BV 4832 . D37 1923 Darlow, Thomas Herbert, 185£ At home in the Bible \ \ * / Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/athomeinbibleOOdarl AT HOME IN THE BIBLE Works by T. H. DARLOW, M. A. AT HOME IN THE BIBLE HOLY GROUND VIA SACRA CHRISTMAS POEMS HODDER & STOUGHTON LTD. Publishers London, E.C.4 AT HOME IN THE BIBLE BY j T. H. DARLOW, M.A. HODDER AND STOUGHTON LTD. TORONTO LONDON NEW YORK J92 + M ade and Printed in Great Britain. Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ldt. London and Aylesbury. TO ALL MY FELLOW-SERVANTS IN THE BIBLE SOCIETY, AT HOME AND ABROAD— AND ABOVE. Foreword The following brief meditations are reprinted from The Bible in the World , the monthly organ of the Bible Society. That catholic organization brings together Christian men and women of many schools — both ecclesiastical and theological. The editor of its magazine has felt bound therefore to avoid questions about which his readers would disagree, and to con¬ fine himself to the elemental truths and experiences concerning which faithful folk can be of one mind and heart. In their collected form, these papers may provide one more illus¬ tration of the truth that the things which divide us are temporal, but the things which unite us are eternal. T. H. Darlow, For twenty -five years Literary Superintendent of the British and Foreign Bible Society. The Bible House, 146 Queen Victoria Street, London. January 1923. Contents PAGB 1. AT HOME IN THE BIBLE 13 2. THE SPARROW HATH FOUND AN HOUSE . 17 3. THE BOOK WHICH IS ALIVE ... 20 4. THE LORD SHEWED HIM ALL THE LAND . 24 5. THE WELL IS DEEP ..... 28 6. BE OF GOOD CHEER ..... 31 7. THE WORDS OF THE LORD JESUS . . 35 8. NOT AS THE WORLD GIVETH ... 38 9. THE SIGN OF THE CROSS . . . . 41 10. THE SALT OF THE EARTH .... 45 11. IN WHOSE HEART ARE THE HIGH WAYS TO ZION 49 12. LET PATIENCE HAVE HER PERFECT WORK . 53 13. BEHOLD, I MAKE ALL THINGS NEW . . 57 14. O TASTE AND SEE . 60 15. IF IT WERE NOT SO . 64 16. IN THE LIGHT OF THE WAR .... 68 17. THE FIELD IS THE WORLD .... 73 18. WE SHALL REAP, IF WE FAINT NOT . . 77 19. ONE PEARL OF GREAT PRICE 8l 20. LIFT UP YOUR HEARTS .... 85 21. WITH FEAR AND TREMBLING ... 89 9 10 Contents 22. THE CROSS MADE PLAIN IN THE HEART • PAGE 92 23- WE STOOP TO RISE . • • 97 24. THE EARNEST OF OUR INHERITANCE • • 101 25- WHEN GOD SPEAKS TWICE • • 105 26. THE HILLS AND THE VALLEYS . • • 109 27. IF THOU KNEWEST THE GIFT OF GOD • • 113 28. OUR HOPE FOR YEARS TO COME . • • 11 7 29. I AM THE BREAD OF LIFE • • 121 30. MEASURE FOR MEASURE • • 126 31- YE SHALL DRINK OF MY CUP • • 130 32. 0 COME LET US WORSHIP . • • 135 33. god’s FELLOW-WORKERS ♦ • i39 34- WHY ART THOU CAST DOWN ? • • i43 35- MORE FOR GOD • • 149 36. AFTER EASTER • • 154 37- THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLE. • • i57 38. BUT YE SEE ME • • 161 39- THE LORD SHALL REJOICE IN HIS WORKS • 165 40. LIFT UP YOUR EYES ON HIGH . • • 168 41. I AM THE WAY • • 172 42. I AM THE TRUTH • • 177 43- I AM THE LIFE • • 181 44. THE FAITH OF THE SAINTS • • 184 45- 0 GOD, THOU ART MY GOD • • 188 46. THY WILL BE DONE • • i93 47- THEY SAW GOD AND DID EAT AND DRINK. 198 48. THE HEART AND THE TREASURE • • 202 Contents n 49- THEIR VOICE CANNOT BE HEARD 50. THE CLOUD AND THE SEA .... 51. FRET NOT THYSELF IN ANY WISE 52. THE DIMENSIONS OF THE CROSS 53. AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD 54. THOU GOD SEEST ME .... 55. THE GREAT WHITE THRONE 56. LAID UP IN THE ARK .... 57. GOD’S ARITHMETIC ..... 58. HE CALLETH HIS OWN SHEEP BY NAME 59. I WILL BE TO THEM A GOD 60. FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT .... 61. LET NO MAN TAKE THY CROWN 62. FORSAKE NOT THE WORK OF THINE OWN HANDS 63. WAR IN HEAVEN . 64. THE REAL PRESENCE . . . . 65. WHEN I AM WEAK, THEN AM I STRONG . 66. LOVEST THOU ME ? . 67. LISTENING FOR THE LORD . . . . 68. FOR THIS CAUSE WE FAINT NOT 69. THE GIFT OF THE MORNING STAR 70. OUR LORD’S LEGACY . 71. A GRAIN OF WHEAT . 72. NOW IS OUR SALVATION NEARER 73- HE LOVED THEM UNTO THE END 74. THE BIBLE IN HEAVEN . I NDEX . PAGE 206 211 2l6 220 224 228 233 237 242 247 251 257 26l 265 268 273 277 280 284 289 294 298 302 307 312 317 321 AT HOME IN THE BIBLE Heine pronounced the Bible to be the homeliest of books. At least we can say with confidence that in no other book is it possible for us to become so profoundly and entirely at home. Such a result, however, implies in the first place patient reading and careful study. For example, to be at home in Shakespeare means, at any rate, that you know the plots of the plays, you have made friends with the char¬ acters, you can recognize their words in a quotation. Now in the same kind of way we ought to grow versed in the varied content of Scripture until its patriarchs and saints and prophets seem to us old familiar faces, and we recognize by instinct the habit of an apostle’s thought and the turn of an evangelist’s