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St. Paul is emphatically the apostle of the Reformation, of the vigorous, intellectual, Western races, and of the advancing civilisation of the world. Few understood him in his own day. The Church soon dropped a veil over his teaching, and developed the idea of sacramental grace, whose fundamental principles his very soul abhorred. For fifteen hundred years the dust of time settled on his doctrine; then Luther with one bold movement scattered it, and translated man once more out of a world of lifeless formalities into a world of vivid, spiritual life. The Churches, Jewish and Roman, had dead works; Christianity has lively faith. And as dead works breed nothing but corruption, while living faith is fruitful of all excellent graces, you may estimate how much they are severally worth to the world.

I. TO UNDERSTAND THE ARGUMENT WE MUST FIRST GRASP THE VITAL DISTINCTION BETWEEN WORKS AND FRUITS. Suppose you are crippled, and need constant attention. A servant for good pay may afford it; but there will be a certain hardness in it, and his work will be the basis of a claim. But if you have a wife or child, whose one desire is to be the minister of your needs, her joy in any alleviation she is able to afford rises into quite another region. The only return such service craves is that which it creates, increase of love. Now man's world is full of works; God's is full of fruits. How much of man's work is under hard compulsion — work for hire, which gold repays! But in God's great world we come into another region. The fields groaning with harvests, the trees bending with fruit, the birds caroling matins at heaven's gate, the insects humming eve's lullaby, do glad service to their Maker; and their reward is the mantle of beauty which His smile flings over all the worlds. And in this we have the key to the two theologies. Religion in Jewish and Roman schools is a working; in Paul's school, in Christ's, it is a life.

II. AND NOW LET US APPLY THIS TO THE MATTER IN HAND. The works of the Pharisaic school are sketched by an unerring hand (Matthew 23:23-27). Their works were abundant, their fruit nowhere. All within them that could bear fruit was dead. The evil in the Church began probably from a misreading of St. James. What St. James calls "faith and works," Paul calls faith — that is, faith which is alive, and can prove its vitality by its fruitfulness. But the Church soon began to lay the chief stress on the works. They are the part of the matter with which a priesthood can most profitably concern itself. Follow the track of Tetzel, and see what the Pharisaic doctrine of work inevitably grows to in time. And the fruit of it is two fold. To the earnest, life becomes a weary, hopeless drudgery — a "yoke" which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear; with which compare Luther's description of his agony of mind while a Roman monk; while with the sensual it develops a reckless profligacy which, by a little clever arrangement with the Chancery of heaven, can all be set right at last.

III. "WHEREFORE WE CONCLUDE THAT A MAN IS JUSTIFIED BY FAITH WITHOUT THE DEEDS OF THE LAW," and we step out at once into a new and heavenly world (Galatians 3:10-14, 21-29). Paul's position and Luther's is that a soul in anguish on account of transgression must sweep clean out all anxieties as to what it can do to please the Father, beyond the filial act of looking to Him through Him who came to reveal Him. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."

1. Well but, said the Judaising theologians to St. Paul, and the Romanising theologians to Luther, this is to do away with the very foundations of morality. But this depends wholly on what we mean by faith. If it be simply a mental consent to Scriptural statements then the Judaisers and the Romanists are right. But if we believe with Paul and Luther, that the act of faith is a vital act whereby the sinner becomes "dead to sin, but alive to God through Jesus Christ his Lord," then you have a guarantee for the fruits of faith, which may be regarded as the nobler works of the law, transfigured, glorified by life. It is a great mystery; so is the life of nature. It is the gift of God; so is the life of nature. As God has ordained the law by which the life of nature is quickened in the embryo, so has He ordained that in the spiritual sphere the "just by faith shall live."

2. And Paul's conception of the meaning of justification was very large and grand. Justified by faith the law has no claim against you, the devil no accusation. God beholds you as you are in Christ, whose image, forming within, shines through all the follies and weaknesses that defile your frail humanity, and obliterates them to heavenly sight. Your title to the name of son, and the son's inheritance, is absolute. You have not to win it. One thing alone vitiates it — unbelief. Let faith fail, the life fails. Fix the eye of faith again on Christ, cry to Him, "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief," and the life rises again in the springs. Good works will flow from you as summer fruits from the sunny earth, music from a harp full strung, or light from the fountain of day. And they are beautiful to Him, for He creates them; what glory is in them, the newborn lay as tribute at His feet.

(J. Baldwin Brown, B. A.)

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KJV: Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.

WEB: We maintain therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.