'Y^LH°¥IMlWEI&SflirY«

DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

GIFT OF
The Rer. Oscar E. Maurer, D. D.
Pastor
First Church, New Haven
1909 . mR 

SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT
OF ST. PAUL

A. G. SHERWOOD & CO.
PRINTERS NEW YORK

Spiritual Development
of St. Paul

BY THE
REV. GEORGE MATHESON
M.A., D.D., F.R.S.E.
MIXEBTEB OF THE PABISH OF ST. BEENABD'S, EDINBTJBQH

NEW YORK
THOMAS WHITTAKER
a and 3 Bible House

PREFACE.
This little book has occupied me at intervals nearly
two years in writing, and a good many years in
thinking. The problem I set before myself was
this: assuming that the thirteen epistles of St. Paul
are genuine, and waiving for the present all ques
tions of Biblical criticism, is it possible to regard
these as marking the stages of a progressive devel
opment? Is it possible out of these alone, and with
out the aid of any foreign materials, to construct a
fairly correct picture of the successive phases of
Paul's Christian experience? The design of the
book is therefore a limited one; it is strictly con
fined within these thirteen epistles. Even within
these boundaries its title involves an additional
limit. On the one hand it is a development of St.
Paul, not of Saul of Tarsus; on the other hand, it
is his spiritual development, as distinguished alike
from the course of his outer life and the growth of
his intellectual system. I leave on the one side his
missions, his shipwrecks, his dangers; I leave on the
other his theology, whether as interpreted by the
school of Tubingen or the school of Calvin, the dis
cussion of Jewish or Gentile tendencies, of grace

vi Spiritual Development of St. Paid.
and law, of Episcopacy and Presbyterianism, of
predestination and free-will. The only doctrines
alluded to are those which bear upon the main thesis —
the growth of his humanitarian consciousness,
the widening of his sympathy from Jerusalem to
Rome. The work, as will be seen from its dimen
sions, is merely the introduction to a vast subject.
It indicates lines of development which might be
followed out to any extent, but it has left it for
others to do so. The authorities are the epistles
themselves, and there is no citation from any German
or English work. I have studied above all things to
keep the mind not only unbiassed by, but as much
as possible forgetful of, previous speculations, and
have striven to gather the materials only from what
claims to be the original source.

GEORGE MATHESON.

19 St. Bernard's Crescent,
Edinburgh, 1890.

CONTENTS.

CHAP. PAOE
I. INTRODUCTORY,  1
II. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCES, ... 22
III. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCES  (continued), . 41
TV. ARABIA : AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCES — (con
cluded),  60
V. PAUL'S FIRST GOSPEL : SOURCES OF HIS CHRISTIAN
EDUCATION  85
VI. PAUL'S SECOND STRUGGLE AND ITS RESULT, . . 113
VTI. PAUL'S THIRD STRUGGLE AND ITS RESULT, . . 134
TOT. DEVELOPMENT OF PAUL'S RELIGIOUS VIEWS, . . 152
IX. THE FORESHADOWINGS OF A NEW DAY, . . . 179
X. PAUL AND CHRISTIAN IMPERIALISM, . . . 196
XI. PAUL AND THE UNIVERSE  216
Xn. PAUL AND THE FAMILY,  235
XIII. PAUL AND SOCIAL GRADATIONS  252
XIV. THE COMPLETED JOURNEY, , , , . , 270

spiritual development
of st. paul

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.

I intend to make an attempt to write the inner
biography of Paul the Apostle. I shall try to trace
the course of his spiritual history from the day of
his conversion to Christianity until the day when
he declared himself "ready to be offered." It is
a task not of great length, but of great magnitude.
It does not need a multitude of pages like the
record of his outward biography. It requires no
maps nor charts, no study of contemporary men
and^ manners, no consultation of references foreign
to his own actual writings. To write a man's
inward biography demands before all things the
undergoing of a kindred experience and the living
of a common life. But if in this respect the task is
comparatively easy, it is in another aspect supremely

2 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
arduous. The difficulty of writing St. Paul's in
ward biography is not the difficulty of statement,
but of discovery. The historian of his outward life
has the facts already made to his hand, but he who
would record the history of his spiritual experience
must begin by interpreting the facts. The outward
historian has the narrative of the Acts before him,
and he has simply, with intelligence and observation,
to follow the course of the stream. But the historian
of the inner life has before him only a series of let
ters, written at different times and dictated to
different readers; and before he can even enter on
his labours, he requires to arrange and to examine
the order of those spiritual sentiments whose his
torical unfolding is to be the subject of his narrative.
There is a preliminary difficulty which meets us
at the very door. I have spoken of arranging and
examining the order of Paul's spiritual experience.
I shall be asked at the outset what right I have to
assume the existence of such an order. Was not
this man inspired, and does not inspiration imply
the denial of any such development? In the case
of an ordinary man, it is legitimate to consult his
correspondence'with a view to determine the gradual
unfolding of his mental life. It is legitimate in
such cases to refer a certain utterance to a certain
period, and to explain a particular view by its con-
gruity with a particular stage of progress. But is
such a process admissible in the case of one who, by
supposition, was struck by the light of heaven — who
was lifted by a Divine inspiration from out the com
mon level on which moved his country and his age,

Introductory. 3
and translated by a seemingly instantaneous act into
a height of heavenly illumination? That is the
question which meets us on the threshold, and for
the present bars the threshold. It is by reason of
this question that the inward biography of St. Paul
has remained to this day one of the most untrodden
fields in history. Volumes have been written on his
outward life, pages have been expended on his mis
sionary journeys, sermons have been multiplied on
the' lessons of his perils and his trials, — but the
history of the man himself, the record of his inward
experience, the study of his spiritual development
from day to day, has as yet occupied little attention.
We have a series of letters, professedly written by
his hand, extending in chronological order from the
First Epistle to the Thessalonians to the Second
Epistle to Timothy, but it has rarely occurred to us
to imagine that the chronological order of these
letters marks a mental order too. It has rarely
occurred to us to inquire why the Epistle to the
Thessalonians should have had an earlier date than
the Epistle to the Romans, or why the Epistle to the
Romans should have occupied a previous place to
the letter inscribed to the Ephesians. It has com
monly been taken for granted that the teaching in
these respective documents exhibits no other mark
of progress than that of an earlier and a later note
of time. And the reason of this is not hard to find.
Is has been assumed that Paul, being an inspired
man, ought not to be a creature of flesh and blood;
that, being a recipient of the Divine life, he should
be freed from the conditions of human development.

4 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
He may write to Thessalonica in the year 52, and
to Timothy in the year 68, but we are not allowed
to believe that these sixteen years covered a growth
ef experience. It is deemed irreverent to suppose
that a man might put his hand upon any of St.
Paul's letters and determine its age by the degree
of its maturity. Such a permission would be the
confession of a progress from the imperfect to the
perfect, and the admission of such a progress is held to
be incompatible with the claim to be an inspired soul.
The question is — Is it so? Is the idea of inspira
tion incompatible with the idea of progress? If we
were dealing with any other religion than Chris
tianity, I would without hesitation answer Yesl The
peculiarity of all other religions consists, to my
mind, in this — that they regard the inspiration of a
human soul as something which lifts that soul outside
of its humanity, something which raises it beyond
the conditions of progress and places it in an at
mosphere from which it can never be moved. But
the Christian idea of inspiration is distinguished
from the heathen or Gentile idea precisely by the
negation of this belief. Christianity in its very
key-note strikes upon a new conception; it declares
that the inspiration of a human soul is no longer to
be regarded as an abolition of its human growth,
or a transcending of its human development. The
life of the Christian Founder is introduced into the
world as a divinely inspired life, but the Divine
inspiration is allowed to unfold through the stages
of the infant, the child, the youth, and the man. It
is represented as a growth in wisdom and in know-

Introductory. 5
ledge and in Divine favour. Each stage is full up
to the measure of its capacity, but the capacity is
in no case transcended before the time. The child
hood is perfect, but it is the perfection of a child —
a perfection which consists in a will subject to
authority and a mind inquiring in the temple of
truth. The youth is perfect, but it is the perfection
of obedience in the path of youth — of consenting
to abide in obscurity until the fulness of the time
be come, and submitting to support its way by the
result of daily toil. The dawn of manhood is per
fect, but it is the perfection peculiar to the dawn —
the perfection which can stand upon the mount of
temptation and choose between the alternatives of
right and wrong.
Such is the leading idea of Christian inspiration
— the growth of the Divine through the capacities
of the human. Appearing at the very outset in the
life of the Christian Founder, it is designed to be
repeated in the lives of all His followers. For it
must not be forgotten that Christianity in its orig
inal manifestation is not the reception of a system
of doctrines, but the assimilation to a particular
type of life. It is the leading thought of the New
Testament, and it is the specially prominent thought
in the writings of St. Paul, that the life of the
Christian Founder is repeated in the lives of His
followers, that the stages of each Christian's expe
rience are designed to be a reproduction of those
stages by which the Son of man passed from Beth
lehem to Calvary. Paul has himself declared1 that
> 2 dor. 111. 18.

6 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
the process of Christian development is a process
whereby the follower of Christ is "transformed into
the same image from glory to glory." No words
can more adequately express his view of the nature
of this new spiritual order. It is a transformation
not only into the image of the Master, but into that
progressive form in which the image of the Master
unfolded itself. The Christian is to ascend by the
steps of the same ladder on which the life of the
Son of man climbed to its goal; he is to proceed
"from glory to glory." He, too, is to have his
childhood, his youth, and his manhood; his period
of subjection to outward authority; his time of
temptation in the wilderness; his experience of
burden-bearing in the haunts of the great city. He
is to have his time of growth and his age of
maturity, his season of inquiry in the temple of
truth, and his day for imparting the fruits of his
ripened mind. No man can read Paul's epistles
without being impressed on every page with the pre
dominance of this thought. The key-note of his whole
teaching is " Christ in you." He tells us that there
is a stage in which Christ is only formed within the
soul — a period which is no more than the process of
being born.1 He tells us that there is a time in
which the religious life is, like the beginning of all
other life, so much under the dominion of sense that
it can only be fed by the sensuous.' He tells us
that the manifestations of each Christian period
must be proportionate to the capacities of that
period — that the child must speak as a child, under-
i Gal. Iv. 19. s 1 Oor. ill. 1, 2.

Introductory. 7
stand as a child, think as a child.1 He tells us that
the goal of Christian manhood, which is the goal of
perfect understanding, is only to be reached in that
day when the soul shall have completed its stages of
rooting and grounding, and shall have attained the
stature of universal love.2
Is it to be supposed that Paul himself was an
exception to this rule? Is it to be thought for a
moment that the man who, of all others, lays such
stress on the progressive nature of the Divine life
should have been, or should have believed himself to
be, exempt from that progress? We have thirteen
letters professedly written by his hand — letters dis
tinguished from most of such public documents by
their intense humanness. Seldom have men in their
private epistles exhibited such an utter absence of
self-consciousness as does the apostle of the Gentiles
in these exhortations to the Christian public. He
seems to be writing off his guard. He makes us feel
that his letters are a revelation of himself — that he is
not directing his thoughts, but being borne along by
them. We feel that his ideas are too rapid for his
pen, and that the machinery of writing is an encum
brance. We seem to be in the presence, not of a
scribe, but of a conversationalist, a man who is pour
ing out his whole soul through the vehicle of words,
regardless of sequence and regardless of grammar.
We are impressed with the conviction that, if ever
the mind of man was revealed to his fellow-man, it
has been so revealed in these epistolary documents,
— documents whose eloquence is greatest in their
1 1 Cor. xltt. 11. " Ephee. 111. 17,

8 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
want of elegance, and which reached their highest
summit of literary art in the very point where they
display the perfect exuberance of nature. In these
letters we have a diary, a record of personal ex
perience extending probably over sixteen years, and
displaying with consummate artlessness the inmost
heart of the man. No man can read that diary
without being impressed with the fact that one day
of the life is essentially different from the other.
We are made to feel that, in the experience of St.
Paul, to-day is not the same as yesterday; that the
record of life which emerges in 2d Timothy moves on
an entirely new plane from that record of life which
appears in the First Epistle to the Thessalonians.
The question is, Are we to account for this difference
by natural or by unnatural causes? Are we to sup
pose that the man revealed a development of expe
rience by an act of ideal imagination, or are we to
suppose that he revealed it because he had actually
passed through it? Surely the answer cannot be
for a moment doubtful. Surely we are entitled to
believe that what appears on the page of biography
has resulted from the laws of life, and that the
narrative of the apostle's experience is an evidence
of the apostle's growth.
The problem which hes before us is not merely
one of personal interest. It is not simply worthy
of investigation as a study of individual experience;
it is interesting as a study of the Church's historical
movement. The inward history of St. Paul is an
epitome of the inward history of the Church uni
versal. The life of the Gentile apostle exhibits in

Introductory. 9
his own experience the successive and progressive
stages through which the development of the Chris
tian commonwealth passed during its first hundred
years. Any man who wishes to study the religious
history of that century can find no better key to the
lock than an intelligent perusal of St. Paul's epistles;
for in these epistles he will find a mirror of those
successive phases of thought through which the life
of the Church was unfolded, from its dawning on
the plains of Galilee till the beginning of its spir
itual empire in the city of the seven hills.
The history of the Christian Church during its
first hundred years is a tale of three cities — Jeru
salem, Antioch, and Rome. Whosoever desires to
master the philosophy of that history should keep
constantly and carefully in his mind the names of
these three cities. They mark at once the phases of
Christianity's outward fortunes, and the stages of its
inward development. The beginning of the new
religion is Jerusalem. Christianity appeared in the
world as a consummation and fulfilment of Judaism.
The first disciples of the faith never dreamed that
they were the founders of a new religion, did not
even regard themselves as the inaugurators of a dis
tinct party. They no more meant to separate from
the Church of Judea than John Wesley meant to
separate from the Church of England. Singularly
enough, the earliest name by which they were called
was just that of Methodists, or "men of the way."1
They looked upon themselves not as innovators upon
the religion of their fathers, but as those who had
1 Acts lx. 2.

10 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
been privileged to discover the method in which
that religion was to become the faith of the world.
Accordingly, it never occurred to them that they
ought to do anything to indicate their separateness;
it was their constant aim and study to convey the
contrary impression. They instituted no new rites,
they inaugurated no new ceremonies. They made
no effort to congregate themselves in places of
worship distinct from the common resorts of their
countrymen. They met in the same temple where
the Pharisees and the Sadducees were wont to as
semble; they observed the same hours of prayer
which from time immemorial had been prescribed
to the Jewish people.1 They would have stared
with astonishment if they had been called disloyal
Churchmen, or even broad Churchmen. They pro
fessed to be religious conservatives, propagators of
the old, defenders of the ancient regime. IT they
had any quarrel it was with innovators, with those
who had grafted a subsequent tradition upon the
original faith of their fathers. They desired to go
back, and the only liberty they claimed was the
right to go back to the beginning. They professed
to find the warrant for their special mode of preach
ing, not in the descent of new spiritual revelations,
but in the study of those early oracles which had
constituted at once the foundation and the glory oi
the Church of the Jewish nation.
The second stage of Christianity's ancient historj
was Antioch.2 The curtain here rose upon a neM
scene. It was here that for the first time, accord
i See Acts 111. » Acts si. 26.

