1. As at the end of the first chapter we asked whether St. Paul was fair to the Gentile world, so now we ask whether he is fair to those of his own race whose religious tendencies he had known so well from inside. And the answer again is that he undoubtedly represents aright the dominant tendency and temper among them. The prophets had always had to fight against the natural but false idea of divine election, which held the Jewish race secure in the favour of Jehovah, simply because He was their God and they were His people. They bring to bear {95} all the activities of an inspired intelligence and heart to make their fellow-countrymen perceive that they are only secure in God's favour so long as they are like Him in character. Now down to the period of the Captivity, the prophets could also denounce the people because they were constantly false to Jehovah in matters of worship as well as of morality. After the Captivity, however, the tendency to idolatry is gone for ever. After the Maccabean period the exclusive and legitimate worship of Jehovah becomes a matter of passionate enthusiasm in the Jewish race. Henceforth therefore their danger from the false idea of election passes into a new phase. We must be in the favour of God, they now could plead, because we have Abraham to our father, and because we keep to the worship of our God with an irreproachable zeal for His law. Against this sort of strengthened pleading John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, aims his bare moral teaching. God's wrath is just about to fall upon His people he declares, because it lacks in real moral righteousness. Repent ye, be changed, get you a new heart--is his one word of preaching. This keynote passes intensified into the teachings and the denunciations of Christ. Nothing {96} more surely stamps the narrative of 'the woman taken in adultery' as historically genuine[3], than its profound truth to the moral attitude of Christ in face of Scribes and Pharisees. The point of His reply to their trial question is that they who would enforce a divine law, and thus stand for God before the world, must themselves be morally sound. 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.' It is moral conformity, not merely orthodoxy, which qualifies us to act for God. It is then precisely this attitude of Christ towards the Jews zealous for the law, which St. Paul is reproducing in the passage which we have just read.