To preach the Gospel in Rome had long been the goal of Paul’s hopes.  He wished to do in the centre of power what he had done in Athens, the home of wisdom; and with superb confidence, not in himself, but in his message, to try conclusions with the strongest thing in the world.  He knew its power well, and was not appalled.  The danger was an attraction to his chivalrous spirit.  He believed in flying at the head when you are fighting with a serpent, and he knew that influence exerted in Rome would thrill through the Empire.  If we would understand the magnificent audacity of these words of my text we must try to listen to them with the ears of a Roman.  Here was a poor little insignificant Jew, like hundreds of his countrymen down in the Ghetto, one who had his head full of some fantastic nonsense about a young visionary whom the procurator of Syria had very wisely put an end to a while ago in order to quiet down the turbulent province; and he was going into Rome with the notion that his word would shake the throne of the Caesars.  What proud contempt would have curled their lips if they had been told that the travel-stained prisoner, trudging wearily up the Appian Way, had the mightiest thing in the world entrusted to his care!  Romans did not believe much in ideas.  Their notion of power was sharp swords and iron yokes on the necks of subject peoples.  But the history of Christianity, whatever else it has been, has been the history of the supremacy and the revolutionary force of ideas.  Thought is mightier than all visible forces.  Thought dissolves and reconstructs.  Empires and institutions melt before it like the carbon rods in an electric lamp; and the little hillock of Calvary is higher than the Palatine with its regal homes and the Capitoline with its temples:  ’I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation.’

Now, dear friends, I have ventured to take these great words for my text, though I know, better than any of you can tell me, how sure my treatment of them is to enfeeble rather than enforce them, because I, for my poor part, feel that there are few things which we, all of us, people and ministers, need more than to catch some of the infection of this courageous confidence, and to be fired with some spark of Paul’s enthusiasm for, and glorying in, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I ask you, then, to consider three things:  (1) what Paul thought was the Gospel? (2) what Paul thought the Gospel was? and (3) what he felt about the Gospel?

I. What Paul thought was the Gospel?

He has given to us in his own rapid way a summary statement, abbreviated to the very bone, and reduced to the barest elements, of what he meant by the Gospel.  What was the irreducible minimum?  The facts of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, as you will find written in the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians.  So, then, to begin with, the Gospel is not a statement of principles,