The hope of Israel which Paul preached to the Gentiles was a hope for the world and for the nations, as well as for the individual soul. "The commonwealth [or _polity_] of Israel" and "the covenants of promise" guaranteed the establishment of the Messianic kingdom upon earth. This expectation took amongst the mass of the Jews a materialistic and even a revengeful shape; but in one form or other it belonged, and still belongs to every man of Israel. Those noble lines of Virgil in his fourth Eclogue[87]--like the words of Caiaphas, an unintended Christian prophecy--which predicted the return of justice and the spread of a golden age through the whole world under the rule of the coming heir of Caesar, had been signally belied by the imperial house in the century that had elapsed. Never were human prospects darker than when the apostle wrote as Nero's prisoner in Rome. It was an age of crime and horror. The political world and the system of pagan society seemed to be in the throes of dissolution. Only in "the commonwealth of Israel" was there a light of hope and a foundation for the future of mankind; and of this in its wisdom the world knew nothing.
The Gentiles were "alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,"--that is to say, treated as aliens and made such by their exclusion. By the very fact of Israel's election, the rest of mankind were shut out of the visible kingdom of God. They became mere _Gentiles_, or _nations_,--a herd of men bound together only by natural affinity, with no "covenant of promise," no religious constitution or destiny, no definite relationship to God, Israel being alone the acknowledged and organized "_people_ of Jehovah."
These distinctions were summed up in one word, expressing all the pride of the Jewish nature, when the Israelites styled themselves "the Circumcision." The rest of the world--Philistines or Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, or Barbarians, it mattered not--were "the Uncircumcision." How superficial this distinction was in point of fact, and how false the assumption of moral superiority it implied in the existing condition of Judaism, St Paul indicates by saying, "those who are _called_ Uncircumcision by that which is _called_ Circumcision, in flesh, wrought by human hands." In the second and third chapters of his epistle to the Romans he exposed the hollowness of Jewish sanctity, and brought his fellow-countrymen down to the level of those "sinners of the Gentiles" whom they so bitterly despised.