phrase. To have our minds and memories saturated with the words of Holy Writ can beget trans¬ forming results even in our common speech. Concerning a preacher in the twelfth century, J. M. Neale declared that “ he seems to quote the Bible, because it is his own natural language, because his thoughts have been so accustomed to flow in Scripture channels that they will run in no other ; and it is sometimes difficult to tell, 13 1 H At Home in the Bible nor would he perhaps always have knownhimself, whether he was employing his own words or those of the inspired writings.' ' In modern days the two greatest speakers of the English tongue have been beyond question Abraham Lincoln and John Bright, and with both men their style was born out of life-long familiarity with the Bible. The sacred language of Scrip¬ ture " doth breed perpetual benediction," when it rises in sacred moments to the lips of those who love it. Sometimes in a village prayer¬ meeting we have marvelled at unlettered plough¬ men and shepherds who spoke with God in the awful and glorious words of revelation — words which they had learned to use freely and naturally as the true vernacular of the soul. For the Bible contains both the grammar and the vocabulary of the universal Christian language. It is wonderful how believers of unlike races, in lands and ages far removed, can meet and communicate and hold converse together in this holy mother-tongue. Men as wide apart as Augustine and Bunyan and Gordon are intelligible to one another, for they all use the lingua franca of the saints. To be nurtured in God's Book is to understand the common speech of God's whole family in heaven and on earth. And the fact that each lover of the Bible becomes at home in its spiritual dialect forms one among many latent tokens that the real reunion of Christendom lies nearer than we sometimes dream.- At Home in the Bible IS We have a proverb which warns us that familiarity will breed contempt ; but this only happens when we grow familiar with things which are in their essence trivial or vulgar or base. Familiarity with Nature herself breeds no contempt, but strange veneration and affec¬ tion. Each of us can probably recall certain places on earth which for him seem haunted with peculiar tenderness. Among the meadows round his ancestral homestead, a grey-haired farmer will look fondly at the grassy footpaths which he has trodden ever since he was a child. And for an old disciple the same deep emotions cluster round the chapters of Holy Writ. In those green pastures he has been at home all his life through. He can never miss his track along the immemorial pathway of promise and con¬ solation. This passage was the first he learned to spell at his mother’s knee. This was the psalm they sang over his father’s grave. This single text shone out like a star through the midnight of doubt and dismay, and sealed upon his spirit the peace which passeth all under¬ standing. So it comes about that to a Christian the pages of his pocket Bible are crimsoned as with a tincture of all that has been most deep-felt and impassioned in the experience of the past. The faded little volume, with its well- worn cover, is a reliquary which enshrines his dearest and holiest secrets, a register which records how God has dealt with his soul. Thus Christians discover that, alike in a human 1 6 At Home in the Bible and in a Divine sense, the Bible is the book of life. Yet to say no more than this would be to fall far short of the truth. Can you ever feel entirely at home, except in the company of the persons whom you love best ? It is the supreme beati¬ tude of Scripture that it introduces us into the very presence and company of the Crucified. To believing hearts the whole Book grows in¬ stinct and alive with Him, Whom having not seen they love. The wind bloweth where it listeth, but each breeze among the branches of this tree of life whispers the Name that is above every name. Each prophet fastens eager eyes upon His advent, and each apostle bears witness to His glory, and each martyr rejoices to suffer for His sake. Those who know the Bible best learn that it has no speech nor language where His voice is not heard. Through its chapters Cor ad cor loquitur , the Redeemer holds converse with His redeemed. Thus it comes to pass that for soldiers in foreign trenches, for stricken men on lonely beds of pain, for prisoners and exiles who are homeless in a strange land, this Book has mysterious power to re-create home in the heart. Those who read it by the waters of Babylon discover that they are come unto Mount Zion unawares. For to those who use it aright the Bible proves noth¬ ing less than a sacrament of Jesus Christ Him¬ self. There they behold His sacred Face in almost every page. And so we cease to wonder ' The Sparrow Hath Found an House 17 that the truest Christians should speak with such reverence and affection