Introductory. j 1
ing to our earliest historian, the disciples of the
Christian faith received the Christian name. Hitherto
they had borne only the Jewish name, had been un
distinguished by the spectator from the creed and
customs of their countrymen. But here, in this
Syrian capital, the differences which the home at
mosphere had failed to reveal were brought clearly
into view. It began to break upon the minds of
men, to break upon the minds of the first disciples
themselves, that although Judaism might be regarded
as a germinal Christianity, Christianity was far more
than a developed Judaism. I may climb to the top
of a hill by an old familiar road, and to this extent
I am entitled to say that the hill-top is the goal of
that road. But when I have reached the top of the
hill, I am certain to find that it could have been
reached by many other avenues than the one through
which I approached it — that I have no right to re
gard this summit of my climbing as the exclusive or
peculiar goal of the old familiar road. Now this
was precisely the discovery to which the Church of
the first Christian century attained in the city of
Antioch. It had reached the top of a hill, had
reached it by an old familiar road which hitherto it
had believed to be the only road. But from the
vantage-ground of the summit it found that this
belief had been a delusion. It found that the height
which had been now attained through the steps of
the old rigime was susceptible of being discovered
through totally different steps. For the first time
in the history of the movement, the Christian religion
presented to its friends and to its contemporaries

12 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
the appearance of a novelty. Its novelty lay in its
very aspect of universality. Hitherto it had believed
itself to be simply the flower of Judaism, but at
Antioch it discovered that it was the flower of the
religious spirit itself. Hitherto it had imagined
that men could only approach it through the gate of
the temple, but at Antioch it discovered that the
gate of the temple was only one of a multitude of
avenues. Accordingly, for the first time, Christianity
exhibited the appearance of a broken unity. Its
votaries were no longer seen following one common
track. They approached it from all directions; they
came to it by the most opposite roads. The Jew
still sought it by the old familiar portal, still pro
fessed to hold that it lay through the gate of his own
national worship. But the representatives of Gentile
nations claimed each his own gate, and refused to
pass through the ancient avenue. Antioch was the
beginning of religious strife, because it was the
beginning of religious freedom: the first-fruit of
private judgment is ever unripe. As the mother-
city of Jerusalem receded, there was no longer any
central tribunal. Each man fell back upon the
authority of his own experience, and the variety of
experience produced a variety of schools. The
river was parted and became four heads — the same
four which appeared simultaneously in the Church
of Corinth,1 and reappeared persistently in the
churches of the Greek republics. It was the in
evitable result of that moment of transition in which
Christianity ceased to be the immediate privilege
i 1 Cor. 1. 12.

Introductory. 13
of a race and passed into the possession of universal
man. By-and-by there came a third stage of the drama;
a new mother-city began to rise for the young church
upon the ruins of the old. The authority of Jerusa
lem had been superseded by the anarchy of Antioch;
the anarchy of Antioch was in turn to give place to
the sovereignty of Rome. Christianity had lost its
political fountain-head, but it was to find a political
ocean; the river had been parted after leaving its
source, but it was_ to be united again on reaching
the sea. That common sea where the divisions of
the young church were to be merged in a second
unity was the city of Rome. As soon as that city
received a Christian church, it became the centre of
gravity to all other churches. It did so, not because
it was the supposed abode of St. Peter, but because
it was the actual abode of the emperor. It was the
imperial and not the episcopal distinction of Rome
that made it the seat of the new authority. Long
before her bishop had acquired or even claimed the
right to exclusive jurisdiction, the city of the seven
hills asserted her desire to be the monitory and
reconciling mother.1 She aspired to be the arbiter
between the divisions of the Christian community,
and she did not aspire in vain. There was much in
the constitution of Rome which made her fit to be
such an arbiter. Gentile to the very core, she yet
exhibited a greater analogy to Judaism than can be
found even in Semitic races. Nowhere with such
1 See Clement's 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, whose date is certainly
not later than 95 a.d.

14 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
prominence were the features of the East and West
blended together. Rome and Jerusalem, in some
respects the opposite poles of thought, had yet
elements in common which ultimately went far to
unite the old faith with the new. Both were based
in their social structure on the recognition of a
moral code, on a sense of the majesty of law. Both
placed in the foreground of that law the idea of
justice, the rendering of rights by man to man.
Both in a sense were theocratic identifiers of the
secular with the sacred; the Jewish king was the
Lord's anointed, the Roman emperor was the head of
a priesthood. Both aspired to a universal dominion,
a dominion which should radiate from themselves as a
centre and embrace in its circumference all ends of
the earth. What is more remarkable still, both
seem to have entertained one common ideal of the
nature of universal dominion. The conception of a
kingdom of God sketched out by the writer of the
Pentateuch is the idea of a number of relatively in
dependent states, bound together into unity by the
recognition of a common theocratic centre. Such
is precisely the ideal towards the realisation of which
the Roman empire aspired. She, too, aimed at the
establishment of a kingdom, not upon the ruins of
other kingdoms, but upon the consent of other king
doms to recognise herself as their theocratic head.
She never sought to press out the life of the nations
she subdued; she was willing not only that they
should preserve their lives, but that they should pre
serve their individual varieties. She only desired
that these individual varieties should consent to

Introductory. 15
circle round a common sun, and agree to accept
their independent life as a gift of grace from herself.
It is not surprising that under these circumstances
Rome should have eventually become in a strictly
literal sense the New Jerusalem. She actually suc
ceeded in being precisely that form of government
which the Jewish commonwealth had aspired to be.
If the old Jerusalem had possessed strength equal to
her will, she would have anticipated that model of
empire which imperial Rome achieved. The old
Jerusalem's ideal was, without collusion and without
imitation, an adumbration of that which appeared in
the empire of the Caesars. So early as the date of
the 122d Psalm, there had floated before the mind
of a Hebrew poet the image of a city which was to
be the uniting centre of surrounding differences —
of a city to which, once a year, the conflicting tribes
were to go up, and within whose walls they were to
become one family. That was the mode of conquest
to which, in its best and purest moments, the Jewish
theocracy aspired, — not the subjugation of national
peculiarities nor the destruction of tribal differences,
but the recognition by different tribes of a common
centre, in the city of Jerusalem. And that was the
mode of conquest to which the Roman empire ac
tually attained. The dream of the old Jerusalem
was fulfilled in the New. The city of the seven hills
became the central city of the world — the place to
which the tribes of the earth went up to claim a
common brotherhood. Here, for the first time in
hist/v^ was realised the thought which had been
'¦stressed on the very threshold of Jewish literature

16 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
¦ — the idea of an empire whose component parts were
relatively independent, but which found their union
in the recognition of a theocratic head. In imperial
Rome, as in ancient Israel, the bond which was de
signed to join the nations of the world was the
acceptance of a central seat of government whose
authority was supposed to rest on the immediate will
of heaven.
In this brief and necessarily superficial sketch, I
have been guilty of no irrelevancy. My sole design
has been to show what was that outward history of
which the life of St. Paul was a mirror. For, indeed,
it will be found that the main value of this life, from
a historical point of view, consists in the fact that it
is an epitome, an abridgment, a microcosm, of the
first Christian century. The life of St. Paul, like the
history of his age, is a tale of three cities — Jeru
salem, Antioch, and Rome. Alike in the narrative
of the Acts, and in the order of his own Epistles, the
course of the apostle exhibits a progress from the
city of the Jews to the city of the Caesars. His life
embraces that period which reaches from the end of
the beginning to the beginning of the end. He ap
pears upon the scene precisely at that stage where
Christianity has ceased to be a merely individual
movement; he disappears from the scene precisely
at that moment in which Christianity begins to be
the centre of the world. We first meet him on the
streets of Jerusalem, incarnating in his own person
all the leading characteristics of his nation, and
carrying these instincts along with him even be
yond the crisis of Damascus. We next meet him

Introductory. It
on the streets of Antioch, and find him parting with
much of his old life, waking into a struggle between
the present and the past, and realising a vivid con
trast between this world and the world to come.
Then we see him once more in a third and final
attitude. Even before he has reached the city of
Rome he is touched by the culture of the empire,
and when he enters that city he is dominated by its
culture. There rises before him the image of a new
theocracy, wider and more comprehensive than the
old, — the image of a kingdom of God on earth which
shall realise the gospel figure of the branches and
the tree. He sees in anticipation the various races
of men, without sacrificing their nationality, con
senting to recognise one common head, and united
in the acknowledgment of one paramount and sacred
sovereignty. His letters henceforth breathe the
Roman atmosphere — the atmosphere of reconcilia
tion. His world ceases to be the opposite of the
world to come; grace ceases to be the antithesis of
nature; Gentile ceases to be the contrary of Jew.
The various forms of humanity are beheld as the
members of one vast body, each necessary to the
other, none adequate in itself; and the bond of union
to the whole is a common life of love which enables
them, even amidst their varieties, to say, ' ' we being
many are one."
Such is the historical interest of the study now
before us. It is not, however, in its historical as
pect that I intend mainly to pursue it. I want to
look at it chiefly from the side of religious expe
rience, and from the standpoint of Paul's personal

18 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
life. Accordingly, I shall ask leave to disregard
almost altogether the narrative of the Acts, to
assume that no documents are before me except
those thirteen letters which are professedly written
by St. Paul, and which contain a direct record of
St. Paul's experience. In taking this course I am
not actuated by any doubt of the substantial credi
bility of the Acts, but solely and entirely by the
desire to reach the most immediate sources from
which information on this subject can be obtained.
The book of Acts is professedly not an immediate
source. However much it may be the work of an
eyewitness, it is by its own admission the work of
an outsider, of one who records the deeds and words
of St. Paul as they struck his own eye and ear.
But to reach the direct source of a biography, we
must hear the man speak himself, must arrive at the
secret of his inner life by listening to his own in
ward communings. In the case of Paul we have in
our possession such a record — a record which, if
discovered for the first time, would be hailed as
simply invaluable. I wish in this study to try to"
imagine that for the first time we have made such a
discovery. I shall try to approach the letters of St.
Paul as if I had found a new document. I shall make
an attempt to come to them with a fresh eye, and,
as much as possible, with an unbiassed mind. Above
all, I shall study to confine myself to that which is
strictly normal, that which lies within the range of
Christian experience.
The record of a life's development can only begin
at the point where that life has begun. It must take

Introductory. 19
notice of its earliest manifestation, but it has noth
ing to do with the question how that manifestation
arose. The earliest manifestation of man's physical
life - is perhaps an infant's cry, and he who would
record the progressive experiences of such a life will
require to take notice of the cry. But within the
province of this study he is by no means entitled to
inquire what was the origin of that sensation which
prompted the cry. That is a perfectly legitimate
question, but it is a question for the apologist and
for the scientist; it is outside the record of the devel
opment itself. So is it with the study now before
us. To trace the spiritual development of St. Paul
we are required to go back to his initial experience,
but no further. We are required to put our hand
upon the earliest phase of difference which distin
guishes the life of Paul the apostle from the life of
Saul of Tarsus, but it is outside our province to ask
whence that phase itself arose. To inquire into the
origin of the light which marked for him the bound
ary of transition from the old into the new belongs
to the sphere of the apologist, and of the apologist
alone. For us it will be enough to trace the course
of the light after it has risen, and to mark the
stages of its progress from the dawn to the perfect
day.

CHAPTER II.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCES.
I have said that the record of St. Paul's spiritual
experience embraces directly those sixteen years
from the writing of 1st Thessalonians to the writing
of 2d Timothy. But indirectly it embraces a great
deal more. Did it not embrace more, a great part of
Paul's life would be to us an unknown land. By the
time we meet with him in the First Epistle to the
Thessalonians he is already no longer young. He
has had behind him a great history, which has left
its marks upon him, and made him what he is. What
is that history? Have we any record that can help
to bridge the blank space between the hour in which
he first accepted Christ and the hour in which he
appears upon the scene as the prominent actor in the
development of Christ's religion? Even if we in
tended to avail ourselves of the narrative in the Acts,
we would find little light upon this question. In
that narrative the brilliant beginning of the spiritual
life of Paul is followed almost instantaneously by a
period of eclipse and silence. The man who on the
plains of Damascus is seen illuminated by the fire of
heaven disappears immediately from our view, and

Autobiographical Beminiscenses. 21
is lost for a time amid the shadows. We meet with
him for the first time at Antioch, but Antioch is
clearly not his beginning. There is a period of
silence in the background which requires to be
accounted for, and which is necessary to explain the
present attitude of the man. How is that silence
to be broken? Where shall we find the materials
for filling up the blank between the day of Damascus
and the days of Antioch? It cannot be supposed
that Saul of Tarsus emerged in the twinkling of an
eye from the attitude of an uncompromising Jew to
the position of an unbending Gentile; such a transi
tion would be as contrary to spiritual as it would be
to natural evolution. We feel instinctively that, in
the Christian development of St. Paul, Jerusalem
must have a place before Antioch. We feel that,
wherever and whenever the desiderated record shall
be discovered, it shall be the record of an experience
rather Jewish than Gentile, and separated by no
very violent convulsion from the experience of his
former days. The record which shall break the
silence will be one which shall exhibit Paul the
apostle at the slightest possible remove from Saul of
Tarsus, and shall reveal in the features of the incip
ient Christian the transmitted lineaments of the
developed Jew.
Is such a source of knowledge attainable? I
believe that it is. It cannot, as we have seen, be
derived from the narrative of the Acts; there is
here a break in the history. But there is another
direction from which information may be sought
— those very letters of St. Paul which belong to a

22 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
comparatively late stage of his outward life. It will
be found that these letters, emerging as they do
from the apostle's days of middle age, have yet in
them that autobiographical stamp which is the
characteristic of letters in general. Written to
serve a particular and a present purpose, they yet
from time to time throw back a retrospective light.
If they contain flashes premonitory of the future,
they equally exhibit gleams illuminative of the past.
The apostle almost unconsciously takes us into his
confidence, and tells us what has been his previous
experience. There are many great writers who are
able from beginning to end to preserve a strict im
personality; one would never know from Shake
speare that he had ever been a child or a boy. But
Paul is not one of these. Completely absorbed as he
is in the study of that which is impersonal, he is yet
unable to conceal that there was a time when he
understood and spake as a child. Ever and anon in
the very heart of his most abstruse discussions there
open glimpses of perspective which cast back a light
on his past development. If we can succeed in
collecting and combining these, if we can conceive
any plausible scheme which would account for their
chronological order, we shall arrive at a very prob
able history of that portion of Paul's life which is
at present wrapped in silence. We cannot, indeed,
on a matter of this sort, expect to reach demonstra
tive evidence; we must be content to allow some
margin for the play of the historical imagina
tion. But we shall at all events have a working
hypothesis which, in the absence of any better guide,

Autobiographical Beminiscenses. 23
may serve as a solution of much that is now
obscure. The first of these autobiographical reminiscences
is one which brings Paul before us in an attitude
quite unique in apostolic history. Every disciple
who embraced Christianity made a transition from
an old into a new life; to this extent there is
nothing peculiar in the experience of St. Paul. But
St. Paul himself tells us that his adoption of Chris
tianity was distinguished from that of the other
apostles by the fact that, in embracing it, he made
a transition not merely from the old into the new,
but from the persecutor into the partisan, — " For I
am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to
be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church
of God. But by the grace of God I am what I
am."1 Here is a biographical reminiscence of far-
reaching value, not so much for its own sake as
for the inferences which are to be deduced from
it. St. Paul declares inat he occupied a unique
attitude in relation to the other apostles. The
question which naturally suggests itself is, Why?
Looking back from the standpoint of our present
knowledge, we should certainly not have imagined,
had we not been told, that there had been any
difference between the pre-Christian experience of
Paul and the pre-Christian experience of his col
leagues. Nor, even after we have been told, is it
at first sight very easy to account for the difference.
Why should the original attitude of Paul towards
Christianity have been more hostile than the original
i Cor. xv. 9, 10.

