ST. PAUL AND HIS MODERN STUDENTS.

_The Life and Epistles of St. Paul._ By the Rev. W. J. CONYBEARE,

M.A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; and the Rev. J.

S. HOWSON, M.A., Principal of the Collegiate Institution,

Liverpool. 2 vols. 4to. Longmans. 1852.

_The Epistles of St. Paul to the Corinthians: with Critical Notes

and Dissertations._ By ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY, M.A., Canon of

Canterbury, late Fellow and Tutor of University College, Oxford,

&c. 2 vols. 8vo. Murray. 1855.

_The Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans:

with Critical Notes and Dissertations._ By BENJAMIN JOWETT, M.A.,

Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford. 2 vols. 8vo. Murray.

1855.

These treatises, bearing on their title-pages the names of our two

ecclesiastical Universities, give happy signs of a new era in English

theology. They show how effectually we have escaped from the morbid

religious phenomena represented by Simeon at Cambridge, and the

counter-irritants applied by John Henry Newman at Oxford; and come as

the returning breath of nature to those who have witnessed the fevers

of "Evangelical" conversion or the consumptive asceticism of

"Anglican" piety. On looking back, from the position now attained, it

seems wonderful that we could ever, with St. Paul's writings in our

hands, have been betrayed into either of these opposite extravagances:

for anything more absolutely foreign to his breadth and universality

than the Genevan dogma, or more at variance with his free spirituality

than the sacramental system, it is impossible to conceive. But it is

the peculiar fate of sacred writings, that the last thing elicited

from them is their own real meaning. The very greatness of their

authority puts the reader's faculties into a false attitude; creates

an eagerness,--an inflexible intensity,--that defeats its own end;

and, in particular, gives undue ascendency to the uppermost want and

feeling that may be craving satisfaction. Hence the tendency of

Scriptural interpretation to proceed by action and reaction; an easy

ethical Arminianism being succeeded by a severe Calvinism, and the

reliance on individual grace giving way before the advance of

sacerdotal and Church ideas. When the opposite errors have spent

themselves, the requisite repose of mind will be recovered for reading

just the thought that lies upon the page: here and there an eye will

be found, neither strained with pre-occupying visions, not scared by

sceptic shadows, but clear for the apprehension of reality, as God has

shaped it for our perception. At length we have reached this crisis of

promise; and critics are found who, instead of interrogating St. Paul

on all sorts of modern questions, listen to him on his own; and draw

from him, not a fancied verdict on the sixteenth century, but a

faithful picture of the first.

And for this historical purpose, the writings of the great Gentile

Apostle are of paramount value, and justly occupy the inquirer's first

researches. The most considerable of them are of unimpeachable

authenticity. They are the very earliest Christian writings we

possess. They are the productions of a man more clearly known to us

than any of the first missionaries of the Gospel. They are _letters_:

abounding in disclosures of personal feelings, of biographical

incident, of changing moods of thought, of outward and inward

conflict. They are addressed to young communities, scattered over a

vast area, and composed of differing elements; and exhibit the whole

fermentation of their new life, the scruples, the heart-burnings, the

noble inspirations, the grievous factions, of the Apostolic age. The

Gospels and the Book of Acts _treat_ no doubt of a prior period, but

_proceed_ from a posterior, of whose state of mind, whose

retrospective theories concerning the ministry of Christ, it is of

primary importance to the criticism of the Evangelists that we should

be informed; and on these points the Pauline Epistles are the

indispensable groundwork of all our knowledge or conjecture. In them

we catch the Christian doctrine and tradition at an earlier stage than

any other canonical book represents throughout. Although the

narratives of the New Testament doubtless abound in material drawn

faithfully from a more primitive time, they are certainly not free

from the touch and tincture of the post-Pauline age. How powerful an

instrument the Apostle's letters may become for either confirming or

checking the historical records, may be readily conceived by every

reader of Paley's "Horæ Paulinæ." In fine, if it be a just principle,

in historical criticism, to proceed from the more known to the less

known,--to begin from a date that yields contemporary documents, and

work thence into the subjacent and superjacent strata of events,--the

elucidation of Christian antiquity must take its commencement from the

Epistles of St. Paul.

Except in its general similarity of subject, the first of the three

works mentioned at the head of this article admits of no comparison

with the other two. It is rather an illustrated guide-book to the

Apostle's world of place and time, than a personal introduction to

himself. The authors are highly accomplished and scholarly men, and

could not fail, in dealing with an historical theme, to bring together

and group with conscientious skill a vast store of archæological and

topographical detail; to weigh chronological difficulties with patient

care; to translate with philological precision, and due aim at

accuracy of text. They have accordingly produced a truly interesting

and instructive book: _so_ instructive, indeed, that by far the

greater part of its information would, probably, have been quite new

to St. Paul himself. His life seems to us to be injudiciously overlaid

with what is wholly foreign to it, and for the sake of picturesque

effect to be set upon a stage quite invisible to him. He was not

"Principal of a Collegiate Institution," accustomed to examine boys in

Attic or Latian geography; was not familiar with Thucydides or Grote;

was indifferent to the Amphictyonic Council; and, in the vicinity of

Salamis and Marathon, probably read the past no more than a Brahmin

would in travelling over Edgehill or Marston Moor. The world of each

man must be measured from his own spiritual centre, and will take in

much less in one direction, much more in another, than is spread

beneath his eye. He cannot be reached by geographical approaches. You

may determine the elements of his orbit, and yet miss him after all.

It is an illusory process to paint the ancient world as it would look

to an Hellenic gentleman then, or a university scholar now; and then

think how St. Paul would feel in passing through it to convert it. The

indirect influence of this kind of conception seems to us apparent

both in Mr. Conybeare's translation and Mr. Howson's narrative and

descriptions. The outward scene and conditions of the Apostle's career

are elaborately displayed; but more with the modern academic than with

the old Hebrew tone of coloring; and the English version, scrupulous

and delicate as it is, has, to our taste, a general flavor quite

different from the original Greek. Unconsciously entangled in the

classifications and symbols of the Protestant theology, the authors

are detained outside the real genius and feeling of the Apostle.

Of a far higher order are the other two works,--produced, we infer

from their numerous correspondences of both form and substance, not

without concert between the authors. Indeed, the same explanation of

the merits of Lachmann's text (printed without translation by Mr.

Stanley, and with the adapted authorized version by Mr. Jowett) is

made to serve for both. So clearly and compendiously is this

explanation drawn, that, in the next edition of Lachmann, Mr. Jowett's

introduction might usefully be annexed to the great critic's rather

tangled and awkward preface. Of the superior fidelity of this

recension, we think no habitual reader of the Greek Scriptures can

reasonably doubt; and the recognition of its authority fulfils a prior

condition of all scientific theology. The text being chosen on grounds

purely critical, the notes are written in a spirit purely exegetical;

they aim, simply and with rare self-abnegation, to bring out, by every

happy change of light and turn of reflective sympathy, the great

Apostle's real thought and feeling. How very far this faithful

historic purpose in itself raises the interpreter above the crowd of

erudite and commenting divines, can scarcely be understood till it has

formed a new generation, and fixed itself as a distinct intellectual

type. It is not, however, an affair of mere will and disposition; but,

like most of the higher exercises of veracity, comes into operation

only as the last result of mental tact and affluence. With the most

honest intentions towards St. Paul, a critic without psychological

insight and dialectic pliancy, without power of melting down his

modern abstractions and redistributing them in the moulds of the old

realistic thought,--a critic without entrance into the passionate

depths of human nature,--a critic pre-occupied by Catholic or

Protestant assumptions, and untrained to imagine the questions and

interests of the first age,--_cannot_ surrender himself to the natural

impression of the Apostle's language. The disciple and the master are,

in such case, at cross-purposes with one another; the questions put

are not the questions answered; the interlocutors do not really meet,

but wind in a maze about each other's _loci_, not to end till the

unconscious interpreter has set his fantasies within the shadow of

inspiration. No such blind chase is possible to our authors. They have

achieved the conditions of fidelity; and bring to a task, in which the

truthful and sagacious spirit of Locke had already fixed the standard

high, the ampler resources of modern learning, and more practised

habit of historic combination. In the distribution of their work, the

difference of natural genius between the two authors has perhaps been

consulted, and is, at all events, distinctly expressed. Mr. Stanley's

aptitude for reproducing the image of the past, his apprehensive

sympathy with the concrete and individual elements of the world, fitly

engage themselves with the composite forms of Corinthian society, and

the most personal, various, and objective of the Apostle's letters.

For the more speculative Epistles to the Galatians and the Romans,

there was need of Mr. Jowett's philosophical depth and subtilty. The

strictness with which he restrains these seductive gifts to the proper

business of the interpreter, is not less admirable than their

occasional happy application. Instead of being employed to force upon

the Apostle a logical precision foreign to his habit, they are chiefly

engaged in detecting and wiping out false niceties of distinction

drawn by later theology, and throwing back each doctrinal statement

into its original degree of indeterminateness. It is not in the

notes,--which are wholly occupied in recovering St. Paul's own

thought,--but in the interposed disquisitions, which avowedly deal

with the theology of to-day, that a certain breadth and balance of

statement, and delicate ease in manœuvring the forms and antitheses

of abstract thought, and fine appreciation of human experience, make

us feel the double presence of metaphysical power and historical tact.

The author, accordingly, appears to us, not only to have seized the

great Apostle's attitude of mind more happily than any preceding

English critic, but also to have separated the essence from the

accidents of the Pauline Christianity, and disengaged its divine

elements for transfusion into the organism of our immediate life. Mr.

Stanley appears to have more difficulty in unreservedly adhering to

the purely historical view, and clerically flutters, without clear

occasion, on the outskirts of "edification";--the critic in his notes,

the preacher in his paraphrase; conceding in act more readily than in

name, and apologizing for finding human ingredients in the Apostles

and their doctrines, as if it were he, and not _God_, that would have

them there. This tendency to blur the lines which he himself draws

between the temporary and the permanent in the Scriptures with which

he deals, is the only fault we can find with Mr. Stanley; whose

associate, clinging less to the past, in effect preserves more for the

present. To learn the external scene of the Apostle's career, we would

refer our readers to Messrs. Conybeare and Howson; to appreciate his

moral surroundings, and the problems it presented, especially on the

ethnic side, they may take Mr. Stanley as their guide; but for insight

into the Apostle himself, and outlook on the world as it seemed to

him, they must resort to Mr. Jowett.

The Pauline Epistles are interesting, apart from all assumption of

inspired authority, because the elements are seen fermenting there of

the greatest known revolution both in the history of the world and in

the spiritual consciousness of individual man. Judaism was the narrowest

(that is, the most _special_) of religions; Christianity, the most human

and comprehensive. Within a few years, the latter was evolved out of the

former; taking all its intensity and durability, without resort to any

of its limitations. This marvellous expansion of the national into the

universal was not achieved without a process and a conflict. Divine

though the work was, it had to be wrought upon men, and through men,

whose character, interests, convictions, habits, and institutions

furnished the data conditioning the problem, and whose remodelled

affections and will supplied the instruments for its solution. The laws

of human nature, therefore, and the action of human events, necessarily

enter into the study of this great revolution; and it cannot be detained

out of the hands of the historian by any exclusive rights of the divine.