of their Book ; because in that Book, as in no other place or way, they find themselves at home — at home with the Lord. FHE SPARROW HAFH FOUND AN HOUSE There are some experiences which never grow stale by repetition. They recur con¬ tinually, without losing their fresh wonder and zest. Year after year the earth grows young again when, by the miracle of springtime, once more the heavenly Power makes all things new. Nature, having been planted in the likeness of death, is found again in the likeness of resurrec¬ tion. This is the Lord's doing ; and each year it is more marvellous in our eyes. Surely the Rabbis had a true instinct when they decided that the world must have been created in spring. At such a season, “ when sparrows build and the leaves break forth," it is not difficult to obey Christ's commandment, and to consider the birds of the air. Indeed, few of His comfortable sayings are more full of comfort than the lesson which He bade us learn from the sparrows. In His day these little birds were just as common and just as cheap as they are in England now. In the market of modern Jerusalem fowlers still offer for sale strings of larks and sparrows, which are used as food by the poor. " Are not 2 i8 The Sparrow Hath Found an House two sparrows sold for a farthing ? and not one of them shall fall to the ground without your Father/' No preacher has ventured to affirm the doctrine of a special Providence so absolutely as Jesus Christ. “ The Lord upholdeth all that fall/' sang the Psalmist — yea, even those tiny, twittering birds which men consider hardly worth stooping to pick up. The Divine thought is so great that nothing seems small in His sight. The Father's heart is so wide that it takes the humblest of His creatures in. The vast majority of men and women resemble sparrows in this, that they are intensely common¬ place. The Persian poet likened God to a chess-player, who moves His human pieces across this chequer-board of nights and days. But in actual life the kings and queens and bishops are few and far apart, while the pawns make up a huge, indistinguishable army. Most people seem marked out by nothing except their extreme mediocrity. They are painfully alike. The average man may be respectable ; he is certainly not romantic. He seems dull to nearly every one, except of course to himself. We may be certain that many of our acquaintances con¬ sider us quite as uninteresting as we consider them — and on equally good grounds. “ Such a very ordinary person ! " Yes, most men are very ordinary. Even their vices are commonplace. Cheap meanness and stupid sloth and vulgar passion and fustian selfishness — these are the sins which drag average people down to perdition. The Sparrow Hath Found an House 19 The Gospel reveals the immeasurable value which the meanest, dullest human creature possesses in the eyes of Almighty God. We call such a person “ uninteresting/' God has an intense and tireless interest in every single soul which He made originally in His own like¬ ness, and endowed with the awful gift of choice, and kindled with a spark of immortality. God watches over that soul with personal solicitude, as though the rest of His universe were not the same to Him as that one poor, commonplace human unit. God has set His love upon that solitary soul. He covets its affection, as if in some way it could complete His own beatitude. To Him it has a mysterious preciousness, of which redemption is the measure and the pledge. When we are most tempted to lose heart because of our own insignificance and helpless¬ ness, the Gospel bids us be of good cheer as we remember the sparrows. The loneliest, feeblest, forlornest man can find refuge and rest in this revelation of the personal, unspeakable, inex¬ plicable love of God. Though he knows himself to be contemptible and insignificant and guilty — a creature of no account — the God who knows him far better than he knows himself sees some¬ thing in him worth loving. God prizes him unspeakably. He gives him a place and portion in His eternal love. The sparrow hath found an house ; and here the shelterless soul can dwell safely, in peace that passeth all understanding. Thus the Bible appeals to the most common- 20 The Sparrow Hath Found an House place persons, and speaks to them in the home¬ liest way. And so faithful folk who are very simple and dull and unlettered nevertheless find themselves at home in the Book of God. The poor of this world obtain the franchise of Scripture, and hold the keys of its treasury. It is strange and beautiful to note how some humble believer, quite untaught in men's wisdom, can become domesticated in God's household and initiated into the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. The sacred and glorious words of Scripture pass naturally into his prayers. When he speaks face to face with the Father in secret, he uses the language of