veil of flesh shall fall I shall recognize in that passage the truest portrait ever painted of my own natural heart."
Robert Browning, in a poem of terrible moral interest and power,[34] confesses that, amidst a thousand doubts and difficulties, his mind was anchored to faith in Christianity by the fact of its doctrine of Sin:
"I still, to suppose it true, for my part
See reasons and reasons; this, to begin;
'Tis the faith that launched point blank her dart
At the head of a lie; taught Original Sin,
The Corruption of Man's Heart."
Ver. 19.
Now we know that whatever things the Law says, it speaks them to those in the Law, those within its range, its dominion; that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may prove guilty with regard to God. "The Law"; that is to say, here, the Old Testament Revelation. This not only contains the Mosaic and Prophetic moral code, but has it for one grand pervading object, in all its parts, to prepare man for Christ by exposing him to himself, in his shame and need. It shews him in a thousand ways that "he cannot serve the Lord" (Josh. xxiv. 19), on purpose that in that same Lord he may take refuge from both his guilt and his impotency. And this it does for "those in the Law"; that is to say here, primarily, for the Race, the Church, whom it surrounded with its light of holy fire, and whom in this passage the Apostle has in his first thoughts. Yet they, surely, are not alone upon his mind. We have seen already how "the Law" is, after all, only the more full and direct enunciation of "law"; so that the Gentile as well as the Jew has to do with the light, and with the responsibility, of a knowledge of the will of God. While the chain of stern quotations we have just handled lies heaviest on Israel, it yet binds the world. It "shuts every mouth." It drags MAN in guilty before God.
"That every mouth may be stopped." Oh solemn silence, when at last it comes! The harsh or muffled voices of self-defence, of self-assertion, are hushed at length. The man, like one of old, when he saw his righteous self in the light of God, "lays his hand on his mouth" (Job xl. 4). He leaves speech to God, and learns at last to listen. What shall he hear? An eternal repudiation? An objurgation, and then a final and exterminating anathema? No, something far other, and better, and more wonderful. But there must first be silence on man's part, if it is to be heard. "Hear—and your souls shall live."
So the great argument pauses, gathered up into an utterance which at once concentrates what has gone before, and prepares us for a glorious sequel. Shut thy mouth, O man, and listen now:
Ver. 20.
Because by means of works of law there shall be justified no flesh in His presence; for by means of law comes—moral knowledge (ἐπύγνωσις) of sin.
[27] Μὴ γένοιτο: literally, "Be it not"; "May it not be." Perhaps nothing so well represents the energy of the Greek as the "God forbid" of the Authorized Version.
[28] Ἐν τῷ κρίνεσθαι σε: we may render this (as in 1 Cor. vi. 1) "When Thou goest to law." The Hebrew is, literally, "When Thou judgest"; and the Septuagint Greek, used here by St. Paul, probably represents this, though by a slight paraphrase.
[29] Μὴ ἄδικος; where logically it would rather be οὐκ ἄδικος.—Just above, we explain "God's righteousness" to mean, as commonly in the Epistle, "God's way of acceptance," His reckoning His Righteousness to the sinner.
[30] Κἀγώ: he speaks as claiming, on the caviller's principles, equal indulgence for himself.
[31] Προεχόμεθα: "Do we make excuse for ourselves?" is a rendering for which there are clearer precedents in the use of the verb. But the context seems to us to advocate the above rendering, which is quite possible grammatically.
[32] ὑπὸ τὰ χείλη: again the Greek (as in verse 9) gives the thought of motion to a position under. The human "aspic" is depicted as bringing its venom up to its mouth, ready there for the stroke of its fangs.
[33] Adieux, § 1.
[34] Gold Hair, a Legend of Pornic.
CHAPTER IX
THE ONE WAY OF DIVINE ACCEPTANCE
Romans iii. 21–31
SO then "there is silence" upon earth, that man may hear the "still, small voice," "the sound of stillness" (1 Kings xix. 12),[35] from the heavens. "The Law" has spoken, with its heart-shaking thunder. It has driven in upon the soul of man, from many sides, that one fact—guilt; the eternity of the claim of righteousness, the absoluteness of the holy Will of God, and, in contrast, the failure of man, of the race, to meet that claim and do that will. It has told man, in effect, that he is "depraved,"[36] that is to say, morally distorted. He is "totally depraved," that is, the distortion has affected his whole being, so that he can supply on his own part no adequate recovering power which shall restore him to harmony with God. And the Law has nothing more to say to him, except that this condition is not only deplorable, but guilty, accountable, condemnable; and that his own conscience is the concurrent witness that it is so. He is a sinner. To be a sinner is before all things to be a transgressor of law. It is other things besides. It is to be morally diseased, and in need of surgery and medicine. It is to be morally unhappy, and an object of compassion. But first of all it is to be morally guilty, and in urgent need of justification, of a reversal of sentence, of satisfactory settlement with the offended—and eternal—Law of God.
That Law, having spoken its inexorable conditions, and having announced the just sentence of death, stands stern and silent beside the now silent offender. It has no commission to relieve his fears, to allay his grief, to pay his debts. Its awful, merciful business is to say "Thou shalt not sin," and "The wages of sin is death." It summons conscience to attention, and tells it in its now hearing ear far more than it had realized before of the horror and the doom of sin; and then it leaves conscience to take up the message and alarm the whole inner world with the certainty of guilt and judgment. So the man lies speechless before the terribly reticent Law.
Is it a merely abstract picture? Or do our hearts, the writer's and the reader's, bear any witness to its living truthfulness? God knoweth, these things are no curiosities of the past. We are not studying an interesting phase of early Christian thought. We are reading a living record of the experiences of innumerable lives which are lived on earth this day. There is such a thing indeed in our time, at this hour, as conviction of sin. There is such a thing now as a human soul, struck dumb amidst its apologies, its doubts, its denials, by the speech and then the silence of the Law of God. There is such a thing at this hour as a real man, strong and sound in thought, healthy in every faculty, used to look facts of daily life in the face, yet broken down in the indescribable conviction that he is a poor, guilty, lost sinner, and that his overwhelming need is—not
