Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1871 edition. Excerpt: ... election. Bom. Ix.--xi. St. Paul now approaches a phase of his argument which he instinctively knew would cut the feelings of his countrymen to the quick. Hitherto he has been establishing the right of other nations to only equal privileges with the Jews. He is now about to unfold the designs of Providence in a light which will exhibit the Gentiles as not merely admitted to equal terms of favour, but as at least partially supplanting the Jews in that office and mission which had been the object of their original call, their conscious possession of which was the bond of national cohesion. They had been set apart as the depositaries of the knowledge and worship of the true God. That the other nations should participate in the secondary blessings of this knowledge equally with the nation of priests who "were its chosen celebrants, was an offence; but that the other nations should be promoted to a share in the priesthood itself would be to remove the very grounds of their distinctive national existence. What, then, would it be to declare that the Jews, as a people, had failed to discern the line of duty which a new dispensation had pointed out to them, and that the Gentiles must now succeed to their place as the missionaries of truth? The Apostle's task was rendered still more difficult by the fact that he, a Jew, a member of the degraded nation, appeared himself in the front rank of the intruders by whom his countrymen were to be ejected from the post they had so long and so proudly held. He assures them that the conflict between his Jewish sympathies and his personal sense of the peculiar office to which he had been called in the Christian Church was a source of the deepest pain and sorrow to him, and that he would gladly sacrifice his own...
