ity; for without such belief they could not have been even nominally Christians; but their faith as a vital, actuating principle, producing love, zeal, and obedience to the whole will of Christ. As Christians from every part were in the habit of going to Rome, so on their return they published, with joyful admiration, the excellent spirit and example of the church in that city, in which they would naturally feel the deepest interest, as being planted in the very seat of idolatry, and under the immediate cognizance of the imperial government. Thus its faith was spoken of, or honourably declared through the world, or Roman empire, in toto orbe Romano.

Verse 9. For God is my witness, &c. In calling God to witness to that great affection he had for the church at Rome, whom he had never seen in the flesh, and his strong desire to have visited them, he conciliated them to receive that more perfect instruction in certain doctrines, somewhat offensive to the Jewish part of the members, which the epistle contains; and he probably meets a tacit objection, as to his apparent neglect of the Gentiles of the metropolis of the world, when he professed himself, in a peculiar sense, called to be the apostle of the Gentiles. He insists so strongly upon his frequent purposes and ardent desire to exercise his ministry in Rome, that we must suppose that he had been exposed to some imputation for not having already made that great city the scene of his labours. That he made mention of them in his prayers without ceasing proved how great an interest he felt in their welfare, though they had not been the fruits of his own ministry; and that he had been let or hindered in fulfilling the purpose of visiting them, and

that, by indispensable engagements in his great work, and the appointments of the Holy Spirit, under which he acted, was a reason for his absence which admitted of no objection. Some interpreters have considered this as an instance of that dexterous courtesy by which St. Paul often succeeded in setting himself in a favourable position before his auditors or readers. Much of this contemptible criticism has been applied to his epistles; but art is subsequent to nature, and, at best, ill imitates it. Here all is truth and feeling, and not artifice; and the simple declaration of two truths,-his constant prayers for them, and his constant desires to visit them,-effected infinitely more than a laboured apology, into which he would no doubt have run had he been practising the art of the rhetorician.

Whom I serve with my spirit.-To serve with the spirit, is usually taken to sig. nify, to serve with zeal and earnestness, ex toto animo; but it rather expresses the spiritual service in which St. Paul was engaged, and to which he had consecrated all his faculties.

Verse 10. By the will of God.-The prayer that he might have a prosperous journey to them, that the opportunity might favourably open, and the journey itself be safe and crowned with good success, was made in submission to the will of God, to which we are thus taught to subordinate all our purposes and plans, even when they excite in us the strongest desires. St. Paul was let or hindered, verse 13, by that very will of God, in dutiful subjection to which he had made the request. The apostles were not in their own hands; and that peculiar guidance of the Holy Spirit, as to their labours, under which they were placed,

appears to have been often vouchsafed by sudden and unlooked-for impulses, changing their places and counterventing their most deliberate purposes. This is one of the proofs that they were under that inspiration which they professed. A fanatic turns those impressions which he fancies to be from God, into the channel of his own will and inclination. The apostles had learned not "to live to themselves, but to Christ," and to acknowledge, that in a work which respected the deep and comprehensive designs of God's mercy to the world, not even spiritual and experienced men were, of themselves, competent judges either of TIME OF PLACE. St. Paul was indeed permitted to visit Rome, but at a future time; and his journey was not to be that prosperous journey which he requested, but a journey of perils and suffering; he was indeed to enter Rome as an "ambassador," but an "ambassador in bonds." So differently, in the mode, does God bring about those purposes and plans of ours which he is pleased to accomplish.

Verse 11. Some spiritual gift. - The commentators who would interpret this of miraculous gifts, do not consider, 1. That the impartation of miraculous gifts does not appear to have so distinguished St. Paul's ministry, at any time, that he should be anxious to take a journey to Rome for this purpose. 2. That St. Paul, in no place of his epistles, attaches so much importance to these gifts, as to make it reasonable to suppose that the great object of his desire to visit Rome, was to communicate them to the church there. Generally he rather labours to repress that excessive admiration of them, into which the first Christians too frequently fell. 3. That, for any thing that appears to the contrary, other apostles and evangelists could have communicated extraordinary gifts; or indeed they might "fall," as we know they did, upon believers, without any human medium; but to St. Paul alone of all the

