Lecture XVI.

EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS.

ROMANS 8: 1-4.-There is therefore no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.

AT how early a period the Jews became numerous at Rome we are not informed by history. The first notice we have of their existence in great numbers is in the year forty-eight before Christ. Within fifteen years from the capture of Jerusalem by Pompey, Cicero complains in a public oration for an officer who was accused of embezzling the money sent by the Jews of Asia Minor for the temple service, that the Jews had assembled about the forum in such numbers as to seem to overawe the court, and endanger the public peace. This was a full century, before the date of the Epistle of Paul to the Romans. In the meantime they increased in numbers and

respectability, notwithstanding the contempt that was poured upon them by the wits and poets of the city, and the cruel persecutions to which they were then exposed. It is curious to read the sentiments of this most enlightened and religious of the public men of Rome concerning the Jews and their religion, as it was in his consulship that the holy city fell under the dominion of that vast Republic. "Every state," says he, "has its own religion, we have ours. While Jerusalem was still safe, and the Jews enjoyed tranquillity, their religion and its rites were abhorrent to the splendor of this empire, the gravity of our name, and the institutions of our ancestors; now much more so, since they dared to set our power at defiance. How much the immortal gods care for them, is shown by the fact that they were conquered, carried away captive, and sold into slavery." Such were the sentiments of the most enlightened man of his age concerning the Jews. The singularity which brought odium upon them, seems to have been this, that they were the only people who had any deep and sincere reverence for their religion, the only people on whose daily life it had any power.

Pompey sent home multitudes of the Jews as slaves to Rome, and Josephus, a century later, tells us, that the consuls enlisted four thousand of them as soldiers at one time. As slaves, they were unprofitable, and gave their masters much trouble by their

invincible adherence to the usages and rites of their religion. They were, therefore, liberated in great numbers, and inhabited a part of the city by themselves. There they had their synagogues, and their worship on the sabbath days, to some an object of curiosity, to others of scorn. How the Gospel was first introduced among them, we are not told. That any of the Apostles had been there, is not probable. A church might have been established by mere immigration from those parts of the empire where there were churches already, for we read the names of more than twenty of Paul's acquaintances in the salutations at the close of this Epistle. He must have been known there by reputation, particularly as Priscilla and Aquila, with whom he lived at Corinth and Ephesus, afterwards returned to Rome, their former residence. It was natural that on rejoining their old friends and associates at the capital, they should spread the fame and the praises of the great Apostle to the Gentiles. Perhaps his friends, who were already there, gave him some intimation of the wants of that community. These could not be very different from those of other Christian churches, composed as they all were, out of Judea, of converts from the Jews and Gentiles. The transition from Judaism to Christianity was every where attended by the same difficulties. The very fact of proposing to them a new religion, was an offence to their pride, as it

implied the imperfection of the old. To the old they were attached by habit, by reverence, and by suffering. But as things then were, it operated rather to pervert and obscure, than enlighten and perfect their moral conceptions. It led them to place holiness and sanctification rather in outward observances than in inward purity. They felt themselves a holy people more because they were descended from Abraham, observed circumcision, and abstained from swine's flesh and other forbidden food, than because they were internally any better than their neighbors,were more pure, just, and humane. They looked upon the Pagan as polluted, more on account of his indiscriminate eating and his being a foreigner from the commonwealth of Israel, than his offences against the laws, which God hath written on all hearts. This was the righteousness which was by the law, that Paul so often found it necessary to combat and to discourage. This ceremonial and national righteousness, it was necessary for him to annihilate, not only to make them willing to receive the religion of Jesus, but to make them willing to receive it on equal terms with the Gentiles, and thus amalgamate with those whom they were accustomed to consider as polluted and vile. A new way to the favor of God had now been opened through belief in Jesus as the Messiah, and ambassador of God. The way to the Divine acceptance had before been through a

literal compliance with the laws of Moses, and the pardon of sin was provided for by the ceremonies of sacrifice. By the new religion, salvation was to be obtained by believing and obeying Christ, and God's readiness to pardon the penitent, had already been signified by the death of Jesus, which was the seal of his embassy of mercy to mankind. Sacrifice and offering were now no longer necessary, as all that had been meant by them had been signified once for all by the death of Christ; so that the Jew needed no longer look to the sacrifices that were going on in the temple as the evidence that the sins of which he had repented had been forgiven, but to the cross of Calvary, for Jesus had sealed with his blood the new covenant, a part of which, their own Scriptures assured them, was to be the forgiveness of sin.

To explain the connexion of the forgiveness of sin, with the death of Christ, it is necessary for us to go back to the principal prophecy of the new dispensation in the records of the old. In the thirtyfirst chapter of Jeremiah, there occurs this prediction: "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers, in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel. After those days,