proved. First, that God's method of choosing an elect body to be His people in the world is inscrutable, so that we cannot produce or determine His election by any calculation, or by any real or supposed merits, of ours; secondly, that though we cannot create our vocation, we can retain it by moral correspondence or faith, and by that only. But at present it is only the first point that is insisted upon—the absolute, inscrutable element in the divine choice. And that, we should notice, is a fact not merely of scriptural evidence but of common experience. Men are born to higher and lower positions of privilege and opportunity. They are born Jacobs or Esaus, in respect of moral, intellectual, religious, or physical endowment—with ten talents, or five, or two, or one; and God does not often give us so much as a glimpse of the reason why. All He does make clear to us is that the determination of human vocations, higher or lower, is in wiser hands than ours.

It is of course evident, as has already been said, that what St. Paul is speaking about is the election of men, and specially races or nations of men, to a position of spiritual privilege in this world. We know now, better than the Jews of the Old Covenant could know it, that behind all the apparent injustices and inequalities of this world lies the rectifying equity of God. St. Peter had come to believe that the divine mercy had rectified in the world beyond death the apparently rough and heavy handed judgement upon the rejected mass of mankind in the time of the Flood. That physical catastrophe at least was an instrument of mercy in disguise[23]. St. Paul believed the same about all God's rejections, as well as elections, in this world. They served one universal purpose: 'That he might have mercy upon all[24].' But all the same here and now in this world God does work by means of enormous inequalities. There are Jacobs whom He plainly loves, upon whom He showers all His richest blessings, and Esaus whom, to judge from present evidence, we should say He hates—whom He sets to live in hardest and most cramping surroundings. And no man can determine which lot he shall enjoy. That lies in the inscrutable selectiveness of God.

That there is no question at all about the eternal welfare of the individual Esau's soul—that the question is simply of the comparative status of Israel and Edom in this world—appears plainly in the passage of Malachi, which St. Paul quotes. And we must notice how unexpected an application St. Paul gives to this passage in a direction most unfamiliar to Jewish thought. For Edom was to the Jew the very type of all that was most hateful. He anticipated for the Edomites God's worst vengeance, as for Israel God's best blessings. But St. Paul forces him to think—Why should he assume that he will be better off than Edom? Edom was once physically on Israel's level, or his superior in claim, when their first fathers were but just born infants. But God chose one and not the other. He may exercise the like unscrutable selectiveness upon the seed of Israel to-day. And Edom did not remain in a merely secondary position. He sank to be a byword for all that is most hateful to God. Be warned, St. Paul would say, it may be that 'with change of name the tale is told of thee[25].'

[1] Exod. iv. 23; Hos. xi. 1.

[2] Exod. xvi. 10.

[3] Or 'pray' (marg.) literally 'I was praying.'

[4] Cf. Eph. v. 8-14.

[5] Cf. Col. iii. 9.

[6] Exod. xxxii. 32.

[7] 2 Esdr. viii. 15-16, x. 21-23. The latter passage is not spoken to God, but by one Jew to another.

[8] 2 Cor. iii. 8.

[9] See 1 Cor. x. 1-13.

[10] Heb. x. 29.

[11] 1 Thess. i. 10; Rom. viii. 3.

[12] Acts xx. 28.

[13] Phil. ii. 6-11.

[14] Without the article which makes it a proper name of the Father.

[15] R. V. margin². It does further violence to the Greek to translate as R. V. margin¹, 'He who is God over all is (be) blessed for ever.' I have nothing to add on the matter to S. and H. in loc., especially p. 236.

[16] Tit. ii. 13. This