What has been already said will have been enough to guard against the main sources of mistake in reading this section. St. Paul might have much to say about God's righteousness in general, and large ways of vindicating it. But here he holds fast to the single aspect of righteousness according to which it means that God has been true to the original principles of His covenant. The God who chose Abraham and Moses is the God who is now, and rightly on His own declared principles of government, rejecting the greater part of the people of Abraham and Moses. This--faithfulness to His own declared principles--is what St. Paul here means by His righteousness. And as it was God's declared principle to retain His own liberty to show mercy on men according to His free will, inside or outside the chosen people, so on the other hand He retained His liberty to exhibit His judgement of hardening according to His will inside or outside the chosen people. He who brought Pharaoh the Egyptian upon the stage {38} of history[6], as an example of hardening judgement, is within His right in doing the same now with (the mass of) the people of His choice. The liberty asserted for God is wholly consistent with His being found, in fact, to have 'hardened' those only who have deserved hardening by their own wilfulness. It was for such a moral cause that God hardened the hearts of the Jews, that 'seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not hear[7].' We can feel no doubt that some similar moral cause underlay the hardening of Pharaoh. But this is not St. Paul's present point. All his argument is directed to asserting God's liberty to show mercy or harden, irrespectively of considerations of race, when and where He in His sovereign moral will chooses. We should notice that St. Paul's method is here, as elsewhere, what is called ideal or abstract, in the sense that he makes abstraction {39} of a particular point of view; and, apparently indifferent to being misunderstood, substantiates his argument upon the particular aspect which he has taken apart from the whole matter in hand, till it is done with, and then other points can be taken in their turn. And he does not, as a modern writer would do, painfully correlate the various aspects of the subject[8].