24 Spiritual Developmeut of St. Paul.
attitude of Peter or John or Thomas? There is
nothing in the character of Paul which would lead
us to expect that he should have manifested any
hostility to the name of Jesus; everything the
reverse. It is not too much to say that there is
a greater inherent congruity between the character
of Paul and the life of Jesus than there is between
the life of Jesus and the first historical pictures of
the character of John. If there ever was a man
who, from a human point of view, might have been
expected to sympathise with Jesus of Nazareth, that
man was Saul of Tarsus. Unlike almost every other
of the original disciples, the beginning of his Chris-
tain experience exhibited the promise and potence
of a sacrificial life. Here, almost alone in the re
cords of early Christianity, we are brought into con
tact with a man who does not begin by asking an
equivalent for the service on which he is about to
enter. We see him from the very outset consenting
to leave all and follow Jesus, without ever once ask
ing the question "What, then, shall we have?"
We are impressed in him with the paramount and
dominating presence of that sense of duty which is
the perpetual foe of self-interest. It never occurs
to him to weigh the consequences of the step he is
taking; it never enters into his mind to measure the
earthly loss by a possible earthly gain. All he knows
is that he has heard a voice calling him, and that he
has no choice but to obey, ne surrenders himself to
privation, pain, poverty, for the sake of love, and
in so surrendering himself he manifests the ripest
fruit of the sacrificial life which had yet been

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 25
given to the world. Is it conceivable that such a
man should, a few hours before, have been manifest
ing a personal hostility to the character of one who,
considered from a purely human aspect, was so pre
eminently and markedly the counterpart of his own
soul? I answer, it is not. But I ask, Is there anything
in the circumstances of the case which warrants
us to conceive such a thing? Is the history of Saul
of Tarsus the history of a man who was converted
from antagonism to the character of Jesus? There
is not a particle of evidence that in the mind of
Saul there ever existed such an antagonism. The
opposition in his mind was not to the character but
to the name or claim of Jesus. How much he had
learned of the narrative of Christ's earthly life we
can never know, but the very fact of the silence on
this point is strongly confirmatory of the notion that
the narrative of Christ's earthly life was not the
ground of his antipathy. His antipathy rested on
something which was posthumous, on the claim set
up by the disciples to the Messianic dignity of their
departed Lord. Why that claim should have been
repulsive to him we shall presently see; but mean
time I wish to direct attention to the marked con
trast which this view of the matter interposes be
tween the experience of the unconverted Paul and
the experience of the unconverted Peter, Thomas,
and John. When we speak of the comparative an
tipathy of Saul and the other apostles, do we suffi
ciently consider their comparative difficulties? Do
we sufficiently bear in mind that the starting-point

26 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
of Saul was quite different from the starting-point
of the other apostles? Saul began precisely where
they ended; their inner room was only his threshold.
The starting-point of Saul was the recognition of
Jesus as Messiah; but the recognition of Jesus as
Messiah was a comparatively late stage in the pro
gress of the primitive apostles. No man can read
dispassionately the Gospel narrative, and not be
impressed with the fact that the first approach of
Jesus to His disciples was personal and not official.
The day is far spent before He asks them the ques
tion, "Whom do men say that lam; whom say ye
that I am?" Before He asked that question He
had already called them, charged them, organised
them, set them apart for their mission. His aim
was to attract them, not to His greatness but to
Himself; or rather it was to lead them to a recogni
tion of His greatness through a knowledge of Him
self. Accordingly the great question was suppressed,
postponed. Men were called at the outset not to
the recognition of a doctrine, but to the acceptance
of a life. They were not asked to believe something
about Jesus, but to believe in Jesus Himself. The
inquiry, who He was and whence He came, was
designedly kept in abeyance. The disciple was
desired to contemplate nothing but the man, to keep
his eye persistently fixed upon that which was
earthly and human. Step by step, unconsciously
to himself, he was attracted into an atmosphere of
love from which it was impossible for him to escape.
Before he knew it he was already taken captive,
already made to feel that the presence of the Master

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 27
was a vital element in his joy. And when at last
the Messianic claim was put; forth, — when at last
the crucial question came, "Whom say ye that I
am? " the disciple had been so fortified by his past
draught of love that, in spite of the recognised
difficulties of such a confession, he was able with
confidence to say, ' ' Thou art the Christ, the Son of
the living God."
I say, ' in spite of the recognised difficulties of
euch a confession.' For it must be acknowledged
that the claim of Jesus to be the Messiah was based
upon the very ground which to the popular mind of
Judea constituted the refutation of such a claim, —
the bearing of the cross. That the Son of man, be
cause He was Son of man, should be a special
sufferer; that the Messiah, by the very reason of
His sinlessness, should be a peculiar subject of
sorrow; that He in whom the heavenly Father
delighted should, just on the ground of that delight,
be exposed to a more than ordinary share of human
ills, — was a paradox which the mind of the Jewish
nation was quite unable to realise. In the view of
that nation the mark of Divine sonship was the
exemption from sorrow; the token of heavenly
favour was the possession of a path through ways
of earthly pleasantness. It had become a settled
point in the national consciousness that the good
man must be the prosperous man — that the perfect
man must be the most prosperous of all. Very
startling, therefore, must have sounded the an
nouncement which, according to St. Matthew,1 was
i Matt. xvi. 21.

28 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
made immediately after the proclamation of Jesus as
Messiah — "that He must go unto Jerusalem, and
suffer many things of the elders and chief priests
and scribes, and be killed." That it was startling
is manifest from the sequel. Peter cries out, " Be
it far from Thee, Lord: this shall not be unto Thee,"
and receives in return the withering rebuke, "Get
thou behind me, Satan." Shall it be asked why
an expression of natural affection should have met
with so vigorous a repulse? The answer is plain.
It was not an expression of natural affection; it
was the expression of an intellectual dogma — the
dogma that suffering is incompatible with Messiah-
ship. What excited the indignation of Jesus was
the sight of a rock on which the ship must inevi
tably have foundered, if the movement had not
been counteracted by the anchorage in a previous
love, — a love founded on human relations, and
fostered by personal companionship. The truth
is, Peter had here very nearly reached that" de
gree, and had altogether reached that ground
of antagonism which was afterwards so signally
manifested in the opposition of Saul of Tarsus. If
Saul's antipathy was more bitter, we know why.
It was because in his case there was no refuge in a
previous love. Saul had to struggle with the diffi
culty of the Messianic claim without any aid from
the memory of a past companionship. He had to
begin where the other disciples ended, and precisely
at that point where the other disciples stumbled.
What prevented their stumbling from becoming a
fall was the memory of their Christian past; Saul of

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 29
Tarsus had no such past, and therefore he had no
such memory. He was called to take his start from
the point of offence, and to walk backward into the
paths of pleasantness. He had to begin with the
cross, and thence retrace his steps toward the human
scenes of Galilee. I cannot but think that there is
an autobiographical reminiscence of this in the words
written at a future day, ' ' I count all things but loss
for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus. " 1
Why should he put the Christ before the Jesus?
Manifestly because he knew the Christ before the
Jesus, because he was called to behold Him as the
Messiah ere he was allowed to see Him as the man.
The earliest object presented to his gaze was pre
cisely that object which had repelled the gaze of the
first disciples; he was required to receive the cruci
fied Messiah before he was permitted to behold the
Prophet of Nazareth.
Now the question arises, Have we any record pre
served of Paul's state of mind at this juncture?
Have we anywhere throughout his writings an in
dication given of the difficulty which the Christian
problem presented to his own heart? I think we
have. I believe there is one passage which, al
though not professedly autobiographical, has yet all
the force of an autobiographical reminiscence, and
opens up a vista of perspective into the days of his
pre-Christian struggle. The words to which I allude
are the well-known declaration, " I am not ashamed
of the Gospel: for it is the power of God unto sal
vation to every one that believeth."2 The famili-
1 Phil. 111. 8. * Bom. 1. 18.

30 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
arity of the passage prevents us, I think, from seeing
its peculiarity. Why should Paul say, "I am not
ashamed of the Gospel?" Why should he use a
negative instead of a positive? Why should he be
content with asserting the mere absence of a sense
of disgrace, when he might have been expected to
exult in a sense of triumphant glory? Is not the
reason clear? Is it not plain that Paul deprecates
any feeling of shame concerning Christianity, because
he has a distinct remembrance of the time when
Christianity did present itself to his mind as a thing
to be ashamed of? He remembers that the Gospel
of Christ originally came before him in a garb of
extreme humility, and in an attitude which excited
his contempt as a son of Israel — an attitude which
impelled him to say, ' I would be ashamed to belong
to such a company. ' And if we ask what awakened
this sense of contempt, the answer is found in this
very passage. When Paul says, " I am not ashamed
of the Gospel: because it is power, " he means to
imply that he was at one time ashamed of it from
believing it to be weakness. His objection to recog
nise Jesus as the Messiah originated in the fact that
the cross of Jesus was contrary to the current ideal
of greatness.
I have already pointed out the strong analogy that
subsisted between the Roman empire and the Jewish
theocracy. Paul was a member of both. He was
environed by the traditions of his nation, and he
was surrounded by the atmosphere of imperialism.
Both ran directly counter to the recognition of a
regal claim which was based essentially on a power

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 31
of infinite stooping. Alike to the Roman and to the
Jew, the ideal of universal dominion was the pre
eminence attained by becoming the master of men.
The pre-eminence claimed by Christianity was on
precisely the opposite ground; the Son of man was
to be the servant of all. The thought came to Paul
not only as a novelty, but as an incongruity. I
know very well that he eould have found it in cer
tain passages of the Old Testament. In after-years
no one wondered so much as he at his failure to dis
cover an idea lying in the very heart of his own
scriptures; he could only attribute his obtuseness
to the blindness produced by materialism, or what
he calls "the god of this world." x None the less, it
remains true that neither he nor his countrymen
ever did discover it while they remained Jews. The
prophetic indications of a connection between suffer
ing and glory were foreign to the heart of the nation,
and repugnant to her historical traditions; and to
believe that God would manifest Himself through
sorrow, exposed a man to very much the same re
proach which is now experienced by any one who
holds the crude belief in a Divine manifestation
through chairs and tables. The reproach of early
Christianity was analogous to the reproach of
modern spirit-rapping — it was believed to indicate
a weakness on the part of the worshipper. Above
all, the idea of death was held to be incongruous
and incompatible with Divine manifestation. The
Jew resembled the Greek in his horror of death, yet
the difference was equal to the resemblance. The
i 2Cor.lv. 4.

32 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Greek's horror of death was a physical aversion;
that of the Jew was based upon a moral shame.
The Greek revolted from everything which im
perilled the pleasures of life, and therefore his
revolt from death was prompted by natural fear.
The Jew, on the other hand, was at no time im
mersed in the luxuries of life; the whole tenor of
his religion was in favour of abstinence and self-
denial. If he had believed death to be a part of
the originally prescribed course of nature, — in other
words, of the original will of God, he would have
accepted it stoically if not resignedly. But he be
lieved it to be something abnormal, irregular, dis
connected with the first plan of nature. It was to
him the penalty imposed for a violated law, and as
such he feared it. He saw in it the shadow that
eclipsed the face of God", and therefore the valley of
his own humiliation. The Jew feared death for the
same reason that the Brahman feared life — because
he believed it to be a state of separation from the
Deity; the entrance into a land of shades, illusions,
dreams. He never associated his greatest men with
the thought of death; Enoch escaped it, Elijah
passed it by, Moses had a hidden grave, Samuel was
seen to rise again. To the son of Israel, morality
was inseparable from immortality; the sting of death
was sin.
Now we have Paul's own words for the assertion
that he was in a very pronounced sense a scion of his
race. He tells us that in him there was a peculiar
meeting of national associations. ' ' If any other man
thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 33
the flesh, I more: circumcised the eighth day, of
the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an
Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a
Pharisee. " 1 Every expression of this autobiograph
ical statement is intended to suggest the idea that
the mind of Paul was imbued with a sense of the
necessary connection between physical power and
Messianic glory. He was of the stock of Israel —
a lineal descendant of the man who, as a token of
conquering strength, was declared to be a prince
with God. He was of the tribe of Benjamin — a
member of that community which had produced the
first Jewish king, the king whose name he himself
bore. Hewas a Pharisee — a follower of that sect
which measured everything by its external results,
and estimated the rewards of virtue by its triumphs
in the face of the world. Such a man, hedged round
on every side by the traditions of the past, must on
every side have been repelled by the spectacle of the
cross of Jesus. He was required to accept Jesus
precisely at that point where his national character
istics were assailed. He was required to acknowl-_
edge as Messiah one whom he believed to be dead;
as a scion of the stock of Israel, as a member of the
tribe of Benjamin, as a follower of the sect of the
Pharisees, he was bound to repudiate such a claim.
The one marvel is not his original opposition, but
his subsequent conversion. The problem is not to
account for Saul's virulence in comparison with the
other disciples, but for the fact that, with such
ground for a comparatively great antagonism, he
1 Phil. ill. 4, 5.

