Excerpt from The People's Bible, Vol. 26: Discourses Upon Holy Scripture Throughout the introduction to this Epistle there is hardly any attempt at what we call definition. Great terms are used, and are left to make their own impression, which is the best way. The worst thing to do with the Epistle to the Romans is to try to explain it. Read it, commit it to the heart, let it fall into all the play of life's rough music, and its meanings will come, as birds come in springtime, and as buds grow in the night and surprise us in the morning, and as love reveals itself in new shape and colour and tone, even after we expected we had exhausted the precious mystery. The Church has ruined itself by definitions; because the Church now stops at the definition, and does not go right through to the vital feeling and the necessary and eternal reality. All men are not mentally equal, so why plague all men with the same definitions Define for yourselves: love Godin your own way. What have you to do'wlth my definitions, ufi with your definitions? We may have them, we may be edified by them but we must not harden them into dogmas with which to choke young faith, young hope, young love. All men have not been technically trained; therefore why force upon all men technical definitions All men are not equally interested in definitions: why drag down all human minds to the same level? Some men do not live in definition; they live in love, in hope, in emotion, in imaginati'on, in great gushes of sacred feeling, which do not die as foam dies on the wave, but which tend towards the stimulus of beneficence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.