The three cardinal points in Paul's theology are not therefore, we repeat, those commonly assigned by Puritanism, _calling_, _justification_, _sanctification_; but they are these: _dying with Christ_, _resurrection from the dead_, _growing into Christ_. And we will venture, moreover, to affirm that the more the Epistle to the Romans is read and re-read with a clear mind, the more will the conviction strengthen, that the sense indicated by the order in which we here class the second main term of Paul's conception, is the essential sense which Paul himself attaches to this term, in every single place where in that Epistle he has used it. Not tradition and not theory, but a simple impartial study of the development of Paul's central line of thought, brings us to the conclusion, that from the very outset of the Epistle, where Paul speaks of Christ as 'declared to be the son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead,'[78] to the very end, the essential sense in which Paul uses the term _resurrection_ is that of a rising, in this visible earthly existence, from the death of obedience to blind selfish impulse, to the life of obedience to the eternal moral order;--in Christ's case first, as the pattern for us to follow; in the believer's case afterwards, as following Christ's pattern through identifying himself with him. [Footnote 78: _Rom._, i, 4.] We have thus reached Paul's fundamental conception without even a glimpse of the fundamental conceptions of Puritanism, which, nevertheless, professes to have learnt its doctrine from St. Paul and from his Epistle to the Romans. Once, for a moment, the term _faith_ brought us in contact with the doctrine of Puritanism, but only to see that the essential sense given to this word by Paul Puritanism had missed entirely. Other parts, then, of the Epistle to the Romans than those by which we have been occupied must have chiefly fixed the attention of Puritanism. And so it has in truth been. Yet the parts of the Epistle to the Romans that have occupied us are undoubtedly the parts which not our own theories and inclinations,--for we have approached the matter without any,--but an impartial criticism of Paul's real line of thought, must elevate as the most important. If a somewhat pedantic form of expression may be forgiven for the sake of clearness, we may say that of the eleven first chapters of the Epistle to the Romans,--the chapters which convey Paul's theology, though not, as we have seen, with any scholastic purpose or in any formal scientific mode of exposition,--of these eleven chapters, the first, second, and third are, in a scale of importance fixed by a scientific criticism of Paul's line of thought, sub-primary; the fourth and fifth are secondary; the sixth and eighth are primary; the seventh chapter is sub-primary; the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters are secondary. Furthermore, to the