34 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
should ultimately have manifested a faith and love
and zeal to which the other disciples in their ripest
moments never attained.
It is true, Paul ultimately came to the conclusion
that the sacrificial life of the Gospel had in it that
very element which had attracted him in Judaism —
the element of power. But the very expression in
which he announces this discovery is significant.
He says "it is the power of God to every one that
believeth." He means to say that the beauty of the
building is quite apparent when a man has once
got inside the house. But this implies that in the
view of Paul there was a discrepancy between the
inside and the outside appearance. The passage, in
fact, has all the force of a biographical note, and
throws back a light upon Paul's original relation to
Christianity. It virtually tells us that he found in
the inside precisely the opposite of what he expected
to find — power instead of weakness. We can readily
understand how such a discovery should have formed
a bond of constancy to Christianity after he had
once embraced it, but the problem still remains un
solved why he should have embraced it at all. The
secret of Christianity's sacrificial power lay, ac
cording to Paul, in the interior of the building. It
could not, therefore, have been its sacrificial power
which drew Paul from the outside. We want to
know, not what kept him in, but what let him in;
not what enabled him to remain steadfast to his
discipleship, but what originally made him a disciple-
He now stands before us in the exterior of the build
ing, and to his eye the edifice looks so repulsive and

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 35
uninviting that he cannot bear to enter it. There
is a stone before the door which is to him a rock of
offence — the stone which originally lay on the se
pulchre of Jesus. He cannot accept as his Messiah
one who, in the sight of men, has passed through the
ordeal of death, and been laid in an earthly grave.
Who shall roll away the stone from the door? Who
shall remove the preliminary prejudice which to Paul
bars the threshold? Who shall reconcile to him the
claim of Jesus to be the Messiah with the undoubted
and notorious fact that He ' ' has been evidently set
forth crucified."?1
Now let us try to dismiss from our minds any
thought of documentary evidence. Let us, in the
meantime, ignore the knowledge that we have any
subsequent record of the immediate cause of Paul's
conversion. Let us confine ourselves strictly to the
fact that he has been confronted by these two
seemingly incongruous elements — the claim of Jesus
to Messiahship, and the consciousness that Jesus
had been crucified. The question is, In what direc
tion could a solution of the problem be found
whereby Paul could accept the Messiahship of Jesus
in spite of the fact of His crucifixion? I have no
hesitation in saying that there was only one possible
direction in which such a result could be found. If
Paul accepted Christ at all, he could only do so on
the ground of a belief that, in spite of the crucifixion,
Christ was still alive. In the very nature of the case
Paul was bound to be the apostle of immortality.
Circumstanced as he was, it was not possible for
' Gal. ill. 1.

36 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
him to be a Christian in any form except on the
ba,sis that Christ was risen. I am not prepared to
say that the same holds true for the other apostles.
They did not originally come to the Christ but to
the Jesus. Their first approach to the Son of man
was not on the ground of His Messiahship, but on
the ground of His humanity. They were drawn to
Him not by an exhibition of His power, but by a
vision of His gentleness, by a sight of His human
sympathy. Such an expression, independent- as it
was of Messianic manifestations, could not have
been affected by the contradiction of these mani
festations. Even though the death of Jesus had
been to the first apostles the closing scene of all,
even though the shadow of the grave had to them
never been eclipsed by the vision of His immortal
ity, there is no improbability in the thought that a
Christian community might have been founded on
the basis of His humanity alone; what the sacrificial
life of Buddha has done, the sacrificial life of Jesus
well might do. But Paul did not originany approach
Christ as a man. What he was called to behold was
not a human life, but a Messianic claim, and a Mes
sianic claim in behalf of one who had been carried
to the grave. Into the portal of the grave Paul
could not enter to meet with Jesus. The conception
of death was incompatible with the conception of
Messiah. Had he known Jesus as a man, he would
have reverenced Him as a man, and his reverence
would not have been eclipsed even by the shadow of
death. But he was called to know Him first and
foremost as a Divine manifestation, and with such a

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 37
recognition the shadow of death was at variance.
Before Paul could even approach Christianity, he
required to see that shadow superseded. To make
him a Christian, it was necessary that, first of all,
the thought of .death shonld be annulled by the vision
of immortality, and that beyond the heights of Cal
vary there should be discerned the sunlit peaks of
Olivet. All this, I say, might be gathered from the nature
of the case irrespective altogether of documentary
evidence. But when we turn to the documentary
evidence our expectation is wonderfully confirmed.
We leave out of account the narrative of the Acts,
yet perhaps nowhere is the narrative of the Acts
more strikingly corroborated than in the view that
Paul's Christian experience began with the vision
of Christ's immortality. When he is speaking to
that nation which of all others reverenced most the
idea of physical strength, he bases Christ's claim to
its recognition on the fact that He had triumphed
over death, that He was ' ' declared to be the Son
of God with power, by the resurrection from the
dead." J When he is speaking to the same nation
of the ground' of his Christian confidence, he again
lays the main stress on the vision of Christ's im
mortality, "who is he that condemneth? It is
Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again,
who is even at the right hand of God." 2 But to
my mind the passage on this subject which of all
others most trenchantly illustrates Paul's position
is his remar-kable aspiration contained in his letter
i Bom. i. 4. 2 Bom. vUI. 84.

38 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
to the church of Philippi, ' ' that I may know Him
and the power of His resurrection, and the fellow
ship of His sufferings." " I have called it a remark
able aspiration, because it seems to invert the natural
order. Why did not Paul say, ' ' that I may know
Him, and the fellowship of His sufferings, and
the power of his resurrection"? Is not this the
historical arrangement in which the events of the
life of Jesus actually presented themselves? Un
doubtedly it is. But it is not the order in which
the events of the life of Jesus presented themselves
to Paul's experience; that which was last, to him
came first. The passage has a biographical ring in
it. It tells us that Christ had come to the man of
Tarsus in the inverted order of His own life. To
the primitive disciples the Christian revelation had
presented itself in its natural and historical order —
first the Man, then the fellowship with His suffer
ings, and, last of all, the power of His resurrection.
To Paul the Christian revelation presented itself in
exactly the opposite arrangement; it began with the
crown, and it went back to the cross. Paul's vision
rested first of all on that which was supernatural
and superhuman, and he had thence to retrace his
steps into that which was earthly and historical;
he began with the "power of the resurrection," he
passed next into "fellowship with the sufferings,"
and he ended with the recognition of that which
identified Christ with humanity. His spiritual life
was in one sense a progress from Damascus to
Galilee; it had to find its terminus where that of
i PhU. ill. 10.

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 39
Peter and John had found its beginning. Its goal
was to be the discovery of that perfect bond of
humanity which bound the heart of the disciple to
the heart of the Master, and in reaching that dis
covery it attained the completion of its journey
precisely where the first apostles had begun.
We have now arrived at a definite point, and a
very important point — the beginning. We have
reached a spot which we can make the starting-
place of Paul's Christian experience. We have
found that in the nature of the case it was necessary
that Paul should begin with the vision of Christ's
immortality; his very conception of the Jewish
Messiah made it imperative that, at the outset, he
should see the form of Jesus dissociated from the
trappings of the grave. We have seen that this
expectation is confirmed by documentary evidence,
and precisely by that documentary evidence which
in such a case is of the greatest value — the personal
testimony of Paul himself. Here, then, is a centre
from which we may legitimately take our departure.
Independently altogether of the narrative in the
Acts, and from the simple testimony of St. Paul's
own autobiographical recollections, we have been
driven to the conclusion that the beginning of his
Christian experience was a vision of the exalted
Christ. It by no means follows, however, that his
vision of the exalted Christ was reached through
a sense of personal exaltation. The peculiarity of
Paul's experience lies in the fact that he came to
the recognition of Christ's glory by passing through
a phase of individual depression. Whether literally

40 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
or metaphorically, we are bound to accept the state
ment that by him the golden gates were first seen
through dimmed eyes. We have no need to travel
beyond the testimony of his own epistles, nor beyond
those epistles whose testimony is most unquestioned
in order to recognise the fact that the beginning of
Christian experience was to him the beginning of
struggle. Saul of Tarsus exhibits no struggle; Paul
the apostle on the very threshold meets us as a man
of conflict. From that hour when his eye first rested
on the immortal glory of Christianity, he seems to
have awakened to the perception of his own natural
weakness and nothingness; the period of the exalt
ing revelation was the period of the depressing thorn.
It is from this stage, and not from any pre-Christian
stage, that we must date the opening of that great
spiritual battle which he himself describes as the
war between the spirit and the flesh. The exalta
tion to the third heavens and the buffeting influence
of the thorn are the respective parents of these two
subsequent tendencies which contended within him
as the inner and the outer man — tendencies which,
when reconciled in one direction, broke out anew in
another, and were only lulled to rest in the mature
ripeness of a peaceful old age. A consideration of
the initiaj movement of these tendencies in the heart
of Paul will engage our attention in the following
chapter.

CHAPTER III.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCES
(continued).
In the previous chapter we arrived at the boundary-
line between the life of Saul of Tarsus and the life
of Paul the apostle. At the opening of the present
chapter we shall require to step over that line. I
haye already said that the record of life's beginning
does not lie within the history of development. Shall
any man put his hand upon the exact spot which
forms the point of transition from one stage into an
other? I may set up a wall between two countries,
two provinces, two fields, and I may say that this
wall is the boundary-line between them. Vet,
philosophically speaking, which here means strictly
speaking, I have not by such a process reached any
point of transition. The point of transition lies
somewhere within the breadth of the wall; that is
all the knowledge which I can profess to have at
tained. Now, what is true in geography is true also
in human history. I cannot put my hand upon the
spot which forms the immediate boundary-line be
tween any two periods of man's existence, — cannot
say, 'heretyouth ends, and here manhood begins.'

42 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
I can go to either edge of the stream, can distinguish
on either side the colour of the soil, can mark on
either bank the size and number of the pebbles, but
the stream itself eludes me ; it belongs to a tran
scendental region which the eye is unable to explore.
One thing is certain, — wherever the point of tran
sition lies between the old life and the new, it lies
not without but within the life. No external cir
cumstances, however striking, would be adequate
in themselves to explain that transition. If we
were writing the outward history of St. Paul, we
would be expected to begin with the narrative in
the ninth chapter of Acts. We would be expected
to follow the man of Tarsus in his march from
Jerusalem to Damascus, to mark the sudden arrest
of his journey, to witness the light from heaven
which confronted him, and to tell how, in the
presence of that light, the persecutor fell prostrate
to the earth. But even when we had done all this,
we should not be one step nearer to the discovery
of the real point of transition. The writer of the
Acts himself confesses that he has not put his hand
upon the boundary line between Saul and Paul.
The words, "it is hard for thee to kick against the
goads, " are very suggestive. They carry us back to
something behind the light. They tell us that in
the heart of the man of Tarsus there had been a
previous struggle — that the very vehemence of his
opposition to Christianity had part of its foundation
in a desire to stifle thought. They tell us that the
outward light had set fire to already existing mate
rial, had kindled into a blaze the accumulated pro-

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 48
duct of years, and had effected its seemingly sudden
transformation by its contact with elements that had
long and silently been gathering in the soul. .
And if we turn to Paul's own testimony, we shall
find this view of the subject marvellously confirmed.
In one of his letters in later life he thus expresses
his consciousness of a boundary-line between the
old and the new, "It pleased God who separated me
from my mother's womb" — i.e., set me apart from
the moment of my birth — "to reveal His Son in
me." 1 There are two things to be observed in this
passage. The one is, that Paul is not himself pre
pared to lay his hand upon an ultimate point of
transition. It seems indeed to him that in one sense
he had always been a. Christian. He felt as if God
had set him apart even from his birth, had caused
him from the very first hour of his being to be sur
rounded with influences which had made it possible
for him at some time to see a light from heaven.
The other is, that to the retrospective consciousness
of Paul the point of transition from the old into the
new was not without but within. " It pleased God
to reveal His Son in me. " Looking to the circum
stances of the light from heaven, we should have
expected him to have said "to me." We should
have expected that Paul would have attributed to
the outward catastrophe that change in his nature
which at all events it accelerated and manifested.
But Paul knew better. He knew that a revelation
from without is a contradiction in terms — that no
external manifestation, however striking, could pos-
i Gal. i. 15, ie.

44 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
sibly reveal God to the soul. He insists upon this
fact constantly, pertinaciously, at times even polemi
cally. He says elsewhere, "God, who commanded
the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in
our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 1 He
declares in language more pronounced still, " Eye
hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered
into the heart of man, the things which God hath
prepared for them that love Him. But God hath
revealed them unto us by His Spirit." 2 No words
could express in stronger terms Paul's repudiation
of the thought that any mere material mechanism
could be the source of Divine revelation. He does
not mean, as is popularly thought, that the sights
and sounds of heaven are grander than the sights
and sounds of earth, but rather that in its deepest
essence heaven is not sight and sound, — that no
outward light, even though above the brightness of
the sun, could for a moment illuminate a human
spirit, unless that spirit had elsewhere been illu
minated by an inward glow.
But we must now advance a step further. How
ever inward the beginning of the new life.be, how
ever subtle in its working, however inscrutable in its
immediate point of transition, there is yet a definite
moment in which its possession begins to be realised.
The sun has actually risen before the eye perceives
its rising, but the eye can detect the time when it
does perceive its rising. So is it in the spiritual
world. No man can point to the precise moment of
i 2 Cor. iv. 6. 2 1 Cor. ii. 9, 10.

Autobiographical Reminiscences. 45
transition between the old life and the new, but
every man may photograph the moment when the
new life was first realised by him as a part of his
being. Now, in the spiritual experience of Paul
there was clearly such a moment of realisation. He
is himself quite conscious that he is standing on an
opposite bank of the stream to that which he occu
pied yesterday; yesterday he was a persecutor, to
day he is a friend. What has led him to this real
isation? It is a question perfectly legitimate and
purely scientific. The origin of a change is one
thing, the realising of a change is another and a
very different thing. There must have been a time
when Paul became conscious in himself of an altered
attitude towards Christianity — a time from which it
became impossible for him to be a persecutor any
more. Have we any clue to the circumstances in
which this experience was realised? Have we any
indication, from the writings of Paul himself, of the
nature of that influence which first led him to recog
nise the fact that he had, from the hour of birth,
been dedicated to Christ?
I think we have. One thing is quite clear, that
to the mind of Paul the first conscious transition did
not present itself as a voluntary one. In speaking
of that transition, he says, " by the grace of God, I
am what I am."1 Now, let it be remembered that
in the New Testament the word "grace " has always
a definite meaning. It always implies something
opposed to the natural will. It is the opposite of
"glory." It is the direct antithesis of our English
' 1 Cor. xv. 10.

46 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
word " grace," which means a naturalised beauty, a
symmetry which has become indigenous to the life.
Scriptural grace, on the other hand, implies the
revelation of something which is not natural to
the life, not symmetrical with its proportions, not
consonant with its aims. It is the beginning of
struggle, the presentation of a point of resistance,
the first sense of an impersonal obstacle which has
put itself in the way of the development of my own
will. When Paul refers his moment of realisation
to an act of grace, he really means to refer it to the
encountering of an antagonistic experience.
In another passage he himself gives very clear
expression to this view. He says, ' < lest I should be
exalted above measure through the abundance of
the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in
the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me."1
The act of grace which arrested him on his road to
persecution is here more strictly defined; it is said
to have consisted in the impartation of a thorn to
the flesh. It is the same thought to which he has
already given utterance in speaking of the inward
light which has illumined his heart, "we have this
treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of
the power may be of God, and not of us."2 He
means to say that the recognition of Christianity's
truth could to him be no subject of personal boast
ing. He had not arrived at that knowledge by an
act of his own will; he had been driven into it. It-
had come to him through an arrest of his own will,
through an impediment which had been thrown
1 2 Cor. xii. 7. a 2 Cor. iv. 7.