When we endeavor to trace the successive steps of faith from Mount Zion

to the Vatican, many parts of the progress appear to have left but

scanty vestige. We know the beginning, in the doctrine of the Hebrew

Messiah; we know the end, in the recognition of a Saviour of the world.

We know the intermediate fact,--that Judaism did not surrender its own

without a struggle, or readily give away the keys of its enclosure just

when it was passing from a prison of affliction into a palace of "the

kingdom." But within this general fact lies a world of mysterious

detail,--nay, almost the whole life of the early Church. Who began the

open breach between Messiah and the Law? how, and to what extent, did

the parties divide? what was their relative magnitude at different times

and in different places? and by what process was the difference

terminated, and the two extremes--Marcion on the one hand and the

Ebionites on the other--removed outside as heretics? The Christianity of

the third century is so little like the doctrine of Matthew's Gospel as

to perplex our sense of identity. No one can bring the two into direct

comparison, without feeling how much must have happened to shape the

earlier into the form of the later. Could we trace the flow and estimate

the sources of this change, the most wonderful of the world's

experiences would be resolved. The continuity, however, of visible

causation is often broken; there are everywhere many missing links in

the chain, and a chasm extending through a large part of the second

century. But a generation earlier we meet with materials of the richest

value in the Epistles of St. Paul; and by their aid the general

direction may be found by which thought and events must have advanced.

Otherwise, the change would seem as violent and inconceivable as a

convulsion that should mingle the Jordan and the Tiber.

No doubt, the germ of the Gospel's universality is to be found in the

personal characteristics of its Author,--in the whole spirit of his

life, and the direct tendency of his teachings. He who found in the

love of God and love of man the very springs of eternal life; who

measured good and evil, not by the act, but by the affection whence

they come; who placed his ideal for man in likeness to the perfection

of God,--had already proclaimed a religion transcending all local

limits. Nay, if he opposed the "true worship" to the services at

Gerizim and Jerusalem, and could wish the Temple away, that obstructed

his direct dealing with the human soul and suppressed the inner shrine

"not made with hands," he must even have placed himself in an attitude

of open alienation towards the ritual of his people. At the same time,

his words seem to have left not unfrequently an opposite impression.

He comes, "not to destroy the Law and the prophets, but to fulfil"

them; "not a jot or a tittle is to fail." His most spiritual truths

and sentiments, instead of being announced as novelties grounding

themselves on his personal authority, are drawn out of the old Hebrew

Scriptures; and even the life beyond death he finds lurking in

patriarchal idioms and phrases heard at the burning bush. His

intensest polemic against the sacerdotal party goes on within the

limits of the system which they represent and yet corrupt; and his

bitterest reproach against them is that there is no reverence for it

in their hearts, since they hugely violate and trivially obey it. Far

from ever launching out against law _as_ law, or setting up faith as a

rival principle excluding it, he extends _precept_ to the last heights

of religion, _enjoins_ the divinest affections, as if _there also_

obedience was possible, and duty and volition had their place. It was

not in a nature holy and harmonious as his,--type of heavenly peace

rather than of earthly conflict,--that the schism would be exhibited

between Will and Love; where both are at their height, there is no

rent between them. Nor was there need, in that meek, reverential soul,

to break with the past, in order to find a sanctity for the present,

and leave an inspiration for the future. Some things, once given for

the hardness of men's hearts, might be dropped, and fall behind; but

God had ever lived, and left the trace of his perfectness upon the

elder times as on the newest manifestations of the hour. There was

enough in the Law, if only its fruitful seeds were warmed into life,

to furnish forth the Gospel. And so Christ presents himself as the

disciple of Moses, and in the Sermon on the Mount does but open out

the tables of Sinai. It was not, therefore, without honest ground that

his immediate disciples could defend him from the charge of being

unfaithful to the religion of his native land. And yet the instinct of

the priests and rabbis told them truly that he and they could not

co-exist, that his doctrine reduced their work to naught, and that,

whencesoever he might draw it, there was no doubt whither he must

carry it. The "witnesses" were not altogether "false" which they

brought to show his inner hostility to the altar ceremonial; and

perhaps his enemies, with apprehension sharpened by fear, more

correctly interpreted his tendency in this direction than his

followers, entangled in the cloud of a Judaic love. It was quite

natural that the real antithesis between the Law and the Gospel should

thus be first felt by his antagonists, whilst as yet it slept

undeveloped in the minds of his followers and in the habitual

expression of his own thought; and that its earliest proclamation

should be _their_ act, _their_ defiance, the cross on Calvary!

This terrible challenge, fiercely protesting that the Law would hold

no parley with the Gospel, the Apostles, however, refused to accept.

They still denied their Lord's apostasy or their own; they had always

been, and with his encouragement, the best of Jews: nor did they

contemplate, so far, any change. The crucifixion was a Jewish mistake,

meant for the nation's enemy, but alighting on its representative; a

mistake, however, which God had counteracted by a glorious rescue, in

the resurrection of the crucified. The mischief being thus undone, the

day of Hebrew opportunity was resumed; the ministry of Jesus was not

closed; he yet lived and preached to them as before;--no longer,

indeed, in person till their better mind should re-assert itself, but

by "faithful witnesses";--no longer too in tentative disguise, but now

identified as Messiah by his exaltation above this world. Whatever

conflicts of mind the disciples suffered in the mysterious period

following the crucifixion, the operation of the resurrection and the

Spirit was at first simply to reinstate them in their prior

faith,--that the kingdom would soon be restored to Israel, and be

brought in by no other than their Master, already waiting for the

crisis in a higher world till God's hour should come. There is no

evidence to show that, on the transference of their Lord's life from

earth to heaven, they were carried into any greater comprehensiveness

or spirituality of faith: their convictions were more intense, but

held on in the same direction, being all included in one great

theme,--the speedy coming of Messiah's kingdom and the end of the

world. Nay, of so little consequence, in comparison with this

_general_ picture of expectation, was even the appearance in it of the

person of Jesus as its central figure, that Apollos, more than twenty

years afterwards, was making and baptizing converts, without having

ever heard of any later prophet than John the Baptist; and these

people are already recognized as "disciples," and then informed, as

needful complement to their faith, that, besides the crisis being

near, the person is appointed.[58] Here had evidently been, for some

quarter of a century, two independent streams of Messianic faith, one

from a rather earlier source than the other, but pursuing their own

separate way, till thus partially confluent at Ephesus. And what is

the relation between them? One of them baptizes into an impersonal and

anonymous hope, the other into the same hope with the name attached.

And when these two states of mind are set side by side, they are

regarded as the same in their essence, and differing only in

completeness. Nor is there anything in their mutual feeling to hinder

their instant coalescence. This fact defines in the clearest way the

position of the early Church; the ordinary Jew believed that Messiah

would _some time_ come, and bring in "the last days"; Apollos, that he

would come _erelong_; the Christians, that already _the person_ was

indicated, and would prove to be Jesus of Nazareth. All three

co-existed within the Hebrew pale, and the two last fall under the

common category of "disciples."

It was impossible, however, that the contemplation of a Messiah risen

and reserved in heaven should affect all the believers in a precisely

similar manner. His personal attendants it would take up just where

the crucifixion had let them down; would give new force to their

previous impressions, new sacredness to their recollections, new

significance to his words and example, new reluctance to venture where

he had not led. The whole effect would be conservative, and tend to

fix them, with an inspired rigor, within the limits of the Master's

lot and life. Quite otherwise was it with the new disciples, who had

no such restraining memories of the human Teacher. _They_ began with

Christ above, and were tied down by no concrete biographical images,

no scruples of tender retrospect. They were free to ask themselves,

"What meant this surprising way of revealing Messiah 'in heavenly

places,' and letting his disguise first fall off in his escape from

local relations? The scene from which he looked down,--was it the mere

upper chamber of Judæa, or did it overarch the human world? Who could

claim him, now that he was there? Was it for him to examine pedigrees

to test 'the children of the kingdom'; or would he, as Son of David,

even come emblazoned with his own?" The mere conception of an ascended

and immortal being, assessor to the Lord of _all_, seemed to dwarf and

shame all provincial restrictions, and sanction the distaste for

binding forms and ceremonial exclusiveness. The withdrawal of Christ

to a holier sphere accorded well with all that was most spiritual in

his teachings and in himself; and could not fail to reflect a strong

light back on this aspect of his life, and give a more significant

emphasis to the tradition of his deepest words. In the mind of many a

disciple this tendency would be favored by a weariness towards the

outer worship of the temple, and a secret aspiration after purer and

more intimate communion with God. Especially was the _foreign_ Jew

obliged to confess such a feeling to himself. The very speaking of

Greek spoiled him for thinking as a Hebrew; for language is the

channel of the soul, and according as the organism is open, the sap

will flow. Accustomed to the simple piety of the Proseucha, where God

was sought without priest or sacrifice, and adequately found in

poetry, and prophecy, and prayer, the Hellenist acquired a tone of

sentiment on which the material pomps and puerilities of Mount Moriah

painfully jarred. Nor could he enclose himself contentedly, like the

Palestine Jew, within the sacred boundary that admitted the most

worthless son of Abraham, and shut the noblest Gentile out. Living in

heathen cities, dealing with heathen men, touched at times with the

sorrow or the goodness of heathen neighbors, his moral feeling fell

into contradiction with his inherited exclusiveness, and inwardly

demanded some other providential classification of mankind.

