4. The appeal to the new-grafted "branch" to "abide by the goodness of God." We have listened, as St Paul has dictated to his scribe, to many a deep word about a divine and sovereign power on man; about man's absolute debt to God for the fact that he believes and lives. Yet here, with equal decision, we have man thrown back on the thought of his responsibility, of the contingency in a certain sense of his safety on his fidelity.[197] "If you are true to mercy, mercy will be true to you; otherwise you too will be broken off." Here, as in our study of earlier passages, let us be willing to go all along with Scripture in the seeming inconsistency of its absolute promises and its contingent cautions. Let us, like it, "go to both extremes"; then we shall be as near, probably, as our finite thought can be at present to the whole truth as it moves, a perfect sphere, in God. Is the Christian worn and wearied with his experience of his own pollution, instability, and helplessness? Let him embrace, without a misgiving, the whole of that promise, "My sheep shall never perish." Has he drifted into a vain confidence, not in Christ, but in privilege, in experience, in apparent religious prosperity? Has he caught himself in the act of saying, even in a whisper, "God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are"? Then let him listen in time to the warning voice, "Be not high-minded, but fear"; "Take heed lest He spare not thee." And let him put no pillow of theory between the sharpness of that warning and his soul. Penitent, self-despairing, resting in Christ alone, let him "_abide by the goodness of God_." [189] Παράπτωμα: so we venture to render the word here, where its compound form gets a special point from its neighbourhood to the simple verb πίπτειν (πέσωσι). [190] Παράπτωμα: see above p. 294. [191] Read δὲ not γάρ. It is the "_but_" of a slight pause and resumption. [192] The converts of the Roman Mission were surely Gentiles for the most part. See further below, ver. 25. [193] Τὴν σάρκα μου: we venture to write "_flesh and blood_" as the nearest equivalent in our parlance to the vigorous Greek, "_my flesh_." [194] It will be seen that we punctuate the Greek here as follows: Ὑμῖν δὲ λέγω τοῖς ἔθνεσιν (ἐφ' ὅσον μὲν οὖν εἰμὶ ἐγὼ ἐθνῶν ἀπόστολος, τὴν διακονίαν μου δοξάζω) εἴ πῶς κτλ. The thought of his "_glory_" in his "_ministry_" is surely _parenthetical_; thrown in to remind them that his plea for Israel means no change of heart towards his Gentile converts, or any wavering in the certainty that in Christ they are as completely "the people of God" as Israel is. The "main line" of the sentence runs past this parenthesis: "To you Gentiles I speak, in the hope of moving the jealousy of the Jews." [195] Cp. too 2 Cor. iii. 14-16 with this whole passage. [196] This chapter is silent on that great matter.