its first eight chapters, what is the Apostle talking about when he
in them fulfils his purpose and preaches 'the Gospel' to them that
are at Rome also? Here is, in the briefest possible words, his
summary--the universality of sin, the awful burden of guilt, the
tremendous outlook of penalty, the impossibility of man rescuing
himself or living righteously, the Incarnation, and Life, and Death
of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, the hand of
faith grasping the offered blessing, the indwelling in believing
souls of the Divine Spirit, and the consequent admission of man into
a life of sonship, power, peace, victory, glory, the child's place in
the love of the Father from which nothing can separate. These are the
teachings which make the staple of this Epistle. These are the
explanations of the weighty phrases of my text. These are at least
the essential elements of the Gospel according to Paul.

But he was not alone in this construction of his message. We hear a
great deal to-day about Pauline Christianity, with the implication,
and sometimes with the assertion, that he was the inventor of what,
for the sake of using a brief and easily intelligible term, I may
call Evangelical Christianity. Now, it is a very illuminating thought
for the reading of the New Testament that there are the three sets of
teaching, roughly, the Pauline, Petrine, and Johannine, and you
cannot find the distinctions between these three in any difference as
to the fundamental contents of the Gospel; for if Paul rings out,
'God commendeth His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners
Christ died for us,' Peter declares, 'Who His own self bare our sins
in His own body on the tree,' and John, from his island solitude,
sends across the waters the hymn of praise, 'Unto Him that loved us
and washed us from our sins in His own blood.' And so the proud
declaration of the Apostle, which he dared not have ventured upon in