Accordingly, it was the Hellenist Stephen who first saw, in the

heavenly Christ, a principle of universal religion and a proclamation

of spiritual worship. When accused of defaming Moses and the Law and

the holy place, and setting up Jesus to supersede them, he boldly

reflects on the stone Temple, rooted to one spot, as at variance with

His nature who said, "Heaven is my throne, and earth my footstool,"

and points to the earlier tabernacle, movable from place to place,

following the steps of wandering humanity, as truer emblem of a faith

that takes every winding of history, and a God who goes where we go,

and stays where we stay.[59] This noble doctrine doubtless expressed a

feeling common among the foreign Jews of liberal culture and fervid

piety; and when consecrated by Stephen's martyrdom, it would assume a

distinctness unknown before, and become the admitted type of belief

among the Christian Hellenists. That it was confined to them is

evident from the partial effect of the persecution in which Stephen

fell. _His_ friends,--perhaps we may say his _party_,--hunted from

house to house, fled from Jerusalem; but the Jewish Apostles remained

where they were,[60] apparently unmenaced and undisturbed. The

hostility of the city drew therefore a distinction between such Hebrew

Christians as the twelve, and the freer "Grecians" who proclaimed a

Spirit above the Temple and the Law. The former, constituting an inner

sect of Judaism, might hold their ground unmolested; the latter were

treated as apostates, and "scattered abroad." The essential, but

hitherto dormant, antithesis between the Gospel and the Law, had thus

burst into expression, and embodied itself in two sections of the

Church that grew ever more distinct; the Hebrew party concentrated in

Jerusalem, and remaining intensely national; the Hellenistic,

spreading itself on the outskirts of Palestine, and erelong fixing its

head-quarters at Antioch. Within this freer circle, first as

persecutor, soon as disciple, appears Saul of Tarsus. So congenial are

its tendencies and aspirations with his nature and his antecedent

position, that his hostile attitude towards it might well strike him,

on looking back, as a monstrous self-contradiction. A foreigner to

Palestine, a "citizen of no mean city," familiar with a trade that

bought from the shepherds of Mount Taurus, and sold to the Greek

skippers of the Levant, he knew the human side of the Gentile world

too well to rest in a narrow Judaism. We cannot imagine his fervid,

free-moving mind, content to live within the enclosure of Rabbinical

niceties, or able to find, in the materialism of the Temple rites, his

ideal of true worship. With sympathies essentially cosmopolitan, he

could scarcely fail to be disappointed, not to say repelled, by

Jerusalem,--so different from the dream of his young romance. Some

higher, fresher communion between earth and heaven, some wider

monarchy for God than over a mere clan, would be to him natural

objects of aspiration. Hence his first persecuting attitude towards

the Christian Hellenists was permanently untenable; and as he went

amongst them, words were sure to fall upon his ear, and holy looks to

meet his eye, that would smite him with a kindred affection. Whether

the death of Stephen left on his mind images which he could not

banish, and commenced a reaction which no plunge into fresh violences

could arrest, it is vain to conjecture. That it should be so, would be

only human; for in the life of passion, triumph and humiliation are

near neighbors, and often the last note in the song of exultation dies

down into the plaint of compunction. Certain it is, that shortly

afterwards it "pleased God to reveal his Son in him"; that, with the

suddenness characteristic of impassioned natures, he came to himself,

and found his proper work, "to which he had been set apart from his

mother's womb"; and that his new convictions were of the very same

type and tendency with Stephen's, and strongly discriminated from the

Messianic doctrine of the twelve at Jerusalem. The incipient breach

between Law and Gospel, latent in the Master, denied by the twelve,

bursting forth among the Hellenists, finally realized and defined

itself in Paul; whose intense impulses were too great for the custody

of his will; whose soul had wings to fly, but not feet to plod; who

felt himself the theatre of living powers not his own, and could find

no peace till, by communion with the heavenly Son of God, he

discovered a providential love universal as human life, and a way of

reconciliation quick and open as human trust and reverence. It is

easier to speak of the effects than of the nature of his conversion.

His writings exhibit its results, but only vaguely allude to its

occurrence, and never in terms at all resembling the recitals in the

Book of Acts, or abating their discrepancies. Of these narratives

(Acts ix. 1-9, xxii. 6-12, xxvi. 12-18) Mr. Jowett remarks, "There is

no use in attempting any forced reconcilement." (I. 229.) On the one

hand, "There is no fact in history more certain or undisputed than

that, in some way or other, by an inward vision or revelation of the

Lord, or by an outward miraculous appearance as he was going to

Damascus, the Apostle was suddenly converted from being a persecutor

to become a preacher of the Gospel." (I. 227.) On the other, "If we

submit the narrative of the Acts to the ordinary rules of evidence, we

shall scarcely find ourselves able to determine whether any outward

fact was intended by it or not." This, however, is of the less moment,

because it is evident from the language of the Epistle to the

Galatians (Gal. i. 15, 16) that,--

"Whether the conversion of St. Paul was an outward or an inward fact,

it was not principally the outward appearance in the heavens, but the

inward effect, that the Apostle would have regarded. Compare Eph. iii.

3: 'How that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery (as I

wrote afore in few words).'

"It has been often remarked, that miracles are not appealed to singly in

Scripture as evidences of religion, in the same way that they have been

used by modern writers. Especially does this remark apply to the

conversion of St. Paul. Not a hint is found in his writings, that he

regarded 'the heavenly vision' as an objective evidence of

Christianity. The evidence to him was the sudden change of heart; what

he terms, in the case of his converts, the reception of the Spirit; what

he had known, and what he felt; the fact that one instant he was a

persecutor, and the second a preacher of the Gospel. The last inquiry

that he would have thought of making, would be that of modern

theologians: 'How, without some outward sign, he could be assured of the

reality of what he had seen and heard.' No outward sign could, as such,

have convinced the mind of a man who fell to the ground amazed, unless

it were certain that his companions had seen the light and heard the

voice. Nor unless they had distinctly been partakers of the supernatural

vision could he ever have been satisfied that what they saw was anything

but a meteor, or lightning, or that the voice they heard was more than

the sound of thunder. No evidence of theirs would have been an answer to

the language of some of the rationalist divines: 'St. Paul was overtaken

by a storm of thunder and lightning in the neighborhood of Damascus.'

Such difficulties are insuperable; at best we can only raise

probabilities in answer to them, based on the general tone of the

narrative in Acts ix. But we may remember that the belief in some

outward fact was not the essential point in St. Paul's faith, and

therefore we need not make it the essential point in our own.

* * * * *

"It is not upon the testimony of any single person, even were it far

more distinct than in the present instance, we can venture to peril

the truth of the Christian religion. Weak defences of comparatively

unimportant points, undermine more than they support. He who has the

Spirit of Christ and his Apostles, has the witness in himself; he who

leads the life of Paul, has already set his seal that his words are

true. Were the other view supported by the most irrefragable

historical evidence,--had the sign in the clouds been beheld by whole

multitudes of Jews and Gentiles, believers and unbelievers,--it is to

the internal aspect of the event we should be more inclined to turn,

both as the more religious one, and the one which more closely links

the Apostle with ourselves."--Vol. I. p. 230.

With the essentially inward character of this crisis, the substance of

the revelation involved in it strikingly corresponds.

"It was spiritual rather than historical; a revelation of Christ in him,

not external information brought to him. It was the ever-growing sense

of union with Christ, imparted, not in one revelation, but many; not

only by special revelation, but as the inward experience of a long life,

from which his union in Christ with all mankind, and his mission to

preach the Gospel to the Gentiles, were from the beginning inseparable;

as a part of which the image of the meekness and gentleness of Christ

formed itself in him, not without the remembrance that he had 'seen' Him

who was now passed into the heavens."--Jowett, Vol. I. p. 216.

Since the Apostle "nowhere speaks of any special truths or doctrines

as imparted to himself" (I. 72); since he never dwells on the life of

Christ, the miracles, the parables, so that it is even doubtful what

he knew of them; and since his whole appeal is either, (1.) to the

witness of the Hebrew Scriptures, or (2.) to historical testimony, or

(3.) to the assurance of the living Spirit,--it is evident that his

conversion chiefly gave him that inward image of Christ crucified and

risen, which attended him through all his years, and so lived in him

as to take the place of his personality, and coalesce with his

spiritual affections, and do the work of his will.

Of the Apostle's mode of thought when fresh from his conversion no

memorial exists; his earliest extant writing being of a date fourteen

or fifteen years later, and the report in the Book of Acts not being

altogether reliable--as Mr. Jowett has shown[61]--for historical

accuracy. But we learn from his own remarkable statement to the

Galatians, that he kept aloof from the churches in Judæa, and was

unknown to them by face; that it was three years before he entered

Jerusalem, or saw an Apostle; that he then made acquaintance with

Peter, and met James, but without its affecting his independent

course, which ran through eleven years more ere it brought him to

Jerusalem again; that his errand, on this second visit, was to take

security against being thwarted by Jewish jealousies sanctioned at

head-quarters; that from James, Cephas, and John--the "seeming

pillars" of the Church--he learnt nothing that he cared to hear; that

they, on the other hand, could not gainsay the independent rights of

so fruitful an apostleship, and agreed with him not to cross his path,

if he would leave them theirs. The emphasis with which, in this

animated passage, St. Paul dwells on the separate sources of his own

faith, and disowns any obligation to the prior Apostles, renders it

certain that the biography, the discourses, the human personality of

Jesus, were indifferent to him; and that with only the cross and the

resurrection (contained as data in the vision of conversion) he could

construct his scheme. The unmistakable sarcasm of the expressions, οι

δοκουντες,--δοκουντες ειναι τι--οι δοκουντες στυλοι ειναι,--betrays a

state of mind, in regard to the twelve, out of all sympathy with the

grounds of their authority. And the necessity, in order to agreement,

of marking out for each, not a separate geographical beat, but a

distinct religious and ethnologic ground, shows that, with external

mutual toleration, there is yet wanting the inner unity of an identic

faith. Only in the absence of a common Gospel would each party have

to take its own, and spare the other. Indeed, the difference was so

fundamental as to involve everything that St. Paul then, and

Christians now, would deem characteristic of their religion.

The question was this,--"How might a born Gentile become a

Christian?"--"By becoming a Jew first, and then accepting Jesus as

appointed to be the Jews' Messiah," was the answer at Jerusalem. "By

believing in Jesus straightway," was the reply of Paul. With

irresistible force he contended that, according to his opponents'

view, the Gospel opened no door at all, and was simply nugatory. For

it had _always_ been possible for a Gentile to become a Jew; and if,

without this step, faith in Christ was unavailing, the real efficacy

must lie in what the Jew brought to Christ, not in what he received

from him; so that it was hard to say what good there could be in

passing on from Moses at all, or what essential difference between the

unconverted and the converted Hebrew. And, in truth, they were _not_

strongly contrasted in Jerusalem; and in habit, thought, and feeling,

the twelve were probably much nearer to Gamaliel than to Paul. The

altercation between Peter and Paul at Antioch is full of instruction

on this point; proving, as it does, that the intensest form of ritual

exclusiveness--the refusal to partake at table with the

uncircumcised--was retained in the parent church, and enforced with

jealous vigilance. In the Syrian capital the Gentile disciples were

numerous, the Pauline comprehensiveness prevailed, and the

intercourses of life were unhindered by ceremonial scruples. Peter,

thrown amongst them on a visit, yields to the local impression, and,

as long as he can do so unobserved, falls in with their free ways;

feeling all the while, no doubt, like the Quaker from home tempted

into a ball-dress or regimentals. Soon, however, the strict brethren

at Jerusalem send to look after him or the Antiochians, and instantly

his liberality is gone; he is the prim Jew again, and the Gentile

dishes are all unclean. And who then are these new witnesses, that he

should fear their report? They are deputies from James, "the brother

of the Lord," who, on account of this affinity,[62] was the

recognized head of the Judæan Christians; and of whose ascetic

abstinences, and constant devotions _on the temple pavement_, till

"his knees were become like the knees of a camel," Hegesippus

preserved the tradition.[63] It was clear, therefore, that Peter's

association with the Gentile Christians was exceptional,--a violation

of his professed rule, and of the allowed usage of the Apostolic

Church. To own brotherhood with the uncircumcised believer, was a

forfeiture of character, probably an outrage on his own conscience, to

the Christian Apostle! This was the result, among his first disciples,

of nearly twenty years' belief of Christ in heaven. There could be no

real sympathy between such an evangile and Paul's. It let him make

converts, but would not acknowledge them when made. It could not

resist the fact of his success, but treated his "children in the

faith" as in a doubtful case, left to Heaven's "uncovenanted mercies,"

and needing to be put in a securer state, as soon as his back was

turned, and teachers could be sent to complete the task. Hence the

opposition that tracked the steps, and so much marred the work of the

Apostle, wherever he went; and in repelling which he wrote his chief

Epistles, and matured the form of his great theology. Mr. Jowett,

whilst allowing that this opposition was systematic and persistent,

and in some degree connived at by the twelve, is yet anxious to lay it

mainly to the charge of their followers, and defines the relation of

the two sections thus: "Separation, not opposition; antagonism of the

followers rather than of the leaders; personal antipathy of the

Judaizers to St. Paul, rather than of St. Paul to the twelve." (I.

