There  is  undoubtedly  something  paradoxical
in  this,  and  it  is  the  point  at  which  St. Paul's
gospel,  from  the  beginning,  was  most  misunder-
stood and  most  assailed. On  the  one  hand,  when
Christ  died,  justice  was  done  to  the  law  of  God,
both  as  an  imperative  and  as  a  condemning  law,
as  it  had  never  been  done  before. The  will  of
God  had  been  honoured  by  a  life  of  perfect  obedi-
ence, and  the  awful  experience  of  death  in  which
God's  inexorable  judgment  on  sin  comes  home
to  the  conscience  had  been  borne  in  the  same
obedience  and  love  by  His  sinless  Son. On  the
other  hand,  when  this  death  evokes  the  faith  for
which  it  appeals,  the  righteous  requirement  of
the  law  is  fulfilled  in  the  believer ;  the  law  gets
its  due  in  his  life  also,  or,  as  the  apostle  puts  it,
it  is  established  by  faith. How  is  it,  then,  that
faith  involves  a  death  to  the  law?  It  is  through
the  assurance,  given  to  faith  at  the  cross,  that  so
far  as  doing  the  will  of  God  is  concerned,  a  new
and  living  way  has  been  found. It  is  not  the  law
in  its  old  legal  form — the  law  of  statutory  injunc-
tions and  prohibitions — which  is  to  generate
goodness  in  sinful  man  ;  it  is  the  law  glorified  in
the  atonement. The  whole  inspiration  of  the
Christian  life  lies  here,  and  it  is  an  inspiration,
not  a  statutory  requirement. Nothing  is  to  count


DYING  TO  THE  J.AW  191

in  the  life  of  a  Christian  which  does  not  come  with
perfect  freedom  from  this  source. This  explains
the  extraordinary  emphasis  which  St. Paul
everywhere  lays  on  liberty. Liberty  is  the  cor-
relative of  responsibility  ;  man  must  be  perfectly
free  that  the  whole  weight  of  his  responsibilities
may  come  upon  him. But  this  weight  of  respon-
sibility cannot  be  faced,  and  would  not  sanctify
even  if  it  could  be  faced,  /«  vacuo  \  it  can  be  faced
only  when  we  know  God  in  Christ  crucified  ;  and
it  does  sanctify,  when  the  constraint  of  the  atone-
ment, with  its  awful  homage  to  the  holiness  of
God,  descends  upon  the  heart. But  this  is  all
that  is  required,  for  this  is  too  great  to  be  com-
promised by  alliance  with  anything  else. 