are dead to sin, buried with him to rise with him again and to live a new life.  The old man (that which we were before Christ died for us) was crucified with Christ so that we might serve sin no longer.  Freed from the bondage of the law and concupiscence by grace we are saved through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ from damnation.  It is of this grace that we would hear thee speak.  Do we enter into faith through grace?  Mathias asked, and, having obtained a sign of assent from Paul, he asked if grace were other than a free gift from God, and he waited again for a sign of assent.  Paul nodded, and reminded him that God had said to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.  Then, Mathias said, the law of Moses is not abrogated, thou leanest upon it when it suiteth thy purpose to lean, and pushest it aside when it pleases thee to reprove us as laggards in tradition and among the beginnings of things.  It was lest some mood of injustice might be imputed to God in neglecting us that we were invited to become thy disciples, and to carry the joyful tidings into Italy and Spain.  But we no longer find those rudiments in the law.  We read it with the eyes of the mind, and we receive not from thy lips that God is like a man—­a parcel of moods, and obedient to them.  It is true that God justifies whom he glorifies, Paul answered, but for that he is not an unjust God.  If he did not spare his son, but delivered him to death that we might be saved, will he not give us all things?  Who shall accuse God’s elect?  He that chose them?  Who will condemn them?  Christ that will sit on the right hand of his Father, that intercedes for us?  Neither death nor life nor angels can separate me from the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, and if I came hither it is for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen that might be saved.  God has not broken his promise to his chosen people.  A man may be born an Israelite and not be one; we are true Israelites, not by birth but by election.  God calls whom he pleases, and without injustice.  But, brethren, Mathias would ask of me:  why does God yet find a fault though none may resist his will?  We dare not reason with God or ask him to explain his preferences.  Does the vase ask the potter:  why hast thou made me thus?  Had not the potter power over the clay to make from the same lump two vases, one for noble and the other for ignoble use.  Not in discourse of reason is the Kingdom of God, but in its own power to be and to grow, and that power is manifested in my gospel.

The approval of the brethren whitened Mathias’ cheek with anger, and he answered Paul that his denial of the law did not help him to rise to any higher conception of the deity than to compare him to a potter, and he warned Paul that to arrive at any idea of God we must forget potters, rejecting the idea of a maker setting out from a certain moment of time to shape things according to a pattern out of pre-existing matter.  And I would tell thee before thou startest for the end of the earth that the Jesus Christ which has obsessed thee is but the Logos, the principle that mediates between the supreme God and the world formed out of matter, which has no being of its own, for being is not in that mere potency of all things alike, which thou callest Power, but in Divine Reason.