326.) These are fine distinctions, and for this very reason likely, we

fear, in the rough movement of human passions, to be more ideal than

real. True, the feeling of a leader is ever apt to run into

exaggeration among the followers; nor probably was Apostolic control

over the mass of believers so complete as to exclude this danger. But

the Epistle to the Galatians is written by one leader, and speaks of

the others; and the impression it conveys is surely one of very

decided antagonism, and that, too, not accidental, but depending on

permanent differences of principle, which discussion did not smooth

away, and which penetrated into the very organism of daily life. In

the altercation with Peter, what was the point of Paul's rebuke? Did

he simply censure his moral weakness and inconsistency? Not so, or he

would have exhorted him to take whichever course he approved, and

stick to it. Did he find fault with his _exceptional_ act, of eating

with the Gentile Christians? Not so, for he did the same himself. The

thing he blamed was nothing less than the rule and usage by which

Peter _habitually lived_, and which, it is declared, virtually made

Christ of none effect. Here was a collision of irreconcilable

principles, and every subsequent occasion of personal contact, under

like conditions, would be as liable to produce it as the first. Nor

have we, in fact, any reason to suppose a closer approximation at a

later part of the Apostolic age. That Paul looked with any particular

respect on the other Apostles, is surely not proved, as Mr. Jowett

imagines, by his appeal (1 Cor. xv. 5) to their testimony respecting

the _fact_ of their Lord's resurrection, or by his claiming (1 Cor.

ix. 5) to stand on a like footing of privilege with them.[64] To

produce the spectators of an event as its proper witnesses, is no

expression of feeling towards them at all; and to say, "Are the other

Apostles to have the right of taking their wives with them at the cost

of the Church, and may not I take or decline my mere personal

maintenance as I think proper?" institutes a comparison in which it

is difficult to discover any strong sentiment of "respect." Nor do the

doctrinal agreements, of which, as well as of the personal relations

of fellowship, our author makes the most, amount to any substantial

concurrence, when we penetrate to the essence from the form. On both

sides, says Mr. Jowett, the disciples were baptized into the _same

name_. (I. 340.) Yes; but how different the _object named_ as present

to their thought; in the one case, the human life in its detail, with

the resurrection as its crown; in the other, the cross of Christ that

stands between them, and his life in heaven that passes beyond them!

Both sections, it is again said, find their _ground_ in the Old

Testament. (I. 341.) True: but the one on Moses, the tables, and the

holy place; the other, on Adam's nature, and the patriarchs' freedom,

and the prophets' insight; the one, moreover, using the ground to

intrench the Law for ever; the other, to drive the ploughshare over

its ruins, and make it a fruitful field. Once more, it is said that on

both sides there was a looking for "the day of the Lord," an

expectation of Christ's return to end the world within that

generation. (I. 341.) Assuredly, but with such differences in the

vision, that, in the apocalyptic picture of the one, Paul is not among

the Apostles, or his followers among the white-robed and crowned (Rev.

xxi. 14, and ii. 2, 14, 20); while in that of the other, the advent

will but perfect and perpetuate a union with Christ, already present

to their consciousness, and open to all who live with him in the

Spirit. In short, twenty years after the death of Christ, the two

elements that were harmonized in him, but are ever apt to part in our

imperfect minds, the ethical and the mystical, the historical and

spiritual, ascetic concentration and outspreading trust, fell into

determinate antithesis, realizing their conflict in the immediate

question of Jew and Gentile, and finding their respective

representatives in the twelve and St. Paul.

Whether, besides and beyond this general development of the Christian

system, there was also a special development of doctrine into higher

degrees of spirituality within the mind of St. Paul himself, is a

question of less interest and more difficulty. Both Mr. Stanley and Mr.

Jowett find traces of such a change in the modified sentiment of his

later writings, and even make the Apostle himself depose to his own

enlargement of view. We must confess that this speculation, though

excluded by no antecedent improbability, appears to us less well

supported than anything in these volumes. It is ingeniously presented

and argued by Mr. Jowett in his introduction to the Thessalonian

Epistles; and by means of it he explains the marked absence from these

letters of St. Paul's usual topics and manner, and gets rid of the

objection urged on this ground to their authenticity. Applied at the

other end of the Apostle's career, the hypothesis accounts for the

prominence, in the Epistles to the Ephesians, Philippians, and

Colossians, of certain conceptions, doubtfully traceable elsewhere, of

the place of Christ in the hierarchy of the universe, and of his union

with his disciples as his "body." The pastorals may be left out of

consideration, as their mixed phenomena cannot be much used in the

service of this theory. The broad facts are undoubted,--that the four

great central Epistles (Galatians, Corinthians, Romans) must be taken as

our foci of authority for the characteristics of St. Paul; that, in the

earlier Thessalonians, these characteristics are overshadowed by the

more Judaic doctrine of the "day of the Lord," and in the later

Ephesians, &c., by the more Gnostic conception of a spiritual hierarchy

and pleroma. But these facts are quite overworked when set to prove our

author's thesis. In order to establish a process of personal

development, they ought to exhibit certain natural links of

psychological and moral succession, and not mere abrupt and unrelated

contrasts of subject. To look for such organic indications in the sparse

productions of the Apostle's pen, is to ask too much from a few

incidental letters, bearing to his whole life the proportion of a dozen

pages of random excerpts to a cyclopædia. If only the matters treated be

different, the whole group of writings may very well express, in its

several parts and aspects, one simultaneous state of mind. If the types

of thought be such as could scarcely co-exist, the cause may be sought

as reasonably in a plurality of authors as in a succession of beliefs in

the same author; and only a most delicate combination of symptoms can

rescue the problem from this indeterminate state of double solution. Nor

ought we to forget, in weighing the probabilities, that the whole set of

Epistles comprising the phenomena of difference were written within nine

years; and that, ere the first of them was produced, St. Paul had been a

convert fifteen years, and had reached the age of fifty. The earlier and

longer of these periods is a more natural seat of mental change than the

later and shorter; especially of a change not apparent so much in

particular judgments and opinions, as in the whole complexion of

spiritual feeling and idea.

But, we are assured, the Apostle directly testifies to his own

progress in doctrine; and intimates (2 Cor. v. 16) that there was a

time when he had "known Christ according to the flesh,"--had preached

him "in a more Jewish and less spiritual manner,"--though "henceforth

he would know him so no more." Mr. Stanley, explaining this

much-disputed phrase, says:--

"Probably, he must be here alluding to those who laid stress on their

having seen Christ in Palestine, or on their connection with him or

with 'the brothers of the Lord' by actual descent; and if so, they

were probably of the party '_of Christ_.' But the words lead us to

infer that something of this kind had once been his own state of mind,

not only in the time before his conversion (which he would have

condemned more strongly), but since. If so, it is (like Phil. iii.

13-15) a remarkable confession of former weakness and error, and of

conscious progress in religious knowledge."--Vol. II. p. 106.

Did St. Paul then ever "lay stress on having seen Christ in Palestine"?

or on actual blood-connection with him? or on "something of this kind"?

To personal relations with Jesus in his ministry or family he had no

pretensions; and the spirit with which he had _always_ treated

everything "of this kind," is so apparent from his narrative to the

Galatians as to contradict Mr. Stanley's inference. Mr. Jowett gives the

phrase a different turn. Finding (Gal. v. 11) the Apostle charged with

at one time "preaching circumcision," he accepts this as synonymous with

"knowing Christ according to the flesh" (i. 12). This, however, would

imply that he was originally no "Apostle to the Gentiles," but insisted

on _mediate_ conversion into the Gospel through the law. Feeling the

irreconcilable variance of such an hypothesis with the autobiographical

notices in the Epistles, Mr. Jowett lowers his phraseology, and

attributes to St. Paul's early teaching only such sentiments as "_might

be thought_" to make him "a preacher of the circumcision." And so we

lose ourselves again in "something of the kind." Yet at last, in the

following passage, we find the critic's finger distinctly laid on the

doctrine which he proposes to id entify with the Apostle's "knowing

Christ according to the flesh."

"That such a change" (in the Apostle's teaching) "is capable of being

traced, has been already intimated. Both Epistles to the Thessalonians,

with the exception of a few practical precepts, are the expansion and

repetition of a single thought,--'the coming of Christ.' It was the

absorbing thought of the Apostle and his converts, quickened in both by

the persecutions which they had suffered. Not that with this expectation

of Christ's kingdom there mingled any vision of a temporal rule over the

kingdoms of the earth. That was far from the Apostle. But there was that

in it which fell short of the more perfect truth. It was not, 'The

kingdom of God is within you'; but, 'Lo here, and lo there.' It was

defined by time, and was to take place within the Apostle's own life.

The images in which it clothed itself were traditional among the Jews;

they were outward and visible, liable to the misconstruction of the

enemies of the faith, and to the misapprehension of the first

converts,--imperfectly, as the Apostle saw afterwards, conveying the

inward and spiritual meaning. The kingdom which they described was not

eternal and heavenly, but very near and present, ready to burst forth

everywhere, and by its very nearness in point of time seeming to touch

our actual human state. Afterwards the kingdom of God appeared to remove

itself within, to withdraw into the unseen world. The earthen vessel

must be broken first, the unbeliever unclothed that he might be clothed

upon, that mortality may be swallowed up of life. He was no longer

'waiting for the Son from heaven'; but 'desirous to depart and be with

Christ' (Phil. i. 23). Such is the change, not so much in the Apostle's

belief as in his mode of conception; a change natural to the human mind

itself, and above all to the Jewish mind; a change which, after it had

taken place, left the vestiges of the prior state in the Montanism of

the second century, which may not improperly be regarded as the spirit

of the first century overliving itself. Old things had passed away, and,

behold, all things became new. And yet the former things--the material

vision of Christ's kingdom--have ever been prone to return; not only in

the first and second century, but in every age of enthusiasm, men have

been apt to walk by sight and not by faith. In the hour of trouble and

perplexity, when darkness spreads itself over the earth, and Antichrist

is already come, they have lifted up their eyes to the heavens, looking

for the sign of the Son of man."--Vol. I. p. 10.

