[2] The vocation and election which made Israel the chosen people were absolutely of God. What distinguished the faithful remnant from the bulk of the nation was simply that they had not altogether failed in faith, so that the unchanging election was not in their cases practically suspended, but God 'reserved them for Himself.' [3] St. Paul refers chiefly to Isa. xxix. 10--the description of a besotted people whose prophets are eyes that cannot see, and their seers ears that cannot hear; so that the word of God has become as a sealed book; cf. also Isa. vi. 9. But there is a similar passage in Deut. xxix. 4, which partly moulds his language, and supplies the words 'unto this day.' [4] Rather, as margin, in Elijah, i.e. the passage of Scripture about Elijah. [5] This--to recognize or mark out beforehand--is the meaning of divine 'foreknowing' in St. Paul. See vol. i. pp. 317 f. [6] Both in this passage and in Acts i. 20. {68} DIVISION IV. § 5[1]. CHAPTER XI. 13-36. _God's present purpose for the Jews through the Gentiles: and so for all humanity._ St. Paul would not have it supposed that, in his zeal for the recovery of Israel, he was proving faithless to his vocation as the apostle of the Gentiles. On the contrary, he explains (assuming the Roman Christians to be Gentiles in the mass) that he is, by this very zeal, fulfilling that vocation. The conversion of the Gentiles was meant to react as a stimulus on the Jews. When St. Paul magnifies his Gentile ministry, he does so always with the motive of stinging the jealousy of his own people, and so bringing some of them to salvation. How can such a consummation be too eagerly desired? For if even so pitiable an event as their rejection has yet, in God's providence, been overruled for {69} a good end--the bringing back of the outside world into the fellowship of God[2]: can we doubt that so happy an event as their recovery would be indeed (what Ezekiel saw in vision in the valley of the dry bones) a veritable resurrection? For the consecration of God is still upon them. The holy (i.e. consecrated) people they still remain. As the 'heave offering' of the 'first of the dough'[3] consecrates the whole lump, so the first of the nation offered to God--Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--have consecrated the whole nation. The holiness of the root of God's olive tree[4] has passed to the latest branches. It is quite true that some of these branches of the Jewish olive tree were broken off, and that the Gentiles were introduced in their place; like a wild olive grafted upon the root of a cultivated plant, and so sharing its rich sap. But that--to let the metaphor continue--gives the wild olive no ground for an insolent contempt of the branches which naturally belonged to the tree. What advantage it now has it wholly derives from that which it is {70} affecting to despise. It is the root that supports it, not it the root. And are