3. So, then, it is as true as ever that; "apart from the law, the law of nature, a righteousness of God hath been manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets." And we would tell those readers who shrink from admitting the double meaning of "the law," that if we are to understand the same law to be referred to in both clauses, "But now apart from the law a righteousness of God hath been manifested," and "Being witnessed by the law and the prophets," we must conclude that if the righteousness hath been manifested apart from the Law, it is not witnessed by the Law; and if it is witnessed by the Law, it hath not been manifested apart from the Law. The truth is that the law of nature by no means witnesses to the righteousness of God manifested by Jesus Christ, for it is inferior to that righteousness; but the Law of Moses, not the letter, but the spirit, does witness, as also the Prophets in accordance with the spirit of the law, and as does the spiritual word in them. The reader of the Divine Scripture must therefore carefully observe that the Scriptures do not invariably use the same words to denote the same things; and they make the change sometimes on account of the equivocal sense of a word, sometimes for the sake of the figurative meaning, and sometimes because the context requires a different nuance in some places from that which the word has in others. If we are well on our guard in all this we escape many blunders and false interpretations. We ought, then, to know that the word "see" does not always denote the same thing, sometimes being applied to bodily sight, sometimes to our understanding. |51 Speaking generally, we ought to be aware that inasmuch as the purpose of the Spirit in the Prophets, and the Word in the Apostles of Christ, is to conceal and not plainly disclose the thoughts of the Truth, confusion arises again and again through the mere wording, and no close sequence of thought is preserved; the object being that even the unworthy may not to the judgment of their own soul discover the things which are thus for their good concealed from them. And this is often the reason why Scripture, as a whole, appears to lack orderly arrangement and consecutiveness, particularly, as we said before, the prophetic and apostolic writings; and in the apostolic writings, the Epistle to the Romans, wherein the functions of the Law are set forth in different terms, and applied to different circumstances. The result is that Paul in the composition of the epistle does not seem to be true to his aim.