If to announce the coming of Christ is to "know him according to the

flesh," St. Paul assuredly did not keep his resolve "henceforth to know

him no more." For the expectation reappears, without any perceptible

change, in his later Epistles; as in Rom. xiii. 11, 12: "Do this the

rather, knowing the time,--that now is the time to awake out of sleep:

for our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed: the night

is far spent; the day is at hand";--and in Phil. iv. 5: "The Lord is at

hand."[65] Moreover, it is utterly impossible that _this_ element of his

teaching could be adduced in proof of his "preaching circumcision." It

had nothing to do with the question of Jew and Gentile; with the most

opposite solutions of which it is equally compatible.

In truth, our author has here combined two passages, which throw no

light on one another, and has extracted from each what neither is able

to yield. The words (in Gal. v. 11) "if I _still_ preach circumcision,"

do not really imply that the Apostle once _did_ so preach; though in an

accurate writer this sense might be insisted on. He is not thinking of

_his own_ former notions, but of _other people's_, continuing unaltered

after they ought to have changed. There _were_ persons who, in spite of

the dispensation of the Spirit, _still_ preached circumcision after its

significance was gone. This did not Paul; but he was charged with doing

so: and he says, "Well, if so, I am a Judaizer like you, and I cannot be

_also_ chargeable with teaching that the cross of Christ supersedes the

Law." The true sense is, therefore, given by the rendering, "If I preach

circumcision _still_,"--that is, as _still necessary_; and no tale is

told of the Apostle's earlier teaching.

The other passage (2 Cor. v. 16) _does_ undoubtedly refer to a former

state of the writer's own mind, when he "recognized Christ according to

the flesh." But he alludes, we apprehend, to the period when he was a

"Hebrew of the Hebrews"; and had no conception as yet of a suffering,

dying, and heavenly Christ;--when he was full of the thoughts still

occupying the twelve, who did not take in the significance of the cross,

but carried past it their old Messianic notions. "There may have been a

time," he means to say, "when I thought only of a national, Israelitish,

historical Messiah, bound by the law of his fathers, and binding to it.

Had this been the true conception of him, then would it have been a

matter of privilege and pride to be near his person, to stand in natural

relations with him, and be mixed up with the incidents of his local

career. But ever since I understood the cross, and saw that Messiah's

life began in death, a far other truth has dawned upon me. When he gave

up the ghost, all the accidents of his humanity--his lineage, his

nationality, his earthly manifestation--were left behind and died away;

and they must carry with them into extinction whatever feelings had

collected round them,--family pride, Jewish exclusiveness, and the

memories of personal companionship. From that moment, clear of earthly

entanglements, Christ in the spirit draws to him a community of human

spirits,--one with him in self-abnegation, dying to the earthly past;

one with him in re-birth, living to heavenly union with God. Thus, if

any one be in Christ, it amounts to a new creation; his old self has

passed away; behold, all things have become new." The Apostle,

therefore, sets up the death of Christ, as cutting off, for all

disciples, the prior time from the subsequent; as flinging the former,

with all the human conceptions that cling to it, into eclipse and

annihilation, and beginning a new and luminous existence in the latter;

as breaking the very identity of the believer, and delivering him from

the thraldom of nature into the freedom of the Spirit. The cross had

already done its work ere St. Paul became a disciple. He had never known

his Lord but in the spirit; and the "Christ," whom he had "known

according to the flesh," was the Jewish Messiah of his previous and

unconverted conception. Mr. Stanley's objection, that the Apostle could

hardly have spoken of his unconverted state without stronger

condemnation, might perhaps hold, were the allusions to his fit of

persecuting violence against the Church. But there was no occasion for

self-reproach in describing the picture of a national Messiah, on which,

in common with his countrymen, he had permitted his imagination to

dwell.[66]

Neither, then, from his own direct assertion, nor from comparison of

his several writings, _inter se_, do we learn anything of the alleged

_development_ of the Apostle's doctrine. There is no element in it,

that, from inability to co-exist with the rest, requires to be

assigned to a date of its own. The breach with Judaism, especially, we

conceive to have been complete from the first, and unsusceptible of

degrees; nay, to have been the initial principle of his conversion,

the secretly prepared condition or tendency of mind that rendered him

accessible to the Divine call, and open to sudden change in the

direction of his character. When first released from the formulas of a

Jewish Christology, and communing in spirit with a heavenly and

universal Lord, his mind would doubtless be met by a multitude of new

problems, and would work freely towards their resolution, with the

quickening consciousness of new light streaming in, and a grander

landscape of Providence opening before him. The very intensity of this

inward action, however,--the thirst it sustains for its own

completion,--forbids us to attribute to it a life-long duration; ere

fifteen years were passed, its force would be spent by having realized

its work, and attained the equilibrium of a holy peace. Whatever

subsequent changes occurred would be of a different nature, enforced

by the turn of the world's affairs; a mere remoulding or

reproportioning of inward faiths, in adaptation to the altered

pressures of the hour. Of such modifications, such retreat towards the

background of once favorite ideas, and advance of dim suggestions into

strong light, there are doubtless examples in St. Paul. The

expectation of Christ's speedy coming to close the world's affairs,

and realize "the kingdom," could not but dominate at first, and pale

every other interest and belief by the terror and glory of its light.

But there is a limit beyond which the strain of longing cannot be

sustained; as it subsides, the present and actual recovers power, and

pushes its problems forward, and gains once more the eye that had

looked beyond them. And so, after a while, spring up questions of

Christian order that will not bear to be put off;--how to live in a

world that, however near its doom, entangles the disciple still in a

web of difficult relations; how to touch the skirt of its idolatries,

and not be tainted; how to behave to wife and child in this last

generation of human affairs; how to seal up the passions that _ought

to die_ within the saints, but were not dead; how to prevent the gifts

of the Spirit from overbalancing themselves, on the heights of a

dizzied mind, into outrages on nature; how to preserve to the woman

and the slave, in their exulting reaction from degraded life, the

sense of modest reverence, and the appreciation of faithful service.

Day by day questions of this kind insisted on attention, and brought

out a fresh type of sentiments proper for their determination, and

offering to view a new side of the Christian thought and life. Nor,

again, could many years elapse, before the Jew and Gentile difficulty

changed its whole aspect, and expanded, from a petty scruple

compromised at Jerusalem, into a world-wide theology, regulative of

all future history. When it became evident that it was no question

about a small sprinkling of ethnic converts,--mere hangers-on of

Hebrew families and synagogues; when the delay of Messiah, and the

energy of Paul, gave occasion for thousands to pour in; when it seemed

imminent that Palestine should be outvoted and overpowered by the

growth of the foreign Gospel, the alarm of the Judaic Christians

became great. They tracked Paul's steps; their emissaries were

everywhere; their arguments and doctrine became more constricted, and

his more wide and free; and as the clouds visibly lowered over Israel,

touching him as well as them with gloom, all the more did he see the

sunshine flood the lands beyond; and his national trust assumed this

form,--that, maybe, the outlying heavenly light may creep back as the

dark hour passes, and again set the shadows moving on the hills it has

so long glorified. The Apostle died before the question settled

itself by the mere force of the facts,--by the utter breaking up of

the Jewish nation, and the inpouring Gentile numbers. Others waited to

be driven into catholicity by events; it is his glory to have

surrendered himself to the inspiration that implanted in him its

principle from the first. He lived, however, to see a mighty growth,

though not the final fruit; and the grand scale on which he conducts

the controversy, in his Epistle to the Romans, by converging

reasonings fetched from afar out of history, and aloft out of the

perfections of God, and deep out of human nature, shows how his

thought expands with the exigencies of experience, and advances to

fill the whole greatness of his opportunities.

There can be no doubt that the earliest Apostolic Christianity consisted

mainly in the faith of Christ's coming again, "to-day, or to-morrow, or

the third day." This event, with its effect on the living, was _the one

only point_, Mr. Stanley conceives, on which St. Paul, in his great

chapter on the Resurrection, professed to have a distinct revelation:--

"On one point only he professes to have a distinct revelation, and

that not with regard to the dead, but to the living. So firmly was the

first generation of Christians possessed of the belief that they

should live to see the second coming, that it is here assumed as a

matter of course; and their fate, as near and immediate, is used to

illustrate the darker and more mysterious subject of the fate of those

already dead. That vision of 'the last man,' which now seems so remote

as to live only in poetic fiction, was to the Apostle an awful

reality; but it is brought forward only to express the certainty that,

even here, a change must take place, the greatest that imagination can

conceive."--Vol. I. p. 398.

That this belief, where held at all, should be paramount and absorbing,

follows from its very nature. Accordingly, St. Paul, as Mr. Jowett

remarks, makes even the essence of the Gospel to consist in it:--

"It appears remarkable, that St. Paul should make the essence of the

Gospel consist, not in the belief in Christ, or in taking up the

cross of Christ, but in the hope of his coming again. Such, however,

was the faith of the Thessalonian Church; such is the tone and spirit

of the Epistle. Neither in the Apostolic times, nor in our own, can we

reduce all to the same type. One aspect of the Gospel is more outward,

another more inward; one seems to connect with the life of Christ,

another with his death; one with his birth into the world, another

with his coming again. If we will not insist on determining the times

and the seasons, or on knowing the manner how, all these different

ways may lead us within the veil. The faith of modern times embraces

many parts and truths; yet we allow men, according to their individual

character, to dwell on this truth or that, as more peculiarly

appropriate to their nature. The faith of the early Church was simpler

and more progressive, pausing in the same way on a particular truth,

which the circumstances of the world or the Church brought before

them."--Vol. I. p. 46.

Only it is not on "a particular _truth_," but on a particular _error_,

that the "pause" of faith was here made;--an error found or implied,

as our author observes, "in almost every book of the New Testament; in

the discourses of our Lord himself, as well as in the Acts of the

Apostles; in the Epistles of St. Paul, no less than in the Book of the

Revelation." Mr. Jowett does not evade the difficulty. In an admirable

essay on this special subject, he frankly states the facts, traces

their influence on the early Church, accepts them as among the limits

which human conditions impose on Divine revelation, and shows from

them, how, even in God's highest teachings, he leaves much truth to be

drawn forth from time and experience.

"It is a subject," he says, "from which the interpreter of Scripture

would gladly turn aside. For it seems as if he were compelled to say

at the outset, 'that St. Paul was mistaken, and that in support of his

mistake he could appeal to the words of Christ himself.' Nothing can

be plainer than the meaning of those words, and yet they seem to be

contradicted by the very fact, that, after eighteen centuries, the

world is as it was. In the words which are attributed, in the Epistle

of St. Peter, to the unbelievers of that day, we might truly say that,

since the fathers have fallen asleep, all things remain the same from

the beginning. Not only do 'all things remain the same,' but the very

belief itself (in the sense in which it was held by the first

Christians) has been ready to vanish away."--Vol. I. p. 96.

