EPISTLE TO THE ROJIaiMS. SJ 



but by the law." Having in the follownig wori?- msiiiaatcd, 

 or rather more than insinuated, the mefficacy of the Jewish 

 law, S : 3, " For what the law could Rot 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 ;" after a digression indeed, but that sort of a digres- 

 sion which he could never resist, a rapturous contemplation 

 of his Christian hope, and Vv^hich occupies the latter part of 

 this chapter ; we find him in the next, as if sensible that he 

 had said something which would give offence, returning to 

 his Jewish brethren in terms of the warmest aflection and 

 respect : " I say the truth in Christ Jesus, I lie not, my con- 

 science also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I 

 have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart, Foi 

 1 could wish that myself were accursed from Christ /o/- my 

 brethren, my kins.men according to the Jlesli : ivho are Ja- 

 raelites ; to 'whom pertainetli the adojption, and the glory, 

 and the covenants, and the givijig of the laiv, and the ser- 

 vice of God, and the loromises ; whose are the fatlicrs, and 

 of whom, as concerjiing thejlesh, Christ came." When, in 

 the thirty-first and thirty-second verses of this ninth chapter, 

 he represented to the Jews the error of even the best of theii 

 nation, by telling them that " Israel, which followed after 

 the law of righteousness, had not attained to the law ol 

 righteousness, . . . because they sought it not by faith, but 

 as it were by the works of the law ; for they stumbled at 

 that stumbling-stone," he takes care to annex to this decla- 

 ration these conciliating expressions : " Brethren, my heart's 

 desire and -prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be 

 saved. For I bear them record that they have a zeal oj 

 God, but not according to knowledge." Lastly, having, 

 chap. 10 : 20, 21, by the apphcation of a passage in Isaiah, 

 insinuated the most ungrateful of all propositions to a Jew- 

 ish ear, the rejection of the Jewish nation as God's peculiar 

 people ; he hastens, as it were, to quahfy the inteUigence oi 

 their fall by this interesting expostulation : " I say, ther* 



