This foremost place which righteousness takes in the order of St. Paul's ideas makes a signal difference between him and Puritanism. Puritanism, as we have said, finds its starting-point either in the desire to flee from eternal wrath or in the desire to obtain eternal bliss. Puritanism has learned from revelation, as it says, a particular history of the first man's fall, of mankind being under a curse, of certain contracts having been passed concerning mankind in the Council of the Trinity, of the substance of those contracts, and of man's position under them. The great concern of Puritanism is with the operation of those contracts on man's condition; its leading thought, if it is a Puritanism of a gloomy turn, is of awe and fear caused by the threatening aspect of man's condition under these contracts; if of a cheerful turn, of gratitude and hope caused by the favourable aspect of it. But in either case, foregone events, the covenant passed, what God has done and does, is the great matter. What there is left for man to do, the human work of righteousness, is secondary, and comes in but to attest and confirm our assurance of what God has done for us. We have seen this in Wesley's words already quoted: the first thing for a man is to be justified and sanctified, and to have the assurance that, without seeking it by works, he is justified and sanctified; then the desire and works of righteousness follow as a proper result of this condition. Still more does Calvinism make man's desire and works of righteousness mere evidences and benefits of more important things; the desire to work righteousness is among the saving graces applied by the Holy Spirit to the elect, and the last of those graces. _Denique_, says the Synod of Dort, _last of all_, after faith in the promises and after the witness of the Spirit, comes, to establish our assurance, a clear conscience and righteousness. It is manifest how unlike is this order of ideas to Paul's order, who starts with the thought of a conscience void of offence towards God and man, and builds upon that thought his whole system. But this difference constitutes from the very outset an immense scientific superiority for the scheme of Paul. Hope and fear are elements of human nature like the love of right, but they are far blinder and less scientific elements of it. 'The Bible is a divine revelation; the Bible declares certain things; the things it thus declares have the witness of our hopes and fears;'--this is the line of thought followed by Puritanism. But what science seeks after is a satisfying rational conception of things. A scheme which fails to give this, which gives the contrary of this, may indeed be of a nature to move our hopes and fears, but is to science of none the more value on that account.