It is the infirmity of human nature--an infirmity irremovable by

inspiration--to translate eternal truth into forms of time, to throw

color into the invisible till it can be seen, and look into any given

infinity till finite shapes appear within it, and it is felt as infinite

no more. The soul tries, as it were, every apparent path, from spiritual

apprehension to scientific knowledge, from deep insight to clear

foresight, from perception of what God _is_ to vaticination of what he

_does_; and abides alone with the Holy Presence, that will not tell His

counsels, but is ever there himself. From the world of Divine reality

into that of transient phenomena, there is no bridge found as yet; and

only He, whose footsteps need no ground, can pass across. We know

somewhat on both sides; but the chasm between vindicates its perpetuity

against all invasion. _Vision_ for faith; _prevision_ for science:--this

seems to be the inviolable allotment of gifts by the Father of lights.

And whoever overlooks this rule, and, inspired with discernment of what

absolutely is, ventures to pronounce what relatively will be, embodies

his truth in a form whence it must again be disengaged. The deepest

spiritual insight is ineffectual to teach _past_ history; it is equally

so to teach _future_ history. The moment you lose sight of this fact,

and expect the sons of God to _predict_ for you, you confound

inspiration with divination, and will pay the double penalty of missing

the truth they have, and being disappointed at that which they have not.

It is not always much otherwise with themselves; the light which they

_are_, they do not _see_; and that which shapes itself before them, and

becomes the _object_ of their minds, is but the shadow of human things,

deepened and sharpened, perhaps also misplaced, by the preternatural

intensity. By its very inwardness and closeness to the soul's centre,

God's Spirit may express itself chiefly in the unconscious attitudes and

manifestations of the mind; especially as it is these that often leave

the most ineffaceable impressions of character upon others, and may,

therefore, be the vehicle of a more life-giving power than any purposed

teaching or more conscious authority. The disappointment of an avowed

prediction, or the error of an elaborated doctrine, no more affects the

Divine inspiration at the heart of Christianity, than the

miscalculations and failure of the Crusades disprove their Providential

function in the historical education of mankind. Mr. Jowett takes up the

question from another side, and shows how the faith in a future life,

though not directly _given_, necessarily disengaged itself in the end

from the expectation of the coming of Christ.

"We naturally ask, why a future life, as distinct from this, was not

made a part of the first preaching of the Gospel?--why, in other

words, the faith of the first Christians did not exactly coincide with

our own? There are many ways in which the answer to this question may

be expressed. The philosopher will say, that the difference in the

mode of thought of that age and our own rendered it impossible,

humanly speaking, that the veil of sense should be altogether removed.

The theologian will admit that Providence does not teach men that

which they can teach themselves. While there are lessons which it

immediately communicates, there is much which it leaves to be drawn

forth by time and events. Experience may often enlarge faith; it may

also correct it. No one can doubt that the faith and practice of the

early Church, respecting the admission of the Gentiles, were greatly

altered by the fact that the Gentiles themselves flocked in; 'the

kingdom of heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by

force.' In like manner, the faith respecting the coming of Christ was

modified by the continuance of the world itself. Common sense suggests

that those who were in the first ecstasy of conversion, and those who

after the lapse of years saw the world unchanged and the fabric of

the Church on earth rising around them, could not regard the day of

the Lord with the same feeling. While to the one it seemed near and

present, at any moment ready to burst forth, to the other it was a

long way off, separated by time, and as it were by place, a world

beyond the stars, yet, strangely enough, also having its dwelling in

the heart of man, as it were the atmosphere in which he lived, the

mental world by which he was surrounded. Not at once, but gradually,

did the cloud clear up, and the one mode of faith take the place of

the other. Apart from the prophets, though then beyond them, springing

up in a new and living way in the soul of man, corrected by long

experience, as the 'fathers one by one fell asleep,' as the hopes of

the Jewish race declined, as ecstatic gifts ceased, as a regular

hierarchy was established in the Church, the belief in the coming of

Christ was transformed from being outward to becoming inward, from

being national to becoming individual and universal,--from being

Jewish to becoming Christian."--Vol. I. p. 99.

With the Apostle Paul, however, the "coming of Christ" occupies the

place of our "future life"; the _living_ mass of disciples, waiting

till then for the "redemption of their bodies," fill the foreground

and largest space in the scene; the rising of the dead is the

subsidiary fact, needful to the completeness of the gift of life in

Christ. On this crisis, supposed to be so near, his eye was

exclusively fixed whenever he spoke of the Christian's "salvation";

and could he have been told that no such crisis would come, that, for

fifty generations, the present order of the world would vindicate its

stability, we cannot imagine what shape his faith would have assumed;

whether he would have made light of all these centuries, said that

with the Eternal "a thousand years are but as one day," and still

opposed to one another the αιων ουτος and the αιων μελλων; or whether

he would have found that the distinction was evanescent, and the

kingdom of God was to be not sent hither, but to be created here; or

how, in either case, he would have represented to himself the state

of the innumerable dead. These are questions which did not arise for

him; and it were vain to conjecture his solution. He is engaged with

other problems;--all, indeed, having reference to that never doubted

crisis, and arising out of its manifold relations, yet so treated by

him as to detach them unawares from their origin, and give them a

permanent place in the religious consciousness of men. _Who_ were to

be the subjects of that salvation? How were they _qualified_? By what

act of God's, and what temper of their own, to reach the blessing?

What present _assurance_ had they of this approaching good? It is in

dealing with these questions that St. Paul darts from his objective

theology into the deepest recesses of human experience, and fetches

into expression spiritual truths that transcend their incidental

occasion, and will remain valid while there is a soul in man.

In the Apostle's habit of thought there is a certain antique _realism_

which renders many of his doctrines and reasonings almost

unpresentable before a modern imagination. With our sharp notions of

personality, of the entire insulation of each mind as an individual

entity, of the antithesis of inner self to the outer everything, we

are quite out of St. Paul's latitude, and shall be perpetually taking

for figures and personification what had a literal earnestness for

him. The universe is with him full of Agents that for us are only

Attributes,--the theatre of certain _real_ principles (_i. e._

principles having existence independent of us), that carry out their

tendencies and history among themselves, and upon and through

individual men, as organs or media of their activity. Thus, _Sin_ is

neither the mere voluntary unfaithfulness of the transgressor, nor the

person of the tempter; but _both_ of these; and that not apart from

one another or alternately, but blended together under the conception

of a universal element of evil, having its objective focus in Satan

and its subjective manifestation in man. In like manner its opposite,

_Righteousness_ (Justification), is not exclusively human rectitude,

or the Divine justice, or _quasi_-goodness substituted for genuine;

but less ethical than the first, less forensic than the last, and

more ontological than either; that element, we may say, in the

essence of God which sets man at one with Him, and is the common

ground of their harmonious relation. Around these two contrasted

principles, others, equally conceived as real elements, and

misunderstood as mere attributes or phenomena, group themselves on

either side. With the former is _Death_,--the pair being _gemini_, not

simply joined by decree of God in time, but inseparable _in rerum

natura_, co-ordinates by physical necessity; and _Flesh_, the material

or medium that furnishes the endowments of sense, and instinct, and

the natural will, and affords to Sin its seat and hold upon us; and

_Law_, the discriminating light that parts the mixture of good and

evil, and, on entering into us, brings the slumbering evil into the

conscious state, and so makes it sin relatively to us, and

simultaneously shows us the good without adding to the force for

producing it. With the latter--Righteousness--are enjoined _Life_, the

positive opposite of Death, and, like it, a function of the moral as

well as the natural constitution, the immortal energy inherent in

sinless being; and _Spirit_, the absolute essence of God, present as

the vivifying source of whatever transcends nature,--a faint

susceptibility, felt only to be overmastered, in the sons of Adam,--a

conquering power, coalescing with the personality itself, in Christ

and his disciples,--and a spontaneous flow of higher life seizing on

converted men as organs of its charismata; and _Faith_,--the opposite

of Law,--the passing out of ourselves to embrace unseen relations, to

make conscious appropriation of the Spirit, and thus enter into union

with Christ and God. Even this most subjective of all the great

principles of the Apostle's theology, is more than a mere private and

personal act. As common to all the disciples,--the simultaneous gaze

that connects them as a whole with Christ,--its single threads pass

out and become a converging web. As something other than the act (of

obedience) which men were under bond to render, it is a new institute

of God, and, relatively to them, reads itself off as _Grace_. As

opposed to Law, in which there is a delivery of the Divine will _into_

men, it involves a _drawing_ by Divine love of an affection _out of_

men. And under all these aspects it acquires something of that

indeterminate character, subjective and objective at once, which the

associated elements possess in a much higher degree. The same mode of

thought is traceable in another form. The Apostle exhibits the

providential scheme of the human race by distributing them into two

successive _gentes_,--the earthy or natural, the heavenly or

spiritual; and lays down all the predicates of each direct from the

personal history of their respective heads, Adam and Christ. Whatever

is true of the founder is considered as known of the followers; the

phenomena of his being spread themselves inclusively to theirs. He is

regarded, not simply as a representative individual, while they are

the represented individuals; but as a _type_ of being within which

they are contained, and which in its history and vicissitudes carries

them hither and thither. Condemnation and redemption take place by

_Kinds_, and fall on particular persons in virtue of their partaking

of these kinds. Settle the attributes of the species, as found in its

archetype, and you know what to say of individuals. It is not

difficult to understand this way of thinking so long as the Apostle

applies it, as a naturalist might, to the _Adamic gens_; and argues,

that, being made of earthy materials (χοικοι), and having the focus of

personality in σαρξ, with no adequate counterpoise of πνευμα, it is

the seat of sin and death. But it is less easy to follow the Apostle's

meaning when he similarly identifies Christians with Christ, and

transfers, or rather extends, to them all the great characteristics of

his existence. They are crucified to the world. They are "all _dead_"

with him; they are "buried with him" in baptism; they are "risen with

him"; their "life is hid with him in God." And while this is true of

_living_ disciples, he is no less "the first-fruits of them that

sleep"; his resurrection is but the first pulsation of an act that

next proceeds to theirs, and then completes the transformation of the

living. All this is meant for more than rhetorical analogy. With

Christ, and in Christ, took place a re-constitution of humanity. Of

the new man, he was the ideal and archetype; inverting the

proportions of σαρξ and πνευμα, and having his essence and personality

in the latter, so as to render sin an unrealized possibility and death

a transitory accident. The spirit in him which evinced its life-giving

power in raising him from the dead, is no more limited to his

individuality, than flesh and blood were the attributes of Adam only.

It spreads to the whole family of souls, springing up into his

kindred; it flows into them as they look up to him in faith, and are

reborn to him; it repeats in them the fruits it produced in him,--the

sacrifice of self,--the dying away of passion and pride,--the heavenly

love that darts upon the wing whither the bleeding feet of conscience

fail to climb,--together with many "a gift less excellent," of healing

and of tongues. The consciousness of this new heart, set free with

Divine affections, is immediate evidence of their union with Christ,

of the Real Presence of his Spirit within them, of their substantive

incorporation into his essence, and therefore of a restored harmony

and even oneness with God. To what extent the Apostle conceived that

this transformation of nature, by partnership in the properties of the

heavenly Christ, might be carried in the living disciple, it is not

possible to say. It amounted to "a new creation"; and among the "old

things" that had already "passed away," he probably included more than

the moral habits and feelings of the unconverted state; and conceived

that the same spirit by which these died out was purifying also the

bodily organism of the believer, and leavening it with antiseptic

preparation for its final investiture with immortality. That last

"change," like the resurrection itself, is not regarded as an external

miracle, suddenly forced on an uncongenial material by mere

Almightiness; but as the last and crowning stage of an internal

development, whose principle had long been active,--the emergence from

all entanglement with "flesh and blood" of that spiritual element

which in Jesus "could not be holden of death," and which, dwelling in

his disciples, already deadened and damped the vitality of the σαρξ,

and would at last quicken the σωμα with imperishable life. Thus it is

that "Christ" is not to St. Paul an historical individual, but a

generic nature,--the archetype of a spiritual species, sharing his

attributes and repeating his experience.

