But again the caviller, intent not on God's glory but on his own position, takes up the word. [Sidenote: Ver. 5.] =But if our unrighteousness exhibits, sets off, God's righteousness,= if our sin gives occasion to grace to abound, if our guilt lets the generosity of God's Way of Acceptance stand out the more wonderful by contrast--=what shall we say? Would God be unjust, bringing His (τὴν) wrath to bear= on us, when our pardon would illustrate His free grace? Would He be unjust? Would He _not_ be unjust? We struggle, in our paraphrase, to bring out the bearing, as it seems to us, of a passage of almost equal grammatical difficulty and argumentative subtlety. The Apostle seems to be "in a strait" between the wish to represent the caviller's thought, and the dread of one really irreverent word. He throws the man's last question into a form which, grammatically, expects a "_no_" when the drift of the thought would lead us up to a shocking "_yes_."[29] And then at once he passes to his answer. =I speak as man,= man-wise; as if this question of balanced rights and wrongs were one between man and man, not between man and eternal God. Such talk, even for argument's sake, is impossible for the regenerate soul except under urgent protest. [Sidenote: Ver. 6.] =Away with the thought= that He would _not_ be righteous, in His punishment of any given sin. =Since how shall God judge the world?= How, on such conditions, shall we repose on the ultimate fact that He is the universal JUDGE? If He _could_ not, righteously, punish a deliberate sin because pardon, under certain conditions, illustrates His glory, then He could not punish any sin at all. But He _is_ the Judge; He _does_ bring wrath to bear! Now he takes up the caviller on his own ground, and goes all lengths upon it, and then flies with abhorrence from it. [Sidenote: Ver. 7.] =For if God's truth, in the matter of my lie, has abounded,= has come more amply out, =to His glory, why am I too[30] called to judgment as a sinner?= [Sidenote: Ver. 8.] =And why not say, as the slander against us goes, and as some assert that we do say, "Let us do the ill that the good may come"?= So they assert of us. But =their doom is just,=--the doom of those who would utter such a maxim, finding shelter for a lie under the throne of God.