Charles Gore

“ She is waiting for the final disclosure of the children of God in their true position; knowing that she too—as a new heaven and a new earth—will share that glorious future. At present her powers are continually frustrated; failure is everywhere; the law of corruption is upon her like a bondage. This curse she was subjected to, through no will of her own, by the simple fiat of her Creator—but not for ever: she was left to hope for deliverance from this bondage into a state of freedom—a share, that is, in the freedom which is to belong to the final glory of the children of God. ”

“ Is there no sadness or eager desire in nature independently—I will not say of spirit, but of the human spirit? It is sometimes very difficult to believe this. And may not the Christian belief about angels make the fancy legitimate, that every created thing has some accompanying intelligence—higher or lower—which consciously realizes its beauty and its joy, and also its pain and its hope? If this be so, then there is not merely deficiency and pain, but the consciousness of this deficiency and pain, a real groaning and a real expectation, in the great fabric of nature. ”

“ But the novelty in Christianity was the emphasis which it laid rather on the living than on the dying; it was its teaching as to the infusion into human life of a new and positive spiritual force, which was to overcome evil with good and swallow up death in victory. It was by their belief in a gift of the Spirit imparted to them, and by their resulting power to think and act freely according to God, that the Christians were distinguished from the rest of the world. ”

“ I am debtor both to Greeks and to Barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you also that are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is revealed a righteousness of God by faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous shall live by faith. ”

“ If God is for us, who is against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things? Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth; who is he that shall condemn? It is Christ Jesus that died, yea rather, that was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or anguish, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ”

“ And the absolved man, in thanking God for his forgiveness, finds himself, as it were, inevitably and without any fresh act, embarked on a new service. If he does not find this, he is not a man of faith at all. Faith is so deep a principle that, though it shows itself first as the mere acceptance of an undeserved boon from the divine bounty, it involves such hanging upon God as necessarily enlists the will to choose and serve Him, the intellect to know and worship Him with a growing perception as He is revealed in Jesus, and the affections to desire and love Him. ”

“ That light never was or is manifest on the surface of actual experience, and yet it is always latent—the touch of glory in common things, the radiance in even our dim world, 'the master light of all our seeing.' We have almost all of us got to learn the practical power of the Christian imagination, disciplined and spiritually enlightened, to enrich and ennoble actual life. The objects which our imagination should reflect are realities, but realities not yet developed. ”

“ Paul's mind into a deep theory of the function, not of 'the law' only, that is the Mosaic law, but of law altogether—of 'the letter' of any body of external enactments. Law, he found, could enlighten the conscience, but it could never reach deep enough to the springs of will to strengthen and purify them. God must become more intimate to man than any external law can make Him. A law of ordinances can only be a preparatory discipline, intended by the very falsity of the assumption on which it is based to teach men that they are not what they fancied themselves. ”

“ Each metaphor suggests a single idea—each complementary of the other, and corrective of its misuse—and both combine to tell us of the one inseparable love of the Father and the Son, uniting in a sacrificial act which is ascribed to both, to redeem us from the tyranny of sin and to set the pardoning love free to work upon us, without obscuring the true hatefulness of sin or the true character of God. ”

“ We see the trespass of the one generating universal death, and we are sure that the counter influence of Christ is as universally diffusive and incomparably more powerful. We see the one man's offence appealing to God for judgement and producing a condemned race; but we see, on the other hand, a multitude of sins appealing to the divine compassion to let loose the free gift which shall make for acquittal. If the consequence of the transgression was inevitable, and a reign of death followed, so much more certainly must the divine gift, abundant as it is, bring about the triumph of eternal life. ”

“ If therefore the uncircumcision keep the ordinances of the law, shall not his uncircumcision be reckoned for circumcision? and shall not the uncircumcision which is by nature, if it fulfil the law, judge thee, who with the letter and circumcision art a transgressor of the law? For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God. ”

“ We now live in the power of Spirit, since the Spirit of God and Christ—that is, Christ Himself—dwells in us. To have Him is the very meaning of being a Christian. Not to have Christ's Spirit, that is Himself, dwelling in us, is not to belong to Him. But if He does dwell in us, then, though the body must still pay the debt of death, because of sin to which it has belonged—nay though it is already as good as dead—yet the Spirit within us is a superior principle of life, because of the divine righteousness which it bestows upon us. ”

“ Paul's doctrines of free grace and justification by faith must be grossly and carelessly misconceived unless they are viewed upon a deep background of what we commonly call 'natural religion,' that is (practically) the religion that appeals straight off to the conscience of almost all honest and civilized men. It is 'natural religion' to believe that God will judge men with absolute power and insight and impartiality according to their conduct and their characters: that there can be no 'making believe,' no substitute for a good character, and no escaping with a bad one. ”

