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The Fundamentals. tion, or word, or friend, at some bar of judgment, as for ex ample the bar of public opinion, or of common conscience. I t is not to improve, but to vindicate. Take a ready illustration to the same effect from Scrip ture, and from a passage not of doctrine, but of public Israel ite law: “If there be a controversy between men, and they come unto judgment, that the judges may judge them, then they shall justify the righteous and condemn the wicked” (Deut. 25:1). Here it is obvious that the question is not one of moral improvement. The judges are not to make the righteous man better. They are to vindicate his position as satisfactory to the law. Non-theological passages, it may be observed, and generally non-theological connections, are of the greatest use in determin ing the true, native meaning of theological terms. For with rare exceptions, which are for the most part matters of open history, as in the case of the Homousion, theological terms are terms of common thought, adapted to a special use, but in themselves unchanged. That is, they were thus used at first, in the simplicity of original truth. Later ages may have de flected that simplicity. It was so as a fact with our word Justification, as we shall see immediately. But at first the word meant in religion precisely what it meant out of it. It meant the winning, or the consequent announcement, of a fa vorable verdict. Not the word, but the application was al tered when salvation was in question. It was indeed a new and glorious application. The verdict in question was the ver dict not of a Hebrew court, nor of public opinion, but of the eternal Judge of all the earth. But that left the meaning of the word the same. JUSTIFICATION A “ FORENSIC” TERM. \ It is\thus\ evident that the word Justification, alike in re ligious and in common parlance, is a word connected with law. I t has to do with acquittal, vindication, acceptance before
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