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 47
across his path, through the encountering of a hos
tile force which had struck him to the ground. His
illumination had entered through the gate of his
humiliation; his treasure had been conveyed to him
in earthen vessels; his heavenly vision had been
communicated through the medium of an earthly
thorn. What, then, was this thorn? It has been a sub
ject of much dispute amongst commentators. Was
it of the nature of a physical calamity, or did it bear
the character of a moral stain? Each of these views
has been advocated on grounds which I think irrele
vant. On the one hand, it is urged that when Paul
designates his calamity "a thorn in the flesh," he
clearly points to some physical privation; but every
student knows that in the vocabulary of St. Paul the
fleshly is by no means necessarily synonymous with
the material. On the other hand, it has been urged
that, when Paul styles his thorn "a messenger of
Satan," he cannot be speaking of a merely physical
calamity. If Paul had been an Englishman, such an
argument would have been unanswerable. But Paul
was a Jew, and, being a Jew, he used the language
of his nation. In the language of that nation all the
sorrows of life were the messengers of Satan. No
matter from what source they came, whether from
without or from within, whether from the body or
from the soul, they were regarded by the pious
Israelite as the enemies of his peace and the penal
ties of his sin. To the mind of a son of Israel the
loss of sight was as much the buffeting of Satan as
the loss of temper. "Who sinned, this man or his

48 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
parents?" was the question which spontaneously
arose in the view of every physical calamity. There
were spirits which struggled to rise above it; there
were minds which, like the patriarch of Uz, had
glimpses of a higher and holier destination of human
sorrow; but the very strength of their opposition
proved the tenacity of the national belief. The ten
acity of that belief was broken by Christianity alone.
Only in the religion of Christ could even such a one
as Paul recognise the glory of a cross; to the initial
stage of his Christian experience the calamity of his
life still remained " a messenger of Satan to buffet "
him. We are not entitled, then, to draw any argument
from either expression. The "thorn in the flesh"
does not necessarily imply materialism; the "mes
senger of Satan" does not necessarily imply the
presence of a moral stain. There is, however, one
argument which, so far as I know, has not been
hitherto advanced, and which seems to me to bear
conclusively on the decision of this question. In
the sequel of that passage in which Paul speaks of
his thorn, he makes his calamity a subject of prayer,
' ' for this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it
might depart from me. And He said unto me, My
grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made
perfect in weakness."1 I shall hereafter return to
these words in another connection; they belong to a
later stage in Paul's spiritual biography, and I only
notice them now in their bearing upon the nature
of that calamity which marked his conscious transi-
» 2 Oor. xii. 8, 9.

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 49
tion into the kingdom of Christ. Looking at them,
however, in this light, it seems to me that they
decide the question as to whether the nature of that
calamity was moral or physical. Is it conceivable
that any man, struggling with a moral defect, and
earnestly praying for the removal of that defect,
should have either received, or imagined that he
received, a denial of that prayer? Is it conceivable
that one under the influence of a heated temper,
or a jealous disposition, or a lustful passion, should
have thought for a moment that the preventive or
restraining grace of God would be equivalent to the
removal of such a tendency, or that the strength of
God could find its perfect manifestation in the effort
to struggle with such a weakness? The truth is, in
any such case as this, the grace of God is not suf
ficient for us, does not profess nor desire to be
sufficient for us. The climax of the moral life is
not grace, but glory; not the struggle with a new
atmosphere, but the assimilation of the nature to
that atmosphere. The strength of God in the moral
world is perfected, not by its restraining influence,
but by the removal of all necessity to exert such an
influence. It is perfected in that hour in which my
will has ceased to choose, in which the element of
temptation is no longer present to my heart, and
in which the power that used to be restraining has
become the impulse of my life.
We must arrive, then, at the conclusion that the
thorn in the flesh was a thorn op the flesh, — that the
calamity against which Paul prayed was a calamity
of the physical life. If we go on to ask more spe-

50 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
cifically what was that calamity, we can no longer
speak so determinately. Throughout his epistolary
writings, Paul has nowhere given us any direct in
dication of the precise seat of the malady. One
naturally wonders why he should have been so
enigmatical. In a man writing familiar letters to
his familiar friends, we should have expected that,
instead of speaking mysteriously of a thorn in the
flesh, he would have told them that he had become
subject to some particular form of disease. And yet,
to my mind, the reason of his seeming obscurity is
not far to seek. At the time when he wrote these
words, he had not only ceased to grieve over his
thorn, but had come positively to triumph in it. He
did not want his fellow-men to think that his had
been a special case. He wanted them to feel that
they might triumph over their calamities in the
same manner as he had conquered his. To accom
plish this end, he thought it best that no suffering
man should be able to say, when referred to him
as an example, 'Paul had quite a different trial
from me. ' He thought it best that his own par
ticular trial should not be revealed by name, so that
each suffering man might have a chance of believing
that the apostle's thorn had been his own. He
valued the concealment of his thorn for the same
reason that his countrymen had valued the conceal
ment of the body of Moses — lest men should come
to attach a special and peculiar reverence to that
which was only one of a multitude, and only a single
specimen of a mighty whole.
But while Paul makes no direct reference to the

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 51
nature of his thorn, I agree with those who hold
that he has indirectly, and, as it were, unwittingly,
revealed its nature. I agree with those who hold
that the preponderance of argument lies on the side
of Paul's malady having been an affection of the
eyes. The facts, when marshalled together, amount
to a moral evidence. He employs an amanuensis —
a luxury which would not have been voluntarily
appropriated by one in his indigent circumstances.
The only part of his letters written by his own
hand is the salutation at the end, l and the words of
that salutation are inscribed in large characters. 2
The largeness of the characters might have had its
ground in the desire to emphasise the epistle's gen
uineness; but there is a very significant circumstance
which, to my mind, shakes that view. Almost im
mediately after directing the Galatians to the large
letters he has written with his own hand, Paul
breaks forth into the declaration, "I bear in my
body the marks of the Lord Jesus. " 3 He means to
say, "I have no need to get circumcised with a view
to have a wound in the flesh; I have already re
ceived a wound in the flesh from another and a
higher source than any earthly hand. " One feels
it difficult to avoid connecting such a statement
with the immediately foregoing direction to the
largeness of his handwriting. And the impression
is wonderfully confirmed when, only a few para
graphs earlier, we hear him bursting forth into a
strain of tender reminiscence, and reminding this
very church of the sensitiveness, the delicacy, and
r 2 These, ill. 17. a Gal. vl. 11. 8 Gal. vi. 17.

52 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
the helpfulness which had marked their recognition
of his physical trial, "my temptation which was in
my flesh ye despised not, nor rejected; but received
me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus. For
I bear you record, that, if it had been possible, ye
would have plucked out your own eyes, and have
given them to me."1
Now, take these passages together and read them
in connection with another passage, which I do not
think has hitherto been seen in this light, "the god
of this world hath blinded the minds of them which
believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of
Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto
them. " 2 If we have attached no weight to the ar
gument of the previous passages, we shall rightly
see no significance in this. But if these passages
have impressed us already with the conviction that
the thorn in Paul's flesh was connected with an
ocular weakness, I think it will be impossible to
avoid the recognition of a fresh allusion here. To
myself it seems evident that Paul, in this latest
passage, is simply making a metaphor of the fact of
his own experience, — is transferring into the life of
the world at large the analogy of that physical crisis
which had marked his transition into the kingdom of
God. For what is it that Paul means to affirm when
he says that the god of this world is blinding the
natural man to the light of another world? Is it
not simply this, that in the sphere of spiritual life
a man must be made blind in order to see? The
' ' god of this world " means the ' ' light of this world. "
i Gal.; iv. 14,15. a 2 Cor. iv. 4.

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 53
The expression has become obsolete, but it was quite
well understood by the men of Paul's day. There
was in that day an incipient belief, which was ere
long to become a rampant belief, that the forms of
material nature were the work of an inferior deity.
Paul does not accept it, but he allegorises it, points
out a spiritual sense in which it may be held true.
He personifies the spirit of materialism, and calls it
the god of this world. He says that to the natural
man those things called the objects of sight are really
the objects which prevent sight. The light and
forms of nature are revealers of the present world,
but they are the curtains of another world. They
are the shadows which intervene between the eye
and a higher and holier light; they intercept and
eclipse the rays of a better sun. Before that better
sun can be made visible, the intercepting medium
must be destroyed. The eye must be blinded to the
natural light if it would see "the image of God. "
There must be an eclipse of that which eclipses, a
blotting out of that which blots out the view.
This world stands in the way of the vision of a
higher world; therefore before all things this world
must be crucified.
Such is Paul's thought. I submit, however, that
it is not a natural thought. It is not an idea which
would naturally have occurred to one in Paul's cir
cumstances. Through the writings of the apostle
we have become familiar with the doctrine that the
outer world must be crucified to the natural man
before he can get a glimpse of the spiritual world.
But to the mind of a Jew such a doctrine was the

54 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
wildest of paradoxes. So far from being self-evident,
it was to him the reverse of the truth. The pre
liminary condition of a higher life was to the Jew-
not the crucifixion but the expansion of the present
world. Instead of believing that a man must have
outer forms blotted out in order to see the kingdom
of God, it was his distinct doctrine that the kingdom
of God could only be seen through the extension and
the perfecting of outer forms. The man who had
his world crucified was essentially the bad man. He
was thereby placed in a condition of spiritual blind
ness, disqualified for beholding God, and debarred
from the vision of Divine realities. The Jew could
never regard the revelation of the Sun of righteous
ness as something which was to be purchased by the
obliteration of the sun of nature.
Paul's thought, then, was not natural to a Jew.
What made it natural to Paul, being a Jew ? It
seems to me that it was suggested to his mind
purely by the fact of a personal reminiscence. It
was not a simile derived from the theology of his
nation; it was directly opposed to that theology.
But it was in harmony with a memory of Paul's
own life, and it was that which made it to him the
most natural simile in the world. He simply trans
ferred to mankind in general that hour of crisis
through which he had passed in his own soul. He
remembered a time when he himself had been amply
satisfied with the things which are seen and tem
poral. He remembered a time when the beauty of
Christ's religion was completely eclipsed by these
things. So insensible had he been to that beauty,

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 55
that he regarded Christianity as an obstruction to
the world's real life. He had resolved to put it
down with a high hand; he had set forth against it
on a course of persecution. Midway he had been
arrested, arrested by the greatest of physical calami
ties. That world which he believed to be the real
world had become unreal, — it had been extinguished
for him in black darkness. The proximate cause of
the calamity is nowhere revealed; to him there was
but one cause. If Paul had known to a certainty
that the immediate agent in producing his misfor
tune had been lightning, or sunstroke, or epilepsy,
it would have made no difference on his diagnosis;
he would still have referred it to one agency, and to
one alone. It had come to him as the arresting
grace of God, as a Divine hand interposed between
himself and his contemplated victim. On the black
canvas which had covered the images of the natural
day there arose another image — the form of Him
who had been the object of his aversion. It filled
the vacant space — not yet indeed as an object of
love, but as an object of power; Paul said as Julian
afterwards said, " 0 Galilean, thou hast conquered."
Christ was not dead; He was immortal and immor
talising. He had proved Himself to be alive by an
act of arrestive grace; He had revealed the power
of His presence by suppressing all other presences
from the apostle's sight. Doubtless it was this
sense of revelation by desolation that prompted
Paul to see in his own experience an analogy to
the creative work of Genesis, and to say that,
in giving to him the knowledge of His glory,

56 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
God had "commanded the light to shine out of
darkness. "
And is it any other thought which is expressed in
these other words of Paul, "our light affliction, which
is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more ex
ceeding and eternal weight of glory, when we look
not to the things which are seen, but to the things
which are not seen: for the things which are seen
are temporal; but the things which are not seen are
eternal."1 Paul is speaking of two worlds — the
world without and the world within. He says that
to any man whose gaze is riveted with admiration
on the seen and temporal, such a calamity as over
took him must have been indeed appalling. But to
one who has recognised that there is a world behind
the visible world, — to one who has arrived at the con
viction that there is a spiritual glory which, to the
natural heart, is eclipsed by the material form, the
vision of his calamity cannot appear as an uncom
pensated evil. It had in reality worked out for him
a glory far greater than that which it took away,
had revealed a brighter sunshine than the light
which it had put out. It had extinguished the
seen and temporal, but in the very act of doing so,
it had broken down a wall. The veil of the temple
had been rent in twain from the top to the bottom,
and through the aperture had appeared the images
of a higher life.
We are not, of course, bound to assume that the
calamity which overtook Paul remained permanently
in its acute stage. The testimony of his epistles,
1.2 Cor. iv. 17, 18.

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 57
with their record of laborious work and incessant
outward struggle, would suggest an opposite infer
ence. I have spoken of Paul as having passed
through an hour of physical crisis, in which he
experienced a total eclipse of the outward visible
world; I have been led to take this view by the
very strong simile he used.1 But if we regard this
hour of crisis as having amounted to a total eclipse,
we shall require to adopt the view of the later his
torian that there came a partial recovery. The
tenor of Paul's epistles is compatible with a man
who has a thorn, and is consistent with the notion
that his thorn was defective vision, but it is irrecon
cilable with the belief that he was entirely deprived
of sight. The truth is, as we piece together from
purely internal sources the features of this picture,
as we strive by a combination of the man's own
scattered reminiscences to reconstruct his figure into
its probable height and proportions, we are more
and more impressed with the likeness which that
figure presents to the Paul of historical tradition.
We have woven together colours derived from no
professed history, but simply from the incidental
notices which he gives of himself; and yet, as the
result of the whole, we must confess that hitherto
the Paul of the Epistles has been identical with the
Paul of the Acts. We see the man of the Pharisees
animated by an antagonism to the dead Christ, simply
on the ground that He was dead, incapable of being
made a follower except by the belief that death had
to Him been annulled. We see the movement to-
i 2 Cor. iv. 3, i.

58 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
wards persecution arrested midway by what Paul
himself terms an act of restraining grace. We see
the images of external nature extinguished for him
in a stroke of blindness, and on the black canvas
left by his privation we see the imprinting of another
image, destined to surpass for him the brightness of
the sun. We have only to add the supposition that
the full weight of the calamity was subsequently
lightened, and we shall have reached, by an inde
pendent process, a portrait which, in all its essential
features, is identical with the old familiar figure of
historical tradition.
Wc have now come to a point in which the his
toric tradition must for a time desert us. We are
approaching that period of Paul's life in which the
record of the Acts becomes almost a total blank, and
in which we can have nothing outside of Paul's own
reminiscences with which to compare our picture.
We cannot regard this as a disadvantage, because we
have all along professed to reconstruct the picture
from purely internal sources. Nevertheless, the
very fact that we have here lost sight of historical
tradition has made the region on which we are en
tering an almost untrodden field. It is a field which
we cannot tread with dogmatic footsteps, nor appro
priate with confident claims; we must be content to
walk warily, and to speak with reticence. The mine
from which we gather is still the same. It is a col
lection of biographical reminiscences scattered up
and down throughout the epistles, yet revealing their
richest vein in the letter to the Galatians — remi
niscences often incidental, sometimes rather implied

Autobiographical Beminiscences. 59
than expressed, but always opening up glimpses of
perspective, and not seldom suggesting more than
they declare. A consideration of this new fielf1 ot
study will engage us in the following chapter.