“ They can recall the days when they were free from the service of righteousness, as being slaves of sin, and they can remember what fruit they enjoyed as the result of experiences which they now blush to bring to mind. Of such experiences death, moral no less than physical, is the result. Now, set free from sin's slavery and made God's slaves, they enjoy the present fruit of consecration to God and the ultimate prospect of eternal life. So long as Sin was their master he would pay them their wages, and the wages which Sin pays is always death. ”

“ One disobedience made the whole race sinners: one obedience shall make the whole race righteous. The law came in parenthetically to the world of sin and death to let actual sin, like Adam's, have its full and fatal scope. But the greatness of the sin only magnifies still more the greatness of the remedy which divine goodness supplies, that the sovereignty of sin in a world of death might be swallowed up in the sovereignty of divine goodwill working through righteousness unto life eternal through Jesus Christ our Lord. ”

“ Then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil [1] .' But to acknowledge this—to abandon the claim so dear to the human heart, that we can be independent and manage our own life successfully: to repudiate all our false pride, and to come before God all of us on the same level, confessing our failure and our sin—this is to let man's necessity be God's opportunity, and to open the flood-gates of the divine righteousness. God is righteous in all the richest meaning of that word, and that righteousness of His He is now extending to us and giving us admittance into it. ”

“ Paul is here insisting, is a developing thing, a living and germinating principle, the basis of a life which grows—but always 'from faith to faith,' from one stage of faith to another—will appear clearly enough as we go on. But even here, in this chapter, it appears already that faith is something quite inconsistent with remaining as we are. Faith looks to a divine promise—a promise of astounding change—and believes that God is able to realize it in us. Such was Abraham's faith. ”

“ It is plain that he would have us pay no heed to that truly unnatural modern altruism which would disparage and depreciate this motive of a right self-love, and which would treat the desire for eternal happiness, and fear of eternal loss, as a base and unworthy element in religion. No doubt it is not the only motive. It is not even the characteristically Christian motive. But it is a natural and legitimate motive all the same. It is an inextinguishable consciousness in us that we were meant for blessedness. ”

“ They may be Jews or Gentiles, but the divine wrath, showing itself in outward suffering and inward anguish, will be upon them all equally. For God judges men impartially in the light of their opportunities. Those who have the advantage of a revealed law shall be judged and acquitted according as they have, not listened to it merely, but obeyed it. For a law known and not kept, so far from commending us to God, is but the instrument of our judgement. And those who have not this advantage are yet not without an inward light in the natural moral consciousness of mankind. ”

“ We Englishmen are possessed with the idea that there is nothing so alien to our characters as the temper of the Pharisees or the doctrine of the merit of good works. But if we can look at the matter below the surface, we can hardly fail to realize that the spirit which St. Paul so mightily repudiates lies in some respects very close to our natural instincts. The Englishman has a standard, of his class, his college, his profession, which it is his pride not to fall short of; but he is intensely alarmed at any claim upon his moral independence over and above this allowed standard ”

“ Paul, the change in human life which comes about through our conversion and new birth is a change in order. What was managed from below is now controlled from above. That is the point on which we need to examine ourselves. Where do we begin from? Are we in the position of men struggling to manage their own lives, and commend themselves according to some standard more or less right, which either their personal pride or their social circle or the divine law has set up? ”

“ We all feel deeply the imperfection of our prayers: how weak, how ignorant they are! And St. Paul consoles us with the belief in an intercession—perfect, all-knowing, divine—which supports and sustains and, we may say, includes ours. The 'intercession of the Spirit' in our behalf, carried on, it is implied, 'in the hearts' of the saints which only God searches, is mentioned nowhere in the New Testament but here. ”

“ But the awful burden laid upon Jesus on account of human sin, the awful sacrifice of His life which He readily offered, restores the sterner element to our thoughts about God, just at that crisis or opportunity in the divine dealings, when by God's declaration of free forgiveness we are made to feel His love. God does forgive us, but it costs Him much. And no one who under these conditions comes and takes at the hand of Jesus the gift of pardon can fail to receive with it the awful impression of the divine holiness and of the severity of the divine requirements. ”

“ We look around on the life of our city, with its selfish and disgusting lusts, with its drunkenness, with its enervating luxury, with its selfish wealth, with its reckless and immoral gambling, with its dishonest commerce, with its grasping avarice so neglectful of the lives of those whom it makes its instruments: we look round, I say, not on the whole life, but on the sinful life of our city, and we see what human nature is plainly meant not to be, either in its characteristics or in its miserable issues. ”