Romans 9:19

(B) Is Man responsible?

19. Thou wilt say then St Paul is still, as so often before, writing as if an opponent were at his side. How vividly this suggests that he had himselfexperienced the conflicts of thought which indeed every earnest mind more or less encounters! But conflicts do not always end in further doubts. Difficulties, often most distressing ones, must meet us in anytheory of religion that is not merely evolved from our own likings; and difficulties are not necessarily impossibilities. At one point or another we must be prepared to submitto fact and mystery.

yet Q. d., "why, aftersuch statements of His sovereignty, does He go on to treat us as free agents?" Here is the second head of objection. God's justice was the first; now it is man's accountability.

who hath resisted This is not the place to discuss the profound problem here suggested. It must be enough to point out (1) that St Paul makes no attempt to solve it. He rests upon the facts (a) that God declares Himself sovereign in His mercy; (b) that He treats man's will as a reality: and he bids us accept those facts, and trust, and act. (2) The contradiction to the hint that "no man hath resisted" lies, not in abstruse theory, but in our innermost consciousness. We know the fact of our will; we know the reality of moral differences; we know that we can "resist the Holy Ghost." On the other hand, the truth of God's foreknowledge is alone sufficient, on reflection, to assure us that every movement of will, as being foreseen, could not be otherwise than in fact it is. And this is exactly as true of the simplest acts and tenderest affections of common life, as of things eternal: in each emotion of pity or joy we move along the line of prescience, a line which thus may be regarded as, for us, irrevocably fixed beforehand. But meanwhile in these things we feel and act without a moment's misgiving (except artificial misgiving) about our freedom. Just so in matters of religion; but the special relations of sinfulman to God compel these plain and even stern statements of the truth of God's action in the matter, even in the midst of arguments and pleadings which all assume the reality of our will.