CHAPTER TV.
ARABIA: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCES
(concluded).
Paul has now arrived at what may be called a state
of double consciousness. He has for the first time
come into the possession of two natures, and from
this time forth the sense of these two natures is con
tinually present to him.1 His entrance into Chris
tianity was, by his own admission, an entrance into
internecine war. His experience as Saul of Tarsus
had been an experience remote from struggle; his
struggle began with the first presentation of Chris
tianity. I have aheady said that in the moment of
his revelation he was exposed to two opposite in
fluences — an influence which exalted, and an influ
ence which depressed. On the one hand, his first
vision of Christ was the vision not of one who was
crucified, but of one who, in spite of crucifixion, was
alive. Hi's earliest meeting with Christianity was
a meeting not with its cross but with its crown.
Unlike the first disciples, he began at the top of the
hill and was called thence to descend into the
valleys. On the other hand, his very sense of
1 Of. Bom. vii. 9 and sequel.
(60)

Arabia : Autobiographical Beminiscences. 61
Christ's living, power was awakened by a personal
humiliation. It came to him by an arrestment of
his own will — an arrestment which prostrated him,
humbled him, blinded him. The avenue by which
he reached the conviction of Christianity's glory
was an avenue of individual pain; its central figure
was not a flower but a thorn. Here, then, at one
and the same moment there were two opposite im
pulses in the mind ot Paul, — the one enlarging, the
other depressing; the one opening up boundless pros
pects, the other rendering the man cribbed, cabined,
and confined. Each of these influences must be
carefully weighed. We have arrived at a period
ot Paul's life in which the two tendencies were so
equally balanced that the man was brought for a
few years into a position of equilibrium, in which
the motive on either side was so strong that he was
unable to decide in what direction he should turn,
and was compelled for a space to lie inactive and
unoccupied. Let us proceed to consider separately
the opposite effects of these conflicting movements.
And let us begin with the effect of Paul's revela
tion. I have said that it came to him with the
inspiration of a sense of boundlessness. He himself
always connects the moment of his conversion to
Christianity with the conviction of his having re
ceived a call to labour in a missionary field of un
precedented dimensions. In the passage from Gala
tians i. 16, already quoted, he says, "it pleased God
to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him
among the Gentiles. "2 In these words he asserts in
1 Cf. Ephes. iii. 8.

62 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
the most explicit terms, that his call to be a Chris
tian was, at the same time, his call to be a missionary
on a new and a very gigantic scale. No previous
apostle, no previous disciple of the Master, had ever,
in the initial hour of his discipleship, been privileged
to see such a wide field before him. All the pre
decessors of Paul had believed themselves to be
missionaries, but to all of them it was a matter of
course that they should begin at Jerusalem. The
man of Tarsus alone, the latest comer of all the
band, and the disciple who, at his coming, had seen
least of the personal life of the Master, had a view
of the religious scope and destiny to which the first
Christians were strangers. And can any one fail to
perceive the reason of the difference ? Is it not
manifest that Paul's advantage in this matter came
from the very circumstance which was otherwise a
disadvantage — the fact that he had not known the
personal Christ? It was a great privation to him
that he had not lived in the earthly presence of the
Master, had not come into contact with the outward
and local life of Jesus. Yet it was precisely through
this privation that he was enabled to assign to Jesus
a wider field of missionary enterprise in the work of
the immediate present. Christ had first been revealed
to him, not as the man of Galilee, but as the spirit
of Olivet. His earliest vision of the Master had
been the vision of one circumscribed by no time nor
space. To the early disciples the Christ had been
born at Bethlehem; to the soul of Paul He was born
at Damascus. His sense of His living presence
was, from the very outset, the sense of a universal

Arabia : Autobiographical Beminiscences. 63
presence. It was associated with no land, it was
linked with no atmosphere, it was bound up with
no environment. We have Paul's own words for
the assertion that the impression created by the
belief in Christ's resurrection was the vision of one
who had risen far above all principalities and powers,
and beyond every name which denotes simply a
local designation.1 And as the impression of the
risen Christ was the earliest sense Paul had of His
presence, we can readily see why to him the hour of
revelation was the hour of a missionary call. In
the very sight of One whose theatre was the universe,
and whose empire was unlimited by earthly bound
aries, the apostle recognised the obligation to go
and teach all nations. In the very sense that he was
in the presence of a Being who had risen above local
distinctions, there came to his mind the conviction
that in the field of missionary labour local distinc
tions must lose their power.
I shall hereafter show that in the mind of Paul
this sense of a universal missionary obligation by no
means presented itself as a revolt from the Old
Testament; that, on the contrary, his original ideal
of a Christian missionary was based purely upon a
Hebrew type of thought. In the meantime, how
ever, I wish to direct attention to the fact that, from
the very outset of his Christian experience, he was
impressed with the greatness of his privilege in
comparison with his predecessors and contem
poraries. There is a very striking passage which
seems to me to express, in the most direct terms,
l Ephes. 1. 20, 21.

64 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Paul's conviction of having a unique and original
position. Speaking of the appearances of the risen
Christ, he says, " last of all He was seen of me also,
as of one born out of due time." 1 What is the
meaning of the expression, "one born out of due
time " ? There are two possible ways in which a
man may be born out of due time ; he may come
into the world too soon, or he may come into the
world too late. Which is Paul's case? So far as
I know, the universal interpretation has been
hitherto in favour of the latter view. Paul is
popularly supposed to be uttering a complaint
that he had not been privileged to behold the
earliest dawn, — that his had not been the joy of
looking upon the earthly face of the Master; he
had been born too late for that. And yet, is it not
evident, from Paul's own writings, that he himself
would have repudiated such an interpretation? He
would have denied the truth of the statement on
which it is based. He is never weary of insisting
on the perfect equality of privilege between his
vision of the risen Christ and that vision of the
Christ which the first disciples beheld. It is pre
cisely on this ground that he claims an equal
apostleship, and asserts his right to exert the same
authority. Moreover, if the Greek word be pressed
out to its legitimate meaning, it will bear no other
sense than that of " one born too soon. " The figure
is that of a premature birth. It seeks to describe
one who has come into the world at a stage earlier
than his legitimate time. The truth is, so far is
1 Cor. xv. 8.

Arabia : Autobiographical Beminiscences. 65
Paul from looking upon himself as behind the age,
that he is impressed, beyond all things, with that
sense of solitude which comes from being advanced
beyond one's day. He feels himself to be an
anachronism, not on the ground of being in the
rear, but on the ground of being in the van. His
first vision of the Master has been an altogether
different vision from that which greeted the eyes
of his contemporaries. He has seen the Christ,
not as a local personality, not as a historical man
environed by a particular age and circumscribed by
a special soil, but as a life risen above all prin
cipalities and powers and transcending all temporal
conditions. And the effect of that vision has been
to widen his own view of the missionary field; it
has been to him equivalent to a Gentile call. Can
we fail to see how such a perception must have been
to Paul, itself a sense of solitude? He felt that he
had been privileged to see what others had not seen,
what others even yet did not believe. The final
apparition of the Son of man had placed him out
side the gates of Judaism — not indeed as yet very
far beyond them, as we shall hereafter see, neverthe
less clearly and distinctively on the other side. He
felt that he was standing in advance of his fellows,
on a plain which hitherto had been unfrequented,
and where he found himself alone. He had been
called to a solitary privilege — the privilege of re
cognising the fact that the Gentile was equal to the
Jew; and he expressed at once the dignity and the
loneliness of the position by declaring that Christ had
been revealed to him as to " one born out of due time. "

66 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Why, then, does not Paul rush instantaneously to
the fulfilment of his mission? He has' received a
revelation that Christianity is a religion for man as
man; why does he not hasten to proclaim his dis
covery? He has recognised the truth that the
Gentile has an equal right with the Jew; why
does he not forthwith become the apostle of the
Gentile? That he does not do so is transparent on
the very surface of the narrative. The very obscu
rity that hangs over this part of his life is a proof
that during this period his life had undergone a
temporary relapse. Instead of the moment of Chris
tian conviction being followed instantaneously by a
career of Christian action, we are confronted by a
spectacle which appears, at first sight, like a falling
asleep again. The man introduced to our notice
as a percipient of Christ's exaltation is almost im
mediately afterwards utterly withdrawn from view.
We see him on the Jewish bank of the river as a
defender of the old world ; we see him on the
Christian bank as a promised defender of the new;
but almost the next instant he disappears from both
banks. We seek him and he is not found, or at
least is only found as the result of his own confession.
If Paul had not himself told us where he was during
this interval, we never should have gathered it from
history. The man has in the meantime degenerated
into a cipher, and the course which promised to be
a triumphal march has been arrested by an hour of
lethargy. How are we to explain this anomaly of
human nature?
The reason in plain language is simply this, Paul

Arabia : Autobiographical Beminiscences. 67
was not ready for his destiny. He recognised it
clearly, at least he recognised what it ought to be,
but he experienced the same sense of diffidence
which had characterised the call of his ancestor
Moses. For this brings us to consider the second
of those influences which at this period acted on the
apostle's mind. We have seen that his first vision
of the Messiah was the vision of an exalted Christ,
and that to this extent the moment of his conscious
conversion was a moment of spiritual elevation.
But from another side it was also a moment of de
pression; the vision had come to him through an
outward cloud, — the light had shone ' ' out of dark
ness. " He had purchased his recognition of Christ
by the experience of a physical thorn — a thorn which
had come to him as a process of crucifixion. But
Paul himself declares that there are two kinds or
degrees of crucifixion; the world may be crucified
to me, or, I may be crucified to the world. He says,
in a passage which I think certainly autobiographical, x
that he himself has passed in succession through
each of these. He did not all at once reach the
stage of being crucified to the world, — of having his
heart resigned to the calamity which had befallen
him. His original experience was simply that of
having the world crucified to him, of being con
scious of a sense of loss and deprivation. There
was a time, he tells us, in which his attitude under
the chastening hand of God was merely a passive
attitude; he bowed beneath it, but he did not ac
quiesce in it. It brought tc him a feeling of numb-
i Gal. vi. 14.

68 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
ness, a sense of utter prostration. The old man
within him was dead, but the new man was not yet
alive; Egypt had been torn from his sight, but
Canaan had not yet appeared. His was no abnor
mal experience; there is not a spiritual mind which
has not passed through it. There is all the differ
ence in the world between a passive and an active
resignation, between a mind that is dumb and un
murmuring, and a mind that is acquiescent and
alive. It is one thing to accept a thorn as some
thing which comes from a mysterious and incom
prehensible Will; it is another thing to accept it,
and to wear it as a flower. The former state is the
condition in which the world is crucified to us; the
latter is the condition in which we are crucified to
the world. Paul was as yet only in the first state.
He had received his calamity, and he was dumb
before its presence, but he had not yet accepted
his calamity as a possible road to glory. That stage
awaited him in the future, but the time was not yet;
he was for the present simply in the position of one
who is astounded and paralysed.
Does it seem strange to us that a man like Paul
should have been in this position? Does it seem
unworthy of his moral greatness, that even for a
moment he should have bent beneath the weight
of a physical thorn? It would undoubtedly have
been so if Paul had been a Gentile. But Paul was
a Jew, and he was none the less a Jew because he
had become a Christian. To the mind of a Jew
physical calamity was inseparable from moral delin
quency. What Paul said, at an after date, of death,

Arabia : Autobiographical Beminiscences. 69
he would have said now of his physical thorn: its
sting to him was sin. I do not indeed believe that
at this period his conscience had awakened to the
full sense of the struggle between the old life and
the new; it is only through the ripeness of the
new life that the barrenness of the old can be
discerned. But although the conscience of the man
was as yet comparatively dormant, the conscience
of the missionary was already on fire. Let us re
member what it was to be a missionary, or, as men
then called it, an apostle. It was to join the order
of a new priesthood. Now it was of the very
essence of the Jewish religion that a priesthood
should be physically unblemished; any defect in
the corporeal frame was an immediate disqualifica
tion for such a ministry. It was no admiration of
Greek symmetry which led the son of Israel to
such a conclusion: Greek symmetry was the furthest
thing in the world from his sympathy and from his
heart. His abhorrence of corporeal blemish came
from his abhorrence of mental defect. It was
because to him the body and the soul were one
man that in any blemish of the body he beheld a
blemish of the moral nature. He desired that the
priests and ministers of his religion should be free
from outward stain, simply and entirely from his
conviction that the presence of an outward stain
implied the presence of an inward deformity; and
he valued the spotlessness of matter because he be
lieved it to be an index of the spotlessness of mind.
Now Paul had no doubt in his own heart that
his physical thorn was the result of a moral defor-

70 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
mity. However much in after-years he recognised
it as a grace, it had come to him in the meantime
as a barrier to the progress of his life. It had pre
sented itself to him as an arrest of his own will, —
a prohibitory fence which said, ' l hitherto shalt thou
go, and no further." It had marked him out as an
object of Divine reprobation; it had revealed him to
the world as one who bore in his own body the
sign of God's displeasure. Under these circum
stances, what right had he to be a missionary?
There had come to him, through his intellectual
nature, a wider and grander view of the immediate
destiny of Christianity than had ever been possessed
by the eye of mortal man; but was it to him any
thing more than that vision from the top of Nebo
which his ancestor had been permitted to see,' but
in whose realisation he was not allowed to share?
There had been revealed to him a new gospel, or
rather that hidden wisdom which had slept eternally
in the old; but how could he, with a blemished,
tarnished name, presume to be the prophet of this
evangel? Did he not carry in his own person the
credentials of failure? did he not bear in his physical
weakness the proof that his mission was not real?
And so Paul, like Jonah, fled from his destiny.
He felt himself inadequate to meet the weight of
responsibility that lay before him. The revelation
was clear and unequivocal, but he was evidently not
prepared for it. Instead of rushing forward to the
prefigured goal, he shrank backward into himself.
His first impulse was towards asceticism. By an
irresistible instinct he ran into solitude; "when it

Arabia: Autobiographical Beminiscences. 71
pleased God," he says, "to reveal His Son in me,
immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood."1
Writing of the event at a far future day, Paul looks
back upon it with a feeling of congratulation; it
seems to him that his isolation from the face of his
fellow-man had furnished the strongest proof of the
originality of his own teaching. So doubtless it
had; but that was not Paul's motive for the asceti
cism. He was not thinking at the time whether he
would or would not be esteemed an original teacher;
he was trying to postpone the contingency of being
a teacher at all. He felt himself depressed by the
weight of a great physical calamity, which was to
him a moral weight. He felt himself debarred by
a thorn, which had come to him as the penalty of
past transgression, and he refused, in the' meantime,
to force his way through the barrier. He fled from
the vision of his destiny that he might survey the
vision of his own soul.
Whither, then, was he to go? There is a con-
gruity between the mind of the traveller and the
-scenes which he naturally seeks. What was the
natural scene for Paul under these circumstances?
When a man is intent upon the earthly memories
of the home of Jesus, he goes to Palestine; where
should a man go whose mind is continually dwell
ing on the memories of Mount Sinai? Clearly to
Arabia. Accordingly, we are not surprised when,
in the very next sentence of this autobiography, we
read the result of this depressing tendency of an
overwhelming past, "I went into Arabia."2 He
i Gal. i. 16. 2 Gal. 1. 17.

