1. I do not make use of letters of commendation to you from the churches, nor do I ask any such testimonials from you to recommend me on my way. Perhaps that is why I have so often to commend myself?
2. But I regard you yourselves as my testimonial and written commendation and character, written on the heart, and read and known by all men.
3. For it is most abundantly evident and clear that in you is the handwriting of the Christ to be discerned, his sign and seal, ministered by me but divinely manifested, written not with a pen and the aid of ink and parchment, but by the spirit of the living God — yes, not written on tables of stone, but on tables of the heart and of flesh.
4. Such, then, is the only sufficiency I have to put before the world.
5. What have I to recommend me but you, — you who are my work? But even this allows me no power of counting anything to myself, it is simply the fact that God has made me the minister of His new covenant. My only sufficiency is the irresistible power of this fact.
6. Now the old covenant defined and elaborated the doom of sin, and showed the inevitableness of death as its penalty. That was its truth, and hence its glory. And we read that the man appointed to serve this absolute covenant of sin's reward was yet invested with divine glory. That doom was engraven, we read, in letters on stone tables, and it slew.
7. That is the function of the letter of the law, it dooms to death whatever is not in exact accordance with its demands. Yet in receiving and administering to the people this covenant, a glory appeared on Moses' face. How much more glorious then is the ministry of that word which brings life!
8. For the spirit gives life.
9. The glory on Moses' face died away after a while. It could not continue in the presence of the people.
10. That was the reason, as is commonly interpreted, of the veil which Moses placed on his face.
11-14. The children of Israel, because of that veil, never saw the light of the old covenant fade out and vanish into nothing. Had not the veil been there, they would have looked right on to the end of this covenant of finiteness and death, and so discerned its spiritual sense, but that veil represents the hardening of their hearts and the dimness of their eyes, whereby they cannot discern the spiritual sense of the scriptures.