Cleared as a stage for these contending principles, the universe

witnesses their co-existence and antagonism from the beginning to the

end of time.

The great drama has two main acts, and the cross of Christ divides them.

The first is a descending period, accumulating the force of evil to a

pitch of frightful triumph. The second is an ascending period, at

whose goal the last enemy is gone.

In the opening scene of the first, extending from Adam to Moses, both

Flesh and Spirit were there; not yet, however, in conflict; but the

latter sleeping as a mere susceptibility, and the former having its own

way in the instinctive life of man. The state was not one which, had the

comparison been made, would have accorded with the Divine will. It was

therefore really, though unconsciously, a reign of Sin, as was proved by

the presence of Sin's inseparable sign,--the generations _died_.

The next scene was marked by the introduction of _Law_. The effects

were, to bring into full consciousness the sin before unmarked, and so

make it exceedingly sinful; to set man at variance with himself by

giving him discernment, and quickening his longing and his fear,

without any new spring of force; and actually to multiply

transgressions by enumerating and suggesting them.

Hence, at the close of the period, an utter rotting away of human

society, and a confirmed moral incapacity of the widest sweep. The

spontaneous law of nature and the written law of Moses being equally

set at naught by Gentile and by Jew, any promises God might have given

fell through, from human breach of the conditions. This was the moment

seized for instituting a new creation; the promised Messiah of the

Jews being the vehicle of its accomplishment, and the link of

connection between the old and the new.

All the Messianic conditions were _fulfilled_,--the right tribe, the

right family, the right personal marks and characteristics. But they

were also _transcended_. Along with the human infirmities and

liabilities was present, in this archetype of a new race, the Spirit

in such full measure as to constitute his proper self, or at least win

that centre by complete victory over nature and temptation and

surrender of all he had and was to a Divine Love. As he had baffled

and held off Sin, Death had so far no business with him. Yet what was

to be done? for there were conflicting claims upon him. Sinless in

himself, he was of a sin-doomed type, the _likeness_ of sinful flesh

(ὁμοιωμα σαρκος ἁμαρτιας), and therefore liable to the incidents of

such a race. This was at least his property by nature. At the same

time, he was internally and essentially of the opposite type; the

image of God (εικων του Θεου), and so, foreign to the mortal fate, at

once imperishable and life-giving. In the person of this double

nature, the contest between the antagonists must come to an issue; and

while _both_ gain their due, it is the last triumph of evil, the first

opening of eternal good. Sin, recognizing in his suffering and mortal

frame its own physical counterpart and shadow, strikes him with death,

exerting for that end its own "strength" and instrument, "the Law."

But in thus carrying its course upon the guiltless, it overreached and

spent itself; and the Law, lending itself to such an act, fell into

self-contradiction, and disappeared in suicide. He died, therefore, in

virtue of what was really foreign to him, as _representative_ of a Sin

which was not his, but which yet involved him, as human, in sorrow and

mortality. But no sooner had this happened, than his "Righteousness"

vindicated its power. He came out of death, which _could not keep_ one

so holy; and now, escaped from nationality, and placed aloft as the

ideal of the new humanity, his vivifying spirit penetrates the heart

of men below, and, taking them on the side of faith and love instead

of will, kindles a divine fire that burns up the dead elements of the

"old man," and wraps the "heavenly places" and the earthly in a

common blaze. By spiritual affiliation with him, his disciples enter

the essence of all holy and immortal natures. And so it comes to pass,

that, through the incidence of sorrow and death in the wrong place, an

objective power of "righteousness" is set free, that reconciles

mankind with God, and restores them to sanctity and life. The past and

the future of humanity were concentrated, just at the turning point

between them, in one person; the natural element, bearing the burden

of the past, perished and fell away; the spiritual and divine

principle, containing the germ of the future, asserted its

inextinguishable life; and from heaven evinced its self-multiplying

power, making him only "the first-born of many brethren."

Thus was the second act initiated, which also presented two successive

scenes. During the first, the Christ was still in heaven; and his Spirit

on earth, having the community of disciples for its organ or "body,"

stood in presence still of the opposing powers. In the world, it

encroached upon the province of evil continually, and reclaimed a

citadel here and there. In the Church, if it infused as yet no _perfect_

grace, it left its "earnest" everywhere;--ecstatic gifts and mystic

insights; hearts set free from pride and scorn, and brought to the

meekness and gentleness of Christ; the self-seeking will surrendered;

the anxious conscience led to trust; the tangles of thought smoothed out

by a wisdom not its own; and outward distinctions reduced to naught by

faith, and hope, and charity. Nevertheless, Satan disturbed the κοσμος

still; and even the children of the Spirit were but prisoners yet, and

felt the tent of nature but a poor abode. They had yet to wait for their

full adoption; when the tabernacle in which they groaned being

dissolved, they should be invested with an unwasting frame.

This was reserved for the final scene, the coming and the reign of

Christ. At this culminating crisis, the antagonism which in Adam was as

yet unfelt from the ascendency of nature, was to die out and cease on

the absolute triumph of the Spirit. Physically, death was to disappear;

the departed being finally reinstated in life, and the living "clothed

upon" with their new garment ere yet they were stripped of the old.

Morally, the remnant of inner strife and temptation, that even the faith

of saints might leave unappeased, would pass away, aspiration be

harmonized with achieving power, and in conscious presence of the

objects of deepest affection and reverence the sighs of separation would

cease. As soon as resistance was over, and there was nothing to subdue,

the separate function of God's redeeming and sanctifying Spirit would

find no work; "the kingdom would be resigned to the Father"; "the Son

would be subject"; and "the Trinity would cease."

Whether the Apostle's vision of trust was really of universal success,

and included even those who should still be found astray at last, is a

question difficult of direct determination; but not very doubtful when

tried by the general scope of his doctrine. Mr. Jowett's judgment,

given in the following passage, truly seizes, we think, the feeling of

St. Paul. The author is commenting on the parallel drawn between Adam

and Christ, especially on the words, "As by one man's transgression

sin entered into the world, and death by sin," and has shown that they

do _not_ teach any imputation of Adam's sin.

"It is hardly necessary to ask the further question, what meaning we

can attach to the imputation of sin and guilt which are not our own,

and of which we are unconscious. God can never see us other than we

really are, or judge us without reference to all our circumstances and

antecedents. If we can hardly suppose that he would allow a fiction of

mercy to be interposed between ourselves and him, still less can we

imagine that he would interpose a fiction of vengeance. If he requires

holiness before he will save, much more, may we say in the Apostle's

form of speech, will he require sin before he dooms us to perdition.

Nor can anything be in spirit more contrary to the living

consciousness of sin of which the Apostle everywhere speaks, than the

conception of sin as dead, unconscious evil, originating in the act of

an individual man, in the world before the flood.

"On the whole, then, we are led to infer that in the Augustinian

interpretation of this passage, even if it agree with the letter of

the text, too little regard has been paid to the extent to which St.

Paul uses figurative language, and to the manner of his age in

interpretations of the Old Testament. The difficulty of supposing him

to be allegorizing the narrative of Genesis is slight, in comparison

with the difficulty of supposing him to countenance a doctrine at

variance with our first notions of the moral nature of God.

"But when the figure is dropped, and allowance is made for the manner

of the age, the question once more returns upon us,--'What is the

Apostle's meaning?' He is arguing, we see, κατ ανθρωπον, and taking

his stand on the received opinions of his time. Do we imagine that his

object is no other than to set the seal of his authority on these

traditional beliefs? The whole analogy, not merely of the writings of

St. Paul, but of the entire New Testament, would lead us to suppose

that his object was not to reassert them, but to teach, through them,

a new and nobler lesson. The Jewish Rabbis would have spoken of the

first and second Adam; but which of them would have made the

application of the figure to all mankind? A figure of speech it

remains still, an allegory after the manner of that age and country,

but yet with no uncertain or ambiguous interpretation. It means that

'God hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth'; that 'he

hath concluded all under sin, that he may have mercy upon all'; that

life answers to death, the times before to the times after the

revelation of Jesus Christ. It means that we are one in a common

sinful nature, which, even if it be not derived from the sin of Adam,

exists as really as if it were. It means that we shall be made one in

Christ by the grace of God, in a measure here, more fully and

perfectly in another world. More than this it also means, and more

than language can express, but not the weak and beggarly elements of

Rabbinical tradition. We may not encumber St. Paul with the things

which he 'destroyed.' What it means further is not to be attained by

theological distinctions, but by putting off the old man and putting

on the new man."--Vol. II. p. 166.

On surveying the picture of time and the history of humanity that lay

beneath St. Paul's eye, the question naturally arises, What is its

significance and value for us? Manifestly not those of an absolute guide

through the labyrinthine depths of the Divine counsels. "We can scarcely

imagine what would have been the feeling of St. Paul, could he have

foreseen that later ages would look not to the faith of Abraham in the

Law, but to the Epistle to the Romans, as the highest authority on the

doctrine of justification by faith; or, that they would have regarded

the allegory of Hagar and Sarah, in the Galatians, as a difficulty to be

resolved by the inspiration of the Apostle."[67] We cannot say of him

less than Mr. Jowett says of a greater than Paul, that in many places

"his teaching is on a level with the modes of thought of his age." (I.

97.) The ultimate point towards which all the lines of his expectations

converged, and all the history of the past appeared to gaze, we know to

have had no existence where he placed it; and as the whole scheme was

laid out to lead up to this, it might seem to disappear as the fabric of

a dream. Yet it is not so; and the very fear implies that we look in the

wrong place for the permanent amid the evanescent in the Gospel.

Religion--revealed or unrevealed--is no production of the systematizing

intellect,--inspired or uninspired. The workings of constructive thought

follow, not lead it. Their function is not creative, but simply

adaptive;--to find a settlement and orderly method of being and growing

for some new principle of divine life, or for some old principle in an

altered scene; to ward off from it uncongenial elements, remove dead

matter that chokes it, and surround it with conditions whence it may

weave its organism around it and send deep roots into the mellowed soil

of humanity. Divine truth is the coming of God to man, pathless and

traceless: theologic thought is the retrogressive search of man after

God, not by "_His_ ways which are past finding out," and invisible as

night, but necessarily by such tracks as the age has opened and another

age may close or change.