72 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
went into Arabia because Arabia was already in
his heart. He sought to realise, in outward vision,
that experience which was present to his soul. If
asked to speak more definitely, we should say that
he went into Arabia with the hope of expiating his
past. He thought that if he could stand in the
presence of that awful mountain whose blackness
and lightning and tempest had witnessed in days
of old the promulgation of the Divine law, that if
in that presence he could realise more intensely
and feel more bitterly the weight of his own
nothingness, there might come to him, as to the
prophetess Miriam, a forgiveness of his sin and a
removal of his thorn. There was a hope in his
heart that, if he could humble himself sufficiently
beneath the mighty power of God, the burden of
that calamity might be lifted which stood in the
meantime as a barrier between himself and his
missionary destiny. The burden of the calamity
was not what it was, but what it indicated; its
sting was sin. Only by a process of Divine recon
ciliation, only by a penance which could merit
Divine forgiveness, did the future apostle .of the
Gentiles hope to achieve deliverance from nis thorn.
That this desire to win forgiveness by personal
expiation lay at the root of Paul's visit to Arabia,
is evident to me from the fact that his earliest
recorded struggle is one which begins almost im
mediately after his conversion. I shall call this
the Arabian struggle, to distinguish it from subse
quent moral conflicts. It is to the Arabian period
of Paul's life that I assign the first of these three

Arabia : Autobiographical Beminiscences. 73
great strains of mental agony which he has ex
pressed in the words, "for this thing I besought
the Lord thrice that it might depart from me." I
have called it a strain of mental agony, because he
himself, in looking back, virtually calls it a stage of
his Gethsemane. No man can read the passage
without seeing that, at the time when he is record
ing his three struggles, he has in his mind the scene
of the garden. Not that he thought of this when
he was passing through this first struggle. I do
not believe Gethsemane was yet in his mind. He
had begun not with the Christ of the cross, but
with the Christ of the crown. His first acquain
tance with the Son of man had not been as the
crucified, but as the exalted One. His earliest
vision of Him had been the vision of His resurrec
tion, of His immortality, of His superiority to the
limits of space and time; his missionary call itself
had been founded upon that vision. His com
munion with the cross came later, and will be
considered in its due place. But the point for us
to observe in the meantime is how great must have
been the agony of a struggle the memory of which,
long years after, could suggest to Paul's mind one
of the trials in Gethsemane. If, even at that late
day, he could use such a simile to describe it, how
severe must have been the pain at the actual time
of the occurrence! It is not every event which
burns itself into the soul in such a way as to be
reproduced in middle life with undiminished pain.
The Arabian struggle was such an event; it was
Paul's first Christian pain, and first pain is ever

74 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
the severest. It was the struggle of a soul to
emancipate itself, by an act of personal expiation,
from the effects of a moral past which had left its
impress upon his physical frame. Into the nature
of that conflict we are not permitted to gaze ; his
tory is silent upon its record, and his own confession
has alone revealed it. Doubtless it was a time of
watching and fasting, perhaps of those very watch
ings and fastings which at a future day he cata
logued amongst his labours. Earning his bread by
making tents for the Bedouins, he probably took
little bread, and dwelt beneath few tabernacles. In
many vigils under the open sky, in many hours of
prayer amid the storm and rain, in continual self-
mortification, in the constant effort to realise his
own humility and nothingness, — above all, in the
daily crucifixion of that flesh which, because it was
the seat of his thorn, had become the memorial of
his corruption, he sought to earn the removal of
his penalty, and to obtain a liberation from the
days of old.
And the result was failure; that, too, helped to
render permanently vivid the memory of his pain.
A man's first failure is burned more intensely into
his soul than his first success. Paul's earliest ex
perience of Christianity was an experience of defeat
— of effort futile, of prayer unanswered. How do
we know that his firsteffort was futile? The reason
for the assertion is well worth considering. When
we read the Epistles to the Galatians and to the
Romans, we find that, from beginning to end, their
burden consists in ringing the changes on one

Arabia : Autobiographical Beminiscences. 15
thought — the impossibility of being justified by law.
Where did Paul get that thought? We commonly
think of it as a mere dogma or doctrine of his
theology. Be it so; but let us remember, at least,
that it was a dogma new to the religious world,
and discovered for the first time by Paul himself.
Where did Paul discover it? If we were asked
where Timothy or Titus discovered it, we would
have no difficulty in finding for it, in their case, a
purely dogmatic origin; we should say at once that
they had derived it from Paul. But whence did
Paul derive it? Not from his ancestors; it was
contrary to the spirit of his ancestors, — it was the
very thought which separated him from the home
of his nativity. Is it not clear that it was to him
an independent personal experience ? However
much in after-years it crystallised into a dogma,
it was at the beginning a fact of the life. It was
not by dogma that Paul arrived at it; he arrived
at it by stern practical discipline. I have often
remarked that nowhere does he use the singular
number so frequently as in referring to the struggle
to justify one's self by the claims of law. " The law
of the spirit of life hath made me free from the law
of sin and death; " "there is a law in my members
warring against the law of my mind; " " 0 wretched
man that i" am, who shall deliver me from this body
of death? " Why is this? Is it not because Paul
had learned the uselessness of legal penance not
from any mere traditional dogma, but from an ex
perience of living pain? It was to him not a pre
cept but a memory. It was the memory of that

76 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Arabian struggle in which, for the first time, there
strove together in his heart the old life and the new.
It was the memory of a struggle in which he had
sought by vigils, by fastings, by daily and hourly
humiliations, to wash out the dark stain from the
record of his past, and to purchase by forgiveness
a liberation from its penal thorn. Above all, it was
the memory of a struggle in which he had reaped
nothing but weariness, in which his vigils had been
vain, his fastings powerless, his humiliations abor
tive, and which, at the end of the day, left him in
possession of his weakness still.
Does Paul now return from Arabia? His experi
ment at the foot of \ Mount Sinai has been a failure;
does he abandon the search in this direction? Not
so; the hour of his failure is but the beginning of
a new epoch. If I have rightly interpreted the
mental reminiscences revealed in his epistles, there
are two periods in his Arabian struggle — the period
of Mount Sinai, and what may be called the period
of the Sinaitic desert. The period of Mount Sinai
was the time of abortive penance, the season in
which he stood under the shadow of an avenging
law, and failed to find rest from its shadow. But
just at this moment there came into the mind of
Paul a thought which changed the current of his
whole after-life. This law, beneath whose majesty
he cowered, had only begun with Mount Sinai;
what had been the guide of his countrymen before
reaching that mountain? That they had possessed
a guide and a powerful one, was beyond all question.
What had led them within the precincts of Arabia?

Arabia: Autobiographical Beminiscences. 77
What had conducted them beyond the bondage of
Egypt? What had been their sustaining power in
the patriarchal days before Egypt? The law had
not then been given; Mount Sinai was still in
visible; the thunderings and the lightnings were
as yet unheard. What was in these days the sub
stitute for law? Paul asked the question, and from
the Jewish scriptures themselves he received a very
surprising answer. They told him that before the
days of law there had been days of promise, that
previous to the deterring by threats there had been
the attracting, byrewards. So far was Mount Sinai
from being the origin of Jewish worship, it was a
mark of the decline of that worship. The giving of
the law was an indication, not of spiritual strength,
but of spiritual declension ; law was ' ' the child
of the bondwoman." ' The true freedom of the
Jewish nation had from the beginning lain not in
law but in faith, in the prophetic belief of the coming
mercies of God. Not Moses but Abraham had been
the founder of the Hebrew commonwealth, and the
justification of Abraham had been a justification by
faith.2 Might not he (Paul) go back to that stand- ,
point? Was it necessary that, in becoming a Chris
tian, he should cease to be a Jew? He must, indeed,
cease to be a legalist; but was there not a national
life behind legalism? was not Abraham older than
the law ? and was not Abraham justified by faith?
Why should he not go back to Abraham? why
should not the whole nation go back to Abraham?
The law was an excrescence, an after-growth, an
1 See Gal. Iv. 22, and sequel. - See Romans iv. 16, and sequel.

78 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
accommodation to passing needs; the original thing
was the promised mercy and the faith in that mercy.
Would not the return to this primitive standpoint,
instead of being an innovation, be in reality a con
servative movement, in which his country would
purchase national freedom by retracing her steps
into the golden past?
And Paul did go back. His conflict under the
shadow of Mount Sinai was the crisis hour between
the old life and the new. At the close of that hour
he was already loosed from the bonds of Mosaism.
But in being loosed from Mosaism he did not all at
once pass into Gentilism. There was an intermediate
stage between the followers of Moses and the sons
of the Gentiles; it was the stage of the children of
Abraham. Paul's first Christianity after leaving
Mount Sinai, was a Christianity which had indeed
ceased to be Judaic, but only by becoming Hebraic.
It was still grounded on the Old Testament, only it
was on the Old Testament in its patriarchal age. He
accepted justification by faith, instead of justification
by law, but his faith was as yet only the faith of
Abraham. It was not yet a receptive faculty by
which he had communion with Christ; it was simply
a prophetic belief in the promised mercy of God
through Christ. He said to himself, 'May not
God's strength be perfected in my weakness? He
has called me to be a missionary, andv morally, I am
unfit to be a missionary. I bear about in my body
the penalty of a great transgression, and this is itself
sufficient to constitute my failure. But was not
Abraham himself called to be a missionary when he

Arabia : Autobiographical Beminiscences. 79
was physically inadequate? Did not the glory of
his call simply consist in this, that he could only
accept it through faith in God's almighty power?
Why should not mine be a similar experience? Why
should not God's power to me be manifested in bear
ing my moral weakness, just as it was manifested to
Abraham in bearing his physical weakness? If, in
spite of his thorn, God made him the instrument in
the construction of a great spiritual dominion, why
should not His glory be magnified by making me, in
spite of my thorn, an instrument in the construction
of the kingdom of Christ? '
Such I believe to have been Paul's thought — the
thought which marked the conclusion of his Arabian
struggle. Nay, I believe it was even more pointed
than this. I think it was at this stage that there
entered into his mind an idea which moulded largely
his whole after-life. Might not the strength of God
be manifested in his weakness not merely negatively
but positively, not simply in spite of his thorn, but
through his thorn? Might he not cherish the faith
that the mercy of God in Christ would not merely
forgive his past, but atone for his past? Might not
the Divine power reveal itself, just by lifting up his
own dark deeds into the spiritual order of events, by
transmuting his crosses into gold? He had left on
the wayside impediments to the development of the
gospel; why should not Divine grace manifest itself
by transforming these impediments into the steps of
an ascending ladder? Was it not conceivable that,
in the plan and purpose of the Highest, his past bad
actions should be made to work together for good?

80 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
They were bad before leaving his hands, but the
moment they left his hands, were they not part of
God's universe? Had they not ceased to be his after
he had done them? How could these deeds of his
exist in eternal dualism with the works and ways of
God? Must not they too be gathered into the
Divine mosaic?
What relation in the mind of Paul this hope had
to the person of Christ is a question which I shall
consider in the next chapter. In the meantime I
am simply emphasising the fact that it was a hope,
and the first personal hope which Paul had ex
perienced in his new life. The vision of the risen
Messiah had revealed to him the prospect of the
Christian kingdom; here for the first time he re
ceived a prospect for himself. I do not say he
had reached the stage of crucifixion to the world
which he afterwards attained; that stage is only per
fected when a man enters into a new freedom. As
yet Paul did not feel free; his only safety lay in an
absolute and implicit surrender of his own will to
the power of the Highest. His personal life was
rather overshadowed and controlled than strength
ened and invigorated by its contact with the Divine.
Nevertheless, if his strength as a man had not yet
come, his strength as a missionary had. That strength
was displayed in what may be called his incipient
Calvinism— his determination to put the will of God
in the foreground, and his own will in the back
ground. Rising up from his Arabian struggle, he
prepares to prosecute his missionary calling, and it
is a very remarkable fact that he seeks to prosecute

Arabia : Autobiographical Beminiscences. 81
that calling precisely in those places to which his
nature is most repugnant. As we read his auto
biographical narrative of the events which followed
the Arabian sojourn, we cannot fail to be impressed
with the conviction that Paul successively chooses
for evangelistic enterprise precisely those three dis
tricts where he did not wish to go. His immediate
transition is back to Damascus. L It was a voluntary
choice of humiliation — a crucifixion of the natural
man. Damascus had been the scene of his pros
tration — the scene in which his old life had been
humbled by the arrestive grace of God; it required
Calvinistic courage to begin there. There was a
stern justice in the criminal being led back to the
scene of his crime, that on the very spot he might
undo it — a justice which Paul appreciated, and
which, doubtless, dictated his first missionary course.
He felt it incumbent on him to bear the heat he had
himself created, — to experience the first torture of
that fire which he had been the means of kindling.
Damascus was the fitting beginning for such a life as
Paul's, the just commencement for a heart weighed
down with a remorseful past, and struggling by word
and deed to have that past undone.
And so Paul goes to Damascus, and begins there
to preach that faith which he had formerly sought to
destroy. By-and-by Damascus casts him out2 — a
strong testimony to the intensity of his preaching.
The next time the curtain rises there is a change of
scene — he has passed from Damascus into Jerusalem.3
It is a second and a deeper humiliation. If Damas-
» Gal. i. 17. 2 2 Cor. xi. 82, 33. » Gal. i. 18.

«2 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
cus had been the scene of his crime, Jerusalem had
been the scene of his dignity. It was associated
with the memories of his Jewish greatness, of that
greatness which had come to him from his support
of the national faith. It recalled the days when he
had been a Pharisee of the Pharisees, a leader of the
patriotic instincts of his country. It was a hard
thing to go back there — to go back as a represen
tative of that very party whom he had gained his
reputation by decrying. A spirit of self-calculation
would have prompted Paul to have delayed such a
missionary journey until he had made a new reputa
tion to counterbalance the loss of the old. But the
very difficulty of the situation was Paul's motive for
accepting it. Its attractiveness was its humiliation.
He placed Jerusalem in the foreground, just that he
might taste the full penalty of his past. He went
there in the days of his deepest contrast with his
former self, just that the outward humiliation of the
contrast might be apparent to his Jewish brethren.
It was an act of social expiation, and as such it was
courted, not shunned.
Then the curtain falls once more, and when it
rises again we are in yet another scene. Jerusalem
has faded from our view, and we are standing with
Paul in the province of Cilicia.1 It is the deepest
humiliation of all. If Damascus was the scene of
his crime, if Jerusalem was the scene of his dignity,
Cilicia, according to universal tradition, was the scene
of his nativity. Here had been his home-life; here
had been passed the days of his early development;
i Gal. i. 21.

