The Gentiles were “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,”--that is to say, treated as aliens and made such by their exclusion. By the very fact of Israel’s election, the rest of mankind were shut out of the visible kingdom of God. They became mere _Gentiles_, or _nations_,--a herd of men bound together only by natural affinity, with no “covenant of promise,” no religious constitution or destiny, no definite relationship to God, Israel being alone the acknowledged and organized “_people_ of Jehovah.” These distinctions were summed up in one word, expressing all the pride of the Jewish nature, when the Israelites styled themselves “the Circumcision.” The rest of the world--Philistines or Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, or Barbarians, it mattered not--were “the Uncircumcision.” How superficial this distinction was in point of fact, and how false the assumption of moral superiority it implied in the existing condition of Judaism, St Paul indicates by saying, “those who are _called_ Uncircumcision by that which is _called_ Circumcision, in flesh, wrought by human hands.” In the second and third chapters of his epistle to the Romans he exposed the hollowness of Jewish sanctity, and brought his fellow-countrymen down to the level of those “sinners of the Gentiles” whom they so bitterly despised. The destitution of the Gentile world is put into a single word, when the apostle says: “You were at that time _separate from Christ_”--without a Christ, either come or coming. They were deprived of the world’s one treasure,--shut out, as it appeared, for ever[88] from any part in Him who is to mankind all things and in all.--_Once far off!_ * * * * * “But now in Christ Jesus ye were _made nigh_.” What is it that has bridged the distance, that has transported these Gentiles from the wilderness of heathenism into the midst of the city of God? It is “the blood of Christ.” The sacrificial death of Jesus Christ transformed the relations of God to mankind, and of Israel to the Gentiles. In Him God reconciled not a nation, but “a world” to Himself (2 Cor. v. 19). The death of the Son of man could not have reference to the sons of Abraham alone. If sin is universal and death is not a Jewish but a human experience, and if one blood flows in the veins of all our race, then the death of Jesus Christ was a universal sacrifice; it appeals to every man’s conscience and heart, and puts away for each the guilt which comes between his soul and God.