The manifestation of supernatural realities to the human soul involves

so much which is mysterious and unique, that only under great

qualification can we compare it with the known mental processes. But

were we to conceive of it less by the analogy of scientific discovery,

and more by that of artistic apprehension, many an embarrassment would

be saved. In a work of high art, you give a Phidias or a Raffaelle

_his subject_; he necessarily takes it from that which stirs the heart

of his time, and has a solemnity for his own and you do not find fault

that there is mythology in the group, or Mariolatry in the picture.

Through the conceptions of one time there speaks a feeling for all;

and the representation may be immortal, when the thing represented has

long been historical. Nor is it that it only reflects honor on its

author's name. It springs from an inner harmony with the very heart of

things, and it gives a new expressiveness to life and nature, and

leaves behind a self-luminous spot in the world, where there was

"gross darkness" before. Hence it looks into the eyes, and finds the

soul of one generation after another; and, amid the change of

materials and the succession of schools, keeps alive the very sense by

which alone "materials" can be wielded and "schools" exist. With just

the same result do the accidental and temporary media fall away from

early Christianity; disengaging a residuary spirit that takes up the

life of all times, touches a consciousness else unreached, and

breathes upon the face of things, till the meanings writ there with

invisible ink come into clearness before the eye. If it pleases God,

instead of spreading at our feet the things to be seen, rather to

quicken our vision till we see them where they are, it is revelation

all the same, only deeper and more various; not an incident of

position, but a power that can migrate in place and time, and read the

Providential perspective everywhere. This profounder insight into

divine relations it has been the especial office of St. Paul to

awaken; and none the less that the flashes by which he gives it are

incidental, and do not proceed from the Rabbinic lamp which he holds

up to his apocalyptic pictures. Indeed, it is he, in great measure,

that has carried Christendom into regions other than his own. His

thought is everywhere penetrated with an intense heat, leavened with

lightning, that fuses the mass containing it, and runs off alive for

other media to hold it. The revelation to him of Christ in heaven set

in action all the resources of his nature, and gave them a

preternatural tension. The sentiments which found satisfaction, the

intimations which came into expression, in his form of doctrine, are

now for ever _human_, fixed in the self-knowledge of men by his

faithful words, and sure to transmigrate into other forms, when their

first embodiment will hold them no more. And so much is the Apostle's

later exposition of his hope divested of what is special to himself,

that to all ages since it has struck upon the ear of mourners along

with the very toll of the funeral bell; and though often indistinct to

their mind, it has jarred with no falsehood on their heart, but

sounded like an anthem in the dark,--great music and dim words. It

needed only time and events to transmute the doctrine into that of a

future life. For it included--in order to meet the case of those who

had "fallen asleep"--the conception of a path, through death before

the time, "to depart and be with Christ"; only that this was the minor

provision, the by-path of the early few. Reopened, however, as it

always was when a disciple passed away, it became an evermore familiar

track; and experience had but to negative the opposite direction by

leaving it untraced, in order that the upward track should become the

_via sacra_ of human faith. And can any one doubt what the

justification by faith means, when construed into the language of

universal experience? It means that God wants more from us, and also

less, than the anxious will can do; more, because he wants ourselves;

less, because he does not want our niceties of work. It means that we

are called to spiritual heights we strive in vain to climb; that the

most patient feet, step after step upon the ground, will but stand

upon the earthly mountains after all; and it is the fiery chariot of

love and trust that must bear us into heaven. It means that there is

an affectionateness in God that looks to what we are, rather than what

we do, and more readily speaks to us of communion than of obedience.

True, this is but another way of saying what our religion elsewhere

more ethically expresses, that God requires our perfect service, and

yet has forgiveness for what is imperfect. But this statement, though

it means also that heaven is open to the pure, intent, and single

heart, touches a spring less deep and strong. It divides the integral

and living fact, even in regard to God, by describing it as a demand

of the whole, and then a subtraction of a part; and so exhibiting it

rather as a dissolution of justice, than as truth and wholeness of

love. And the Pauline doctrine appeals with far more immediate power

to human consciousness, especially to that third of mankind whom a

fervid enthusiastic mind renders little accessible to the cold

solemnities of duty. And, finally, if we are insensible to the

grandeur of St. Paul's teaching as to the universality of the Gospel,

it is not more because it is entangled with the question of Jew and

Gentile, than because the sentiment has become the common atmosphere

of Christendom, and we feel not its freshness, because it blows not on

us as a breeze, but _only_ as our breath of life. Let Mr. Jowett

remove from us the spell of our indifference.

"Let us turn aside for a moment to consider how great this thought was

in that age and country; a thought which the wisest of men had never

before uttered, which even at the present hour we imperfectly realize,

which is still leavening the world, and shall do so until the whole is

leavened, and the differences of races, of nations, of castes, of

religions, of languages, are fully done away. Nothing could seem a

less natural or obvious lesson in the then state of the world; nothing

could be more at variance with experience, or more difficult to carry

out into practice. Even to us it is hard to imagine that the islander

of the South Seas, the pariah of India, the African in his worst

estate, is equally with ourselves God's creature. But in the age of

St. Paul, how great must have been the difficulty of conceiving

barbarian and Scythian, bond and free,--all colors, forms, races, and

languages,--alike and equal in the presence of God who made them! The

origin of the human race was veiled in a deeper mystery to the ancient

world, and the lines which separated mankind were harder and stronger;

yet the 'love of Christ constraining' bound together in its cords

those most separated by time or distance; those who were the types of

the most extreme differences of which the human race is capable.

"The thought of this brotherhood of all mankind, the great family on

earth, not only implies that all men have certain rights and claims at

our hands; it is also a thought of peace and comfort. First, it leads

us to rest in God, not as selecting us because he had a favor unto us,

but as infinitely just to all mankind. To think of ourselves, or our

Church, or our age, as the particular exceptions of his mercy, is not

a thought of comfort, but of perplexity. Secondly, it links our

fortunes with those of men in general, and gives us the same support

in reference to our eternal destiny, that we receive from each other

in a narrow sphere in the concerns of daily life. Thirdly, it relieves

us from all anxiety about the condition of other men, of friends

departed, of those ignorant of the Gospel, of those of a different

form of faith from our own, knowing that God, who has thus far lifted

up the veil, 'will justify the circumcision through faith, and the

uncircumcision by faith'; the Jew who fulfils the law, and the Gentile

who does by nature the things contained in the law."--Vol. II. p. 126.

What the doctrine of universality in the Divine government was to that

age,--as new and transporting,--is in our own "the clear perception of

the moral nature of God, and of his infinite truth and justice." This

is one of the many deep sayings, sad and wise, quietly dropped by our

author in a series of disquisitions, that show, among other things,

how well he understands its scope. Everywhere his care is to disengage

Christianity from the theological conceptions fastened on it by a

coarser age; and, having restored the purity of its moral vision, to

enlarge its horizon to the whole extent of modern knowledge and

experience. Penetrating beneath the figures natural to St. Paul, the

very changes of which show them to _be_ figures, he finds that nothing

can be more abhorrent from the Apostle's thought than the doctrine of

"satisfaction," which is hunted down, in every form, with exhaustive

and indignant logic; that even the analogy of sacrifice "rather shows

us what the death of Christ was not, than what it was"; and that to

draw us into union with Christ, to fix our eye on his pure

self-renunciation as "the greatest moral act ever done in this world,"

to keep us in a mood that harmonizes our trust in God with our

distrust of ourselves, and to suggest more than it can explain of hope

and peace to a reconciled world, are the real functions, as of his

death, so of all the stages of his existence. This pure type of faith

emerges, we venture to affirm, without straining the rights of the

interpreter. The rest and freedom it gives to the mind is singularly

evident in the fine essay on Natural Religion. The author sets forth

from the Christian centre, and, consciously marking where he passes

the boundary of the apostolic view, surveys and brings to its

religious place the whole outlying realm of nature, history, and life,

that was unknown to Scripture, but is fact to us. The great Gentile

religions, now discriminated and interpreted, and ascertained to

follow certain laws of development; the breadth in philosophies, purer

and brighter as history passed on; the Natural Religion, which is the

counterpart of these in Christian times, and holds its place by the

side of revelation; and the ordinary state of character in morally

good but unspiritual persons, (state of "nature" rather than of

"grace,")--are reviewed and estimated with a breadth of observation

and a delicacy of reflection singularly impressive. Indeed, the

literature of religious philosophy affords few nobler productions than

this essay. With how true a hand and bright a touch is the following

picture drawn! We will but hang it up in our reader's imagination, and

leave him to commune with it alone.

"It is impossible not to observe that innumerable persons,--may we not

say the majority of mankind?--who have a belief in God and immortality,

have nevertheless hardly any consciousness of the peculiar doctrines of

the Gospel. They seem to live aloof from them in the routine of business

or of pleasure, 'the common life of all men,' not without a sense of

right, and a rule of truth and honesty, yet insensible to what our

Saviour meant by taking up the cross and following him, or what St. Paul

meant by 'being one with Christ.' They die without any great fear or

lively hope; to the last more interested about the least concerns of

this world than about the greatest of another. They have never in their

whole lives experienced the love of God, or the sense of sin, or the

need of forgiveness. Often they are remarkable for the purity of their

morals; many of them have strong and disinterested attachments, and

quick human sympathies; sometimes a stoical feeling of uprightness, or a

peculiar sensitiveness to dishonor. It would be a mistake to say they

are without religion. They join in its public acts; they are offended at

profaneness or impiety; they are thankful for the blessings of life, and

do not rebel against its misfortunes. Such men meet us at every turn.

They are those whom we know and associate with; honest in their

dealings, respectable in their lives, decent in their conversation. The

Scripture speaks to us of two classes, represented by the Church and the

world, the wheat and the tares, the sheep and the goats, the friends and

enemies of God. We cannot say in which of the two divisions we should

find a place for them.

"The picture is a true one, and, if we change the light by which we look

at it, may be a resemblance of ourselves no less than of other men.

Others will include most of us in the same circle in which we are

including them. What shall we say to such a state, common as it is to

both us and them? The fact that we are considering is not the evil of

the world, but the neutrality of the world, the indifference of the

world, the inertness of the world. There are multitudes of men and women

everywhere who have no peculiarly Christian feelings, to whom, except

for the indirect influence of Christian institutions, the fact that

Christ died on the cross for their sins has made no difference; and who

have, nevertheless, the common sense of truth and right almost equally

with true Christians. You cannot say of them, 'There is none that doeth

good; no, not one.' The other tone of St. Paul is more suitable: 'When

the Gentiles that know not the law do by nature the things contained in

the law, these not knowing the law are a law unto themselves.' So of

what we commonly term the world, as opposed to those who make a

profession of Christianity, we must not shrink from saying, 'When men of

the world do by nature whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things

are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, these, not being

conscious of the grace of God, do by nature what can only be done by his

grace.' Why should we make them out worse than they are? We must cease

to speak evil of them ere they will judge fairly of the characters of

religious men. That, with so little recognition of His personal relation

to them, God has not cast them off, is a ground of hope rather than of

fear,--of thankfulness, not of regret."--Vol. II. p. 416.