We come to predestination. We have seen how strong was Paul's consciousness of that power, not ourselves, in which we live and move and have our being. The sense of life, peace, and joy, which comes through identification with Christ, brings with it a deep and grateful consciousness that this sense is none of our own getting and making. No, it is grace, it is the free gift of God, who gives abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, and calls things that are not as though they were. 'It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy.'[81] As moral agents, for whom alone exist all the predicaments of merit and demerit, praise and blame, effort and failure, vice and virtue, we are impotent and lost;--we are saved through that in us which is passive and involuntary; we are saved through our affections, it is as beings _acted upon_ and _influenced_ that we are saved! Well might Paul cry out, as this mystical but profound and beneficent conception filled his soul: 'All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.'[82] Well might he say, in the gratitude which cannot find words enough to express its sense of boundless favour, that those who reached peace with God through identification with Christ were vessels of mercy, marked from endless ages; that they had been foreknown, predestinated, called, justified, glorified. [Footnote 81: _Rom._, ix, 16.] [Footnote 82: _Rom._, viii, 28.] It may be regretted, for the sake of the clear understanding of his essential doctrine, that Paul did not stop here. It might seem as if the word 'prothesis,' _purpose_, lured him on into speculative mazes, and involved him, at last, in an embarrassment, from which he impatiently tore himself by the harsh and unedifying image of the clay and the potter. But this is not so. These allurements of speculation, which have been fatal to so many of his interpreters, never mastered Paul. He was led into difficulty by the tendency which we have already noticed as making his real imperfection both as a thinker and as a writer,--the tendency to Judaise.