to the Romans, has Puritanism found what seemed to furnish it with the one thing needful, and to give it canons of truth absolute and final.  Now all writings, as has been already said, even the most precious writings and the most fruitful, must inevitably, from the very nature of things, be but contributions to human thought and human development, which extend wider than they do.  Indeed, St. Paul, in the very Epistle of which we are speaking, shows, when he asks, “Who hath known the mind of the Lord?"+—­who hath known, that is, the true and divine order of things in its entirety,—­that he himself acknowledges this fully.  And we have already pointed out in another Epistle of St. Paul a great and vital idea of the human spirit,—­the idea of the immortality of the soul,—­transcending and overlapping, so to speak, the expositor’s power to give it adequate definition and expression.  But quite distinct from the question [178] whether St. Paul’s expression, or any man’s expression, can be a perfect and final expression of truth, comes the question whether we rightly seize and understand his expression as it exists.  Now, perfectly to seize another man’s meaning, as it stood in his own mind, is not easy; especially when the man is separated from us by such differences of race, training, time, and circumstances as St. Paul.  But there are degrees of nearness in getting at a man’s meaning; and though we cannot arrive quite at what St. Paul had in his mind, yet we may come near it.  And who, that comes thus near it, must not feel how terms which St. Paul employs in trying to follow, with his analysis of such profound power and originality, some of the most delicate, intricate, obscure, and contradictory workings and states of the human spirit, are detached and employed by Puritanism, not in the connected and fluid way in which St. Paul employs them, and for which alone words are really meant, but in an isolated, fixed, mechanical way, as if they were talismans; and how all trace and sense of St. Paul’s true movement of ideas, and sustained masterly analysis, is thus lost?  Who, I say, that has watched Puritanism,—­the force which [179] so strongly Hebraises, which so takes St. Paul’s writings as something absolute and final, containing the one thing needful,—­handle such terms as grace, faith, election, righteousness, but must feel, not only that these terms have for the mind of Puritanism a sense false and misleading, but also that this sense is the most monstrous and grotesque caricature of the sense of St. Paul, and that his true meaning is by these worshippers of his words altogether lost?