was a crucifixion and a resurrection, becomes superfluous. Yet this is my central doctrine."

The notion of God as a magnified and non-natural man, appeased by a sacrifice and remitting in consideration of it his wrath against those who had offended him, --this notion of God, which science repels, was equally repelled, in spite of all that his nation, time, and training had in them to favour it, by the profound religious sense of Paul. In none of his epistles is the reconciling work of Christ really presented under this aspect. One great epistle there is, however, which does apparently present it under this aspect,—the Epistle to the Hebrews.

* Gal. v, 2.

Paul's phraseology, and even the central idea which he conveys in that phraseology, were evidently well known to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Nay, if we merely sought to prove a thesis, rather than to ascertain the real bearing of the documents we canvass, we should have no difficulty in making it appear, by texts taken from the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the doctrine of this epistle, no less than the doctrine of the Epistle to the Romans, differs entirely from the common doctrine of Puritanism. This, however, we shall by no means do; because it is our honest opinion that the popular doctrine of "the sacrificial Atonement of the Divine Son of God" derives, if not a real, yet at any rate a strong apparent sanction from the Epistle to the Hebrews. Even supposing, what is probably true, that the popular doctrine is really the doctrine neither of the one epistle nor of the other, yet it must be confessed that while it is the reader's fault,—a fault due to his fixed prepossessions, and to his own want of penetration,-if he gets the popular doctrine out of the Epistle to the Romans, it is on the other hand the writer's fault and no longer the reader's, if out of the Epistle to the Hebrews he gets the popular doctrine. For the author of that epistle is, if not subjugated, yet at least preponderantly occupied by the idea of the

Jewish system of sacrifices, and of the analogies to Christ's sacrifice which are furnished by that system.

If other proof were wanting, this alone would make it impossible that the Epistle to the Hebrews should be Paul's; and indeed of all the epistles which bear his name, it is the only one which we may not, perhaps, in spite of the hesitation caused by grave difficulties, be finally content to leave to him.* Luther's conjecture, which ascribes to Apollos the Epistle to the Hebrews, derives corroboration from the one account of Apollos which we have; that "he was an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures." The Epistle to the Hebrews is just such a performance

*Considerations drawn from date, place, the use of single words, the development of a church organisation, the development of an ascetic system, are not enough to make us take away certain epistles from St. Paul; our knowledge of the facts is not sufficiently full to make this external evidence decisive. The only decisive evidence, in this case, is that internal evidence furnished by the whole body of the thoughts and style of an epistle; and this evidence that Paul was not its author the Epistle to the Hebrews furnishes. From the like evidence, the Apocalypse is clearly shown to be not by the author of the fourth Gospel, and the so-called Second Epistle of St. Peter to be not by the author of the First Epistle. This clear evidence against the tradition which assigns them to St. Paul, the Epistles to Timothy and Titus do not offer. The serious ground of difficulty as to these epistles will to the genuine critic be, that much in them fails to produce that peculiarly searching effect on the reader, which it is in general characteristic of Paul's own real work to exercise. But they are full of Pauline things, and are, in any case, written by an excellent man, and in an excellent and large spirit.