the apostles and prophets. With happy confidence, with holy familiarity, such an one enters the sanctuary of Scripture, and stands in the presence-chamber of the great King — “ no more a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home." THE BOOK WHICH IS ALIVE In a speech which he once delivered at the Royal Academy Banquet, Mr. Rudyard Kipling de¬ lighted his distinguished audience by a parable concerning the origin of literature. “ There is an ancient legend which tells us that when a man first achieved a most notable deed, he wished to explain to his tribe what he had done. As soon as he began to speak, however, he was smitten with dumbness, he lacked words, and sat down. Bhe Book which is Alive 21 Then there arose — according to the story — a masterless man, one who had taken no part in the action of his fellow, who had no special virtues, but was afflicted with the magic of the necessary words. He saw, he told, he described the merits of the notable deed in such a fashion, we are assured, that the words became alive and walked up and down in the hearts of all his hearers . Thereupon, the tribe seeing that the words were certainly alive, and fearing lest the man with the words would hand down untrue tales about them to their children, they took and killed him. But later they saw that the magic was in the words, not in the man.” We need not go on with the legend. To Christians it suggests an irresistible application. There is one Book, above all others in the world, of which we may say that its words become alive andwalk up and down in the hearts of its hearers. Long ago a wise king set forth this strange, un¬ earthly effect in phrases which are always coming true : “ When thou goest, it shall lead thee ; when thou sleepest, it shall keep thee ; and when thou awakest, it shall talk with thee.” We do not account for such a result, when we ascribe it to " the magic of the necessary words.” The spiritual charm and potency of Scripture refuse to be explained as literature. Christians confess that holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. Often these prophets and apostles were persecuted^and killed. But their words are deathless : and that most 9 22 The Book which is Alive notable deed, whose merits they describe, is nothing less than the redeeming work of the love of God. We recognize that a book is alive when it touches our modern needs and hopes and problems, when it appeals to the people of to-day. Yet vitality does not mean novelty. Discussing the art and influence of Ibsen, The Times declared that the Norwegian dramatist will have a deeper meaning for each generation — • a meaning which the labours of modern students have done something to bring to light, but which future ages will certainly grasp more and more fully — a meaning which no changes in society or belief can put out of date. In a far profounder sense we claim that no changes in society or belief can put the Bible out of date. It is just as modern to-day, and just as living, as it was a thousand years ago, and as it will be a thousand years hence. Even though a whole generation of mankind should fall asleep to its eternal message, yet we could still say confidently : “ When thou awakest, it shall talk with thee.” The converse which the Bible holds with men is not only vital but personal. Amid all the countless complexities of human nature and human life, the Spirit there speaks to each in¬ dividual — the aged saint, the despairing penitent, the happy child. It answers to every mood of the inward man, and touches humanity at all points. It understands my condition, and sym- ‘ The Book which is Alive 23 pathizes with my doubts and troubles and joys. “This Book has been through all my experience; somehow or other it talks with me as if it were a fellow-pilgrim/ * No other literature in the world is half so intimate as the awful revelation of God. Again, the Bible talks to us in the most practical fashion. It speaks in simple words, which come home to plain people — as though God laid aside high, celestial speech, so that He might condescend to men of low estate and communicate with us in the earth-born patois of our native land. His Gospel comes not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demon¬ stration of the Spirit and in power. And the mighty sayings of the Scripture still have power to become alive and walk about in the hearts of its readers and hearers. Of no book except the Bible do Mr. Kipling's phrases come completely true. But bare words from the Bible can still lead nations into or out of captivity, can open to us the doors of other worlds, can stir us so intolerably that we can scarcely abide to look at our own souls. As a great modern preacher puts it : “ Why, the Book has wrestled with me ; the Book has smitten me ; the Book has comforted me ; the Book has smiled on me ; the Book has frowned on me ; the Book has clasped my hand ; the Book has warmed my heart. The Book weeps with me and sings with me ; it whispers to me and it preaches to me ; it maps my way and holds up my goings. 