apostles, the great office was assigned of explaining the precise constitution of the Christian church, as it respects the liberty of the Gentiles from the law of Moses, and the cessation of the obligation of certain parts of that institution. His ministry was essential to a right understanding of some of these difficult and controverted points; but not at all to the impartation of the full measure of miraculous endowments. 4. The phrase some spiritual gift, if so interpreted, would intimate that some one gift in particular was necessary to the perfection of a primitive church. Of this we have no intimation; nor can it be proved but that churches might exist in those early times in a state of completeness and efficiency without having had imparted to any of their members any such gift at all; miraculous powers being confined, as to them, to the apostles or evangelists who first raised them up. We may therefore conclude more reasonably, that the spiritual gift, xapopa Vevμalikov, was not, in the proper sense, miraculous, but truly spiritual, as relating to the soul; and that it was to be imparted through his teaching them, according to that superior "knowledge which he had in the mystery of Christ;" and this view is supported by the intention he proposed, to the end that ye may be established, which is opposed to that wavering of mind which is produced, not by any doubt as to the divine authority of Christianity, which miracles might remove, but by erroneous or defective views of its doctrines, the remedy of which was more perfect instruction. This is further confirmed by verse 12, That I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me. The full knowledge of the important truths he wished them to understand, would produce an equal faith in them and in him. The knowledge being mutual, the faith would be mutual also, which would issue in their being comforted together. The reason then why St. Paul so earnestly

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* Or, in you.

wished to visit the Roman Christians was that he might make them sharers of that more perfect knowledge of various branches of evangelical truth with which he had been endued; impress upon all those motives to constancy and perseverance which such truths contained; and also that by his public ministry he might have FRUIT in Rome as among other Gentiles. That spiritual gift which he was desirous of imparting to them by personal teaching, seems, in consequence of the divine appointment hindering his purpose, to have been communicated through this important epistle; a writing equally adapted to the instruction of both the Jews and Gentiles, of which the Roman church was composed, and of standing, unaltered value and efficiency to all classes of men to this day.

Verses 14, 15. I am a debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians.-The Greeks usually called all other people barbarians; a word indeed not so harsh in its meaning with them as with us, yet nevertheless implying political and intellectual culture in a lower degree than they assumed to themselves. It is probable, however, that the Romans were, in St. Paul's age, included in the term Greeks, as having long become a refined and cultivated people; and a term implying the reproach

+ Or, in you.

of inferiority not being likely to be used in current language, such as St. Paul here employs, with reference to the lords of the Greeks themselves. The context, indeed, proves that St. Paul includes the Romans in it, as well as in the term wise that follows; for his argument is, that being a debtor to all men, he was ready to preach, not only in places distant from the seat of empire, and less cultivated and discerning, but at Rome also; to the Greeks, to those instructed in the Greek philosophy and arts, as were the Romans; and to the wise, for Rome was crowded with sophists and professors of philosophy, both Greeks and Romans; as well as to the unwise.

St. Paul calls himself a debtor with reference to his office. He, like all other ministers, acted under a commission to

'preach the gospel to every creature ; " and being especially raised up for the service of the Gentiles, he was under special obligation to fulfil his ministry among them universally, whatever might be their rank and nation. His charity to the souls included in so vast a city as that of Rome, and his sense of duty, made him ready, прobvμos, anxiously desirous, to preach the gospel to the Romans also.

Verse 16. For I am not ashamed of the

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gospel of Christ.—At Rome, of course, the gospel, like every new system of philosophy, would come under the notice both of the intelligent and inquiring who abounded in that city, and the scrutiny of a jealous government itself. The sophists were sceptics or infidels; they therefore would subject all the supernatural pretensions of the preachers of this new religion to a severe test. But even the sceptical and the infidels were most strenuous advocates for upholding the popular superstition, as an instrument for managing the minds of the lower classes and maintaining the peace of society; and were equally jealous with the most superstitious of any thing which could tend to alienate the minds of any considerable portion of men from the religion of their ancestors. Neither, therefore, from the sceptical nor the superstitious could Christianity expect any favour. Nevertheless, says St. Paul, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; he hesitated not to put it to the severest tests, and to expose it to the most piercing scrutiny, with entire confidence that he should not be confounded or made ashamed by the result. Persecuted it might be, but not disproved; and contemptuously slighted by some, but by others it would be received through the force of its evidence; and he knew that it would erect monuments of its own divinity in the moral changes produced in individuals, and ultimately in society. The ground of this confidence in the gospel, no doubt, embraced more particulars than are stated. St. Paul would naturally advert to the character of Christ, that summary of all high and commanding proofs in itself; to the evidence of miracles and prophecy; to its internal excellence; to the vast and varied range of its revealed truth; but he fixes upon ONE only, its moral efficacy,-and with that he confronts every system of human invention. Its character is power, a power