Arabia : Autobiographical Beminiscences. 83
here had been formed and ventilated those opinions
of Jewish exclusiveness which had characterised his
after-career. The opinions of youth are ever ex
pressed with the greatest vehemence, and it is of
all things the most difficult to confess that these
have been wrong. Paul had left Cilicia burning
with the zeal of his first convictions, and conscious
that these convictions were a matter of notoriety to
the companions of his home-life. It was a hard
thing, a humiliating thing, to come back after a
few years and tell these companions not only that
his convictions were burnt out, but that they had
been replaced by contrary fires. It was a hard
thing to be pointed at as an instance of mental
instability, as one who had falsified the expectations
of his youth, and reversed the estimate which the
comrades of his youth had formed. It was the
hardness of the trial that prompted Paul to seek it.
He owed this humiliation to a past which called for
atonement, and he was eager to prostrate his old life
before the feet of infinite justice.
Such is the framework of the first period of Paul's
Christian history; but it is only the framework.
What is the picture ? We see the man moving
successively through the missionary spheres of
Damascus, Jerusalem, and Cilicia: what is, during
this time, the character of the man himself? What
is the nature of that first gospel which marks the
opening of his missionary career? What is his
mental attitude towards the old faith in his earliest
experience of the new? We have seen that the
moment of his conversion was not immediately ac-

84 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
companied by a sense of moral courage; still less
should we expect that it would be accompanied by a
fulness of intellectual inspiration. The translation
of Paul into Christianity was the translation into a
new order of thought; but here, as everywhere else,
the stage of initiation must precede the stage of
completion. What was Paul's stage of intellectual
initiation? What was the earliest form in which
the objects of Christian thought presented them
selves to his gaze, and what was that process of
education by which he first arrived at a knowledge
of these forms? These are questions which I shall
endeavour to answer in the next chapter.

CHAPTER V.
PAUL'S FIRST GOSPEL: SOURCES OP HIS CHRISTIAN
EDUCATION.
What was the nature of that gospel which marked
the beginning of Paul's missionary life? Was it
universal, or was it particular? Was it an equal
invitation to all the world, or was it tinged as yet
with a certain leaven of Judaism? I believe that
in one sense it was universal, and in another sense
particular. I think that, on the one hand, the vision
of the resurrection Christ had already impressed Paul^
with the glorious destiny of the Gentile nations;
yet it seems to me that, at this stage of his history,
he had not wholly emancipated himself from the
trammels of the national faith. We shall therefore
take up these aspects one by one. We shall begin
by considering in what sense Paul's gospel was even
now a universal invitation, and we shall afterwards
go on to consider in what sense it was still bound
with the grave-clothes of a dead past.
And first, Paul had made a discovery. He had
found that in the religion of Judaism the conserva
tive was the true liberal. In the large number ol
religious beliefs, the progress of liberal thought is

86 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
proportionate to the advance of time; Paul had dis
covered that in Judaism the order of development
was in the inverse ratio. He had found that, in pro
portion as he retraced his steps towards a distant
past, the spirit of the Hebrew nation became more
large and charitable, — that in this respect it had the
aspect of a triangle, and was broadest at its base.
The days of Moses had been days of restriction, of
limitation, of narrowness. But when Paul went
back to the age earlier than Moses, when he directed
his view to that patriarchal period in which were
laid the beginnings of the national life, he found
that the beginnings of this life had been marked
by universal aspirations. The horizon which had
stretched before the eyes of Abraham had been an
unlimited horizon. God had taken him out beneath
the stars, and had shown him in a moment of time
all the points of the compass. There had flashed
before his gaze a vision of humanity itself, in its
length and its breadth, its height and its depth.
There had come into his heart the thought of a
universal brotherhood, of a brotherhood which he
owed to man as man, without national distinctions,
and without local limitations. There had entered
into his mind the hope that he himself might be
destined to be a missionary to this universal race,
a pioneer of its civilisation, a forerunner of its de
velopment. There had risen before his eyes the
image of a great deliverer, who was to come from
his own loins, and be the fulfiller of his own aspira
tions, — a hope which expressed itself in the world
wide prophecy, "in thy seed shall all families of the

PauVs First Gospel. 87
earth be blessed. " In this universal promise, in this
unlimited aspiration, had the germ of Judaism be
gun. Its earliest period had been its most catholic;
its beginnings had been free, unrestrained, bounded
only by humanity. The faith of Abraham, as it ap
peared to Paul, was the faith in a universal man. It
was the belief that, in the fulness of time, there would
come forth from his own lineage one whose perfect
righteousness would expiate the unrighteousness of
all the world, — a life whose untarnished beauty would
stand before the face of the Father as an atonement
for all in the past which had been unbeautiful, as a
vindication and justification of the ancient mandate
"let us make man."
Such, in the view of Paul, was the original code of
Jewish righteousness. But now, as with earnest
heart he ponders the subject, he makes a further
and a more remarkable discovery ; he finds that, as
a matter of fact, this code had never been repealed.
He finds that the law of Moses, whatever interpre
tation might have been put upon it in later times,
had never in its origin been designed to supersede
the faith of Abraham.1 He finds that this law had
been given not as a cure of badness, but as a cure
only of the manifestation of badness — in other words,
of crime. ' ' The law was added because of transgres
sions."2 It was imposed upon men not for the pur
pose of making them righteous, but with the view of
restraining them from deeds of injustice and vio
lence. It was sent to keep man from violating the
rights of man, — to prevent him from leaping the
i Gal. Hi. 17. 2 Gal. ill. 19.

88 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
fences and pilfering from the ground of his brother.
It superseded no code of original righteousness; it
came only to supplement that code when the ideal
of the heart had lost the freshness of its first glow.
It came to invest the present with that sense of
awful majesty which the future had ceased to wear,
and to substitute the fear of a temporal penalty for
that hope of a coming glory which had in the days
of old been adequate to the life of man.
In the view of Paul, then, the law was never
meant to be a guide to moral life. It was only
designed to be a line of boundary between the moral
and the immoral, to constitute a regiment of police
which should prevent the passions of men from
breaking forth into deeds of crime. Accordingly, it
follows that, in the view of Paul, the perfect keep
ing of the law was by no means equivalent to a
perfect fulfilment of righteousness. I am aware
that I am here at variance with the popular opinion.
It is commonly thought that, in the view of Paul, the
law was introduced just to show man how spotless
the righteousness of God was, and how impossible it
was that man should keep it. I can only say that
in this case the law miserably failed in its design so
far as Paul himself was concerned. He certainly
regarded the keeping of it as a very easy thing, so
easy that, to his mind, the achievement did not indi
cate any great amount of righteousness at all. He
says that he himself was, ' ' touching the righteous
ness which is in the law, blameless." How could he
say that he was blameless? Remember that when
he uttered these words he was already a Christian,

PauVs First Gospel. 89
looking back with dismay upon the days when he
was not a Christian. Should we not have expected
that he would have stigmatised these days as full of
blame? Should we not have thought that he would
have contrasted the riches of the new state with the
pinching poverty of the old? Is it not surprising,
then, that in looking back he should have pronounced
that old state to be blameless? It would be indeed
surprising on the common view that Paul held the
righteousness of the law to be a perfect righteous
ness. But is it not plain from this very passage
that he held the reverse? Is it not evident that
he means to teach what a miserable standard the
righteousness of the law must have been when he
himself was able, in looking back even from a Chris
tian standpoint, to feel that he had kept it perfectly,
that, touching its righteousness; he had been blame
less? He does not mean to praise himself, but to
indicate how poor must have been a rule of righteous
ness which should have allowed such a man as he,
not only to believe himself, but actually to be blame
less according to its requirements.
Such, then, was Paul's position in relation to the
law. He never doubted that a man could keep it
perfectly, never doubted that he himself had fulfilled
it. Its very reproach to him was just the fact that
it could be kept by men whose hearts were steeped
in sin. Its defect lay not in its impracticableness,
but in its inadequateness. Paul felt that a man
might be legally blameless, and a deep-dyed sinner
still. He felt that he might keep the law -without
even offending in a single point, and be yet at that

90 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
very moment in the gall of bitterness, and in the
bond of iniquity. He felt that the conviction of
such a righteousness would never satisfy any man,
had never satisfied the Jew himself. What was the
reason that the best men of his nation had ever been
the most impressed with sin? Why had the dis
satisfaction always been expressed most loudly by
those who had reached the top of the hill? Was it
not because the revelation was there made that the
top of the hill was not the top of the universe?
Was it not because the conscience of Israel had at
all times been more exacting than its code, and
asserted its claims most strongly just when its code
had been observed? It demanded from man in
behalf of God a perfect righteousness, a righteous
ness which should indeed fulfil the law, but which
the law itself could never fulfil. The moral hope
of the nation had really rested in an incipient Chris
tianity, had reposed in the aspiration contained in
the faith of Abraham, that the latest fruit of the
tree of life would atone to the Father for the com
parative barrenness of the intermediate branches.
I have now answered the first of the proposed
questions — To what extent Paul's new gospel had
divorced him from the ancient Judaism? I have
arrived at the conclusion that he had reached a
liberal attitude by assuming a more conservative
position. He had gone back from the legal to the
patriarchal age, from the law of Moses to the faith
of Abraham. He had found there that the period of
the most primitive development had been the period
of the most enlarged hope for humanity. The stream

PauVs First Gospel. 91
had been wiaest at its source. The aspirations of
Judaism had been least narrowed and confined pre
cisely at that stage in which they had begun to be.
At that stage Paul stood. He took his stand in the
patriarchal period, side by side with Abraham, and
he shared the hope of Abraham in the advent of a
life whose humanity would be unlimited, and whose
blessing would be universal.
Had Paul, then, ceased to be a Jew? Had he
emancipated himself from the last trace of national
ism? Had he now become what he afterwards was
— the apostle of the Gentiles distinctively and un
qualifiedly? It is my opinion that he had not. He
had passed from Judaism into Hebraism, but there
was one point in which the Hebrew was united
to the Jew. There was a rite which the age of
legalism had confessedly derived from the patriarchal
age — the ordinance of circumcision.1 In accepting
the faith of Abraham, it is natural on the very
surface to suppose that Paul accepted this faith
with all its accompaniments. He left behind him
as non-essential whatever was of later origin, but he
probably embraced with all the more tenacity every
element of that period from which he had elected to
begin. Circumcision was one of these elements. It
belonged to the age of Hebraism as distinguished
from that of Judaism. It was interwoven with the
first universal hope of humanity, was closely asso
ciated with the belief that a blessing was reserved
for all mankind. Would it be surprising if, at the
outset, Paul should have deemed it an essential con-
i Gen. xvii. 10.

92 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
dition of that blessing? Would it be wonderful if
he should have accepted it as incumbent on those
who would be partakers of the faith of Abraham?
Even in the absence of any further evidence, would
it not be natural to suppose that, in adopting the
universal scope of Abraham's promise, he should
have expected those who embraced it to enter
through Abraham's gate?
But we are not left without any further evidence.
There are two passages in St. Paul's letters which
seem to me to bear directly on this question. The
first of these is expressed in the memorable reminis
cence: "Henceforth know we no man after the
flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the
flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him no more."1
The point to be here observed is, that Paul declares
there was a time when he knew Christ after the
flesh; in other words, when he had a more super
ficial view of Christianity than that at which he
had then arrived. When was that time of com
parative superficialness? The common interpreta
tion relegates it to the days of Saul of Tarsus.
Paul is supposed to mean that he recognised a
physical Messiah in the period previous to his
adoption of Christianity. I shall waive altogether
the question whether the reference to a time so far
remote is compatible with the words of the passage
before us, whether the phrase "now henceforth"
can legitimately and grammatically be reckoned
equivalent to ' ' for these fourteen years back. " Let
ting that pass, I shall simply ask whether Paul, in

PauVs First Gospel. 93
looking back from a Christian standpoint, would
have been likely to have dignified with the name of
Christian knowledge his original reverence for the
Jewish Messiah. Is it probable that this man, who
is conscious that he has received from Christianity a
radical change, should, in the very face of that con
sciousness, have honoured his worship of the national
ideal by calling it a knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth?
Has he not elsewhere declared that when he became
a Christian he held to be loss the things which he
had formerly counted gain? Is it compatible with
such a declaration that he should have maintained
his recognition of the Jewish Messiah to have been
identical in kind, and only different in degree, from
the knowledge of that Jesus of Nazareth who was
now the object of his hope and love?
The truth is, Paul is not here speaking of the
difference between his present Christianity and his
former Judaism, but of the difference between his
present Christianity and the Christianity of his
early days. What he says in effect is this — ' I
have now arrived at a stage in which I value no
man according to his circumcision or his uncircum-
cision. I admit, indeed, there was a time in which
my opinion of circumcision was so high, that I be
lieved it to be the necessary gate even to Christian
ity itself. That period has now passed away, and I
have come to see that a man's acceptance of Christ
is altogether unconditioned by the observance of any
fleshly ceremony.' But if this is Paul's meaning, it
clearly contains a most valuable biographical remi
niscence. It tells us in the clearest language that

94 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Paul in emerging from Judaism did not emerge all
in a moment, that there was a period of dim dawn
between his hour of night and his hour of morning.
He left the gate of legalism that he might stand by
a wider gate, but the wider gate was still Jewish,
and the more liberal standpoint was still national.
He desired all men to be made partakers of the
privileges of Israel, and he desired that these priv
ileges should be disencumbered from the burdens of
the law, but as yet he still held it to be inevitable
and imperative that the blessings of the faith of
Abraham should come through the door of circum
cision. The second passage which corroborates my view
of this subject is the question addressed to a church
of Judaic tendencies, "If I yet preach circumcision,
why do I yet suffer persecution"?1 It is designed
to answer a charge of inconsistency, but we have
nothing to do with this here. The point on which I
wish to lay stress is the phrase, " if I yet preach
circumcision. " It clearly implies that there was a
time when Paul did preach circumcision. When
was that time? The popular view is that Paul is
alluding to the period when he was still uncon
verted to Christianity, that he is recalling the days
in which he had stood forth as a defender of the rights
of Judaism against the encroachments of the new
faith. But, I ask, how could it be said that at that
time Paul was a preacher of circumcision? What
ever he defended as Saul of Tarsus, it was not the
doctrine of circumcision. That doctrine had never
» Gal. v. u.

PauVs First Gospel. 95
been assailed by Christianity, had never been the
question on which the new faith had separated
from the old. Even at the moment in which Paul
was writing this passage, his brother apostles were
all believers in circumcision. The new religion
had never dreamed for an instant of overturning this
rite. Its aim had been rather the realisation than
the degradation of Judaism, and it had sought to ac
complish its aim rather by enhancing than by dis
paraging the institutions of the old life. By no
stretch of language could Saul of Tarsus be called
a preacher of circumcision; in no proper use of lan
guage could he be