24 1 1 he Lord Shewed Him all the Land It is a live Book ; from its first chapter to its last word it is full of a strange, mystic vitality.'' THE LORD SHEWED HIM ALL LHE LAND No explorer has identified the exact peak which Moses climbed that he might gaze over all the Land of Promise before he died. It maybe said, indeed, that the whole range of the hills of Moab forms one vast Pisgah, from which your sight crosses the deep cleft of the Jordan valley at your feet and explores the prospect of Canaan that spreads out beyond. There are some mountain- top experiences which never fade from a man's memory — when, for example, he stands on an Alpine summit which overlooks the watershed of Europe, and marks how on this side the streams of melting snow make their way northward to join the Rhine, while on that side they drain down into the Danube and flow eastward to mix with the Black Sea. To-day, indeed, we have no need to climb a mountain : we can get glimpses of what a whole country looks like by means of the photographs which are taken from aero¬ planes. They help us, for the first time, to conceive for ourselves “ that variegated mosaic of the world's surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference between the lands of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the swallow see afar off, as they lean upon 1 The Lord Shewed Him all the Land 25 the sirocco wind.” Now these things are an allegory — to remind us how often we fail and fall short, by reason of our contracted spiritual vision. So many Christians exist with hardly any proper horizon. Their sympathies are shut in by the walls of their family tent, their outlook is bounded by the limits of their ecclesi¬ astical camp. They never gain a Pisgah sight of Palestine, they cannot measure the spacious inheritance of the Israel of God. This principle holds good in regard to reading the Bible. There are not a few students of God's Book who keep their eyes so close to its pages that they fail to grasp the Divine purport of the whole. They are like students of painting who judge some great picture by poring over a few selected square inches of the canvas. These microscopic readers pore over the jots and tittles of Scripture until they lose their sense of its perspective and proportion. They concentrate on this corner or that comer, but they never see all the land. Textual criticism has its own value. For the sake of minute accuracy our English revisers adopted about twenty thousand changes in the text of the Greek Testament. Yet the bulk of these alterations were quite trivial, and the whole of them, taken together, made no perceptible difference to the total mes¬ sage of the Evangelists and the Apostles. With¬ out being critics, many Christians miss their way in the Bible, because they pay attention to so little beyond their favourite passages. But 2 6 The Lord Shewed Him all the Land we cannot possibly grasp the power of an Epistle or a Gospel by picking out those verses which appeal to us, regardless of the setting in which they occur and from which they must not be torn away. Bishop Westcott was a meticulous commentator on each word and syllable of the New Testament. Yet before he began a course of lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews — which lasted for a year and then was left unfinished — he urged his students to start by reading the whole Epistle straight through for themselves three or four times over, so that they might grasp the main drift of its argument and trace the thread which runs through its successive para¬ graphs. Many devout readers of the Bible lose enormously because they hardly ever sit down and quietly read one of its books straight through. We cannot enter into the school of the Prophets or the Apostles unless we let their mess¬ age tell upon our minds with full, unbroken force. The same truth applies to Scripture as a whole. John Stuart Mill referred with a touch of sarcasm to those people who fancy that the Bible is all one book. It is a great mistake to do so ; but, as a profounder teacher than Mill has confessed, it is perhaps a still greater mistake to think that the Bible is not one book, or that it has no unity. “ What fascinates me in the Bible is not a passage here and there, not some¬ thing which only a scholar or an antiquarian can detect in it, but the Bible as a whole/' One in¬ creasing revelation runs- through all its long 27 The Lord Shewed Him all the Land centuries of record. The Gospel of God's right¬ eousness and redemption, which was spoken at sundry times and in divers manners, at last grows explicit and articulate in the Person of His Son. But the end of the Bible looks backward to its beginning. And we can