producing effects mercifully superhuman, and therefore the power of God, and this power of God directed to one grand end affectingly illustrative of the divine benevolence, the salvation of men; a term in which St. Paul always includes their deliverance from sin, in its POWER and its CONSEQUENCE; of course the remission of sins by pardon, and the deliverance of the heart and affections, the springs of action in man, from its influence and pollution; the consequent restoration of man to the divine favour and image, and to immortality and changeless blessedness. The gospel had power to effect this,-that was the ground of the apostle's confidence; and not only as to a few persons more favourably circumstanced than others to receive, to retain, and to improve moral impressions, but to every one that believeth, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek; in which words he refers to the actual proof of the fact from experience. moral changes had taken place in the Jew first, because the gospel had been first proposed to Jews and received by them; but not less was its efficacy marked among the Greeks who had been made "fellow heirs" with them, and partakers of the same benefit, without distinction or limitation. Wherever the medicine had been received, there the cure had infallibly followed.

These mighty

principles from which they flow, and bringing in as by a verdict "the whole world guilty before God."

The phrase, the righteousness of God, has had as many senses attached to it as men have differed in their views of justification. Hence it is taken for freedom from the punishment of sin; for probity, for benignity, for righteousness by faith, and finally, as by Wahl and others, for the mode of obtaining righteousness or justification which God has exhibited in the gospel, ratio divini favoris consequendi. The last is the true view of the apostle's meaning, as will appear from his general argument. Man is under a law which connects life with obedience, death with transgression. The innocent, when brought before the bar, claim justification in their own right; they have never sinned, and are not therefore liable to punishment; but if the guilty are justified, that is, treated as righteous persons through an act of forgiveness,-which will appear to be the sense in which St. Paul uses the term justification when applied to the guilty, they must be justified, or placed in this condition of righteous persons, through some special appointment of God. That appointment does not in the gospel rest upon an act of God's prerogative; but upon his having devised and accepted a SATISFACTION for sin, so that under a condition the remission of sin and the happy consequences of that act of grace, are mercifully offered to the acceptance of men in the gospel. For this reason, that authorized and attested method of justifying the ungodly, which is contained in this divine religion, is called the RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD. It stands opposed to "our own righteousness," that which fallen men vainly fancy they can themselves attain to by efforts of their own; and it is that to which God hath set his seal as the only rule or method of reconciliation to himself, so that the guilty may escape the merited and actually denounced condemnation of his law. It is necessary to hold this simple and clear view of the subject steadily before us, in order to escape those darkening and perplexing comments by which

unenlightened men on the one hand, and systematizing divines on the other, have often obscured so plain a subject.

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Revealed from faith to faith. — That great subject, the method of man's justification, is said to be revealed in the gospel, not that it was a new doctrine, for from the beginning, up to Abel, the truly penitent were justified by faith in the grand propitiation for sin appointed by God; but because it was fully uncovered, as the word signifies, brought from under the veil of the types of the law, and the religious superstitions and gross ignorance of heathenism, and placed in its full lustre and evidence before the whole world. From faith to faith, may be understood as an intensive expression, like τη ανομία εις την ανομίαν, Rom. vi. 19, “ to iniquity unto iniquity," that is, entire and absolute iniquity; or as implying progression from one degree of iniquity to the greatest. The sense under this view will be, as Locke and Seiler have it, "wholly by faith," or from one degree or measure of faith to another; intimating that the doctrine has a progressive evidence, calling into exercise a higher and a still higher faith, and imparting the fulness of its benefits accordingly. This is an important truth; for Christianity has a germinant evidence in all its parts, and in none so much as in that most glorious portion of it which indeed constitutes its very essence, God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them;" the mystery of which is continually opening to the faithful; but in the text EK TIσTEWS may be connected with the righteousness of God, a similar order of words frequently occurring. The meaning then will be, that the righteousness of God by or through faith, God's method of justifying men by the instrumentality of faith in Christ, is revealed Els mori, to faith, or in order to faith, so that, by this means, the grace designed for all upon their believing, may be by all attained. This sense is clear and satisfactory. Rosenmuller and Schleusner interpret es TOT, "to those who have faith," but erroneously; the end of the