He represented the relation of man to God in terms of faith in, and communion through, Christ; so that, previous to the coming of Christ, both revelation and communion had been partial and defective. The Jews represented the relation of man to God in terms of Torah, in the knowledge of divine truth therein contained, and in filial obedience to God whose precepts were recorded in it. They found, on the lines of Torah, the ground of faith in God and present communion with Him; and while they always hoped to learn more of the contents of revelation--to be shown "wonderful things out of the Torah,"--and while they aspired to a closer walk with God, they never felt that the Torah needed to be replaced by any other means of revelation and communion, as being itself only partial and defective. To say of the Torah, as Paul said, that it was a means by which God had prepared the way for Christ, implied that it had only a secondary value on its own account. Indeed, it was rather harmful than helpful, if the effect of its working was to "cause the trespass to abound," and that effect was in no way justified by the alleged intention, on the part of God, that "grace might abound more exceedingly." A Christian, brought up on Paul, may see no difficulty in believing that the holy and righteous God could or would act in such a way. But to a Jew, brought up on Torah, it was impossible so to believe, and he would repudiate the suggestion with indignation; partly by reason of his reverence for God, and partly by reason of his own experience of Torah, and of spiritual life under it. Paul's theory might be valid for himself, but it was not valid for the Jew; and, arguing from his premises, he only described an unreal Judaism, such as it doubtless ought to have been if his premises had been true, but such as, in fact and experience, it certainly was not.[12] Paul, of course, was expounding Christianity; and he had no concern with Judaism, except to account to Christian readers for the very obvious difficulties which it placed in the way of his theory. His explanation of the meaning of Judaism is not a study of that form of religion on its own account, but the theoretical completion of his view of the work of Christ. If Christ came when he did, and if he fulfilled such and such a function in the drama of Providence, then the Judaism that was before him must have meant so and so, and must have been intended by God to produce such and such results. That seems to me to have been the real line of Paul's argument. And, as it started from his intense personal conviction of the inward presence of Christ, it is not wonderful that he should fail to see that the facts of Judaism did not at all correspond to his theory; or that he should assign to the Torah a function which, if put in practice, would have been fatal to the existence of Judaism long before Christ came. Paul argued on the religion of Torah from the postulates of the religion of Christ.