never appropriate the fullness of our heritage in Holy Scripture unless the Lord shows us all the land. We might go on to show how this principle applies also to the study of Christian doctrine and the history of Christian society. In both these fields we suffer continually on account of our narrow, parochial, provincial outlook. We fall into the snare of the specialist who con¬ centrates on details so that he loses sight of the total reality. When an American talks about “ God’s country,” he commonly means his own particular bit of the world, the place where he was bred and born. And to any good man that place ought to appear holy ground : but it is only one tiny corner of God’s country. A wonderful thing happened at the Lambeth Conference when the assembled bishops were carried away in spirit to the top of a high moun¬ tain, where they had a vision of the Great Church which embraces all smaller Churches in its bosom. Reunion will become possible when the Lord shows us all the land. Moreover, in our poor human estimate of God’s kingdom on earth and the effect of the Gospel among men, we are apt to forget that the Gospel treats this present life as after all a mere fragment of the life of the 28 The Well is Deef world to come. Things would seem far other¬ wise, could we but climb where Moses stood and view the landscape of immortality. THE WELL IS DEEP When we first begin to read the Bible, we are moving about in worlds not realized. And we fared in the same fashion when we had to read the old Greek and Latin authors, as boys at school. We could not possibly perceive how much the classics contained. It is only in after years, when a lad has grown older and gained some experience and learned what life means and felt for himself what Virgil calls “ the sense of tears in mortal things ” — it is only then that lines and pages learned by rote come back to him and pierce him with their sad reality. They speak the universal ex¬ perience of mankind with a voice like the voice of Nature herself ; they reveal the secret of that undying charm which modern literature can never rival. And just as experience of life and human nature unfolds the meaning of the great classic writers, so our moral and spiritual experience opens up to us the meaning and power of Scripture. When we read the Bible at first, it seems only an ancient book — picturesque, it may be, and sublime, but without much vital application. Perhaps, like Narcissus, we gaze at our own faces reflected on the surface of the ‘ The Well is Deep 29 water. But when we have lived longer and suffered awhile and undergone the temptations and perplexities and bereavements of which the Bible speaks, when we have been under the cloud and passed through the sea, then these very trials teach us to discern in Scripture depths which we never saw before. In one sense, indeed, the Bible is the simplest of books, because it deals with elemental things like birth and death and hunger and labour and love and pain and parting, which go on in every village every day. Such things seem common¬ place, but they are the stuff out of which human life is fashioned ; and the aged come back to brood over them and to feel that in these things lie the real problems after all. But the Bible is most profound, because it deals with the deep original wound in human nature. It goes down below the roots of man's misery and degradation and remorse. It reveals the abysses of mercy and judgment in which the foundations of man's redemption are laid. “ Deep calleth unto deep " in the Book of God. Its friends are exultations and agonies, and those impassioned hours which interpret to us the passion of the Gospel. The sciolists who declare that the well is shallow are refuted by the common testimony of the men who have drawn deepest from that unfathomable, inexhaustible fountain. No one else can claim to be a true expert in Holy Scrip¬ ture. If the saints shall judge the world, then surely it is the saints, and not the critics, who 3° The Well is Deep shall judge the Bible. And this Book is com¬ passed about with a great cloud of witnesses who cry with Augustine, Mira profunditas, mi Deus, mira profunditas . Some one has said that everywhere in the Bible, if we dig deep enough, we find “ Do right ” at the bottom. Yet while this is true, it is far from being the total truth. For if we dig deeper still, we find each exhortation to right conduct based on the rock of the righteousness of God. While St. Paul lays down in detail the plain practical duties of daily life, he constantly grounds these duties on supernatural facts and enforces them by transcendent motives. For instance, in the Epistle to the Romans, when he has ended his mighty argument concerning the sovereign grace of God and uttered a doxology at its climax, the Apostle begins to draw the cords of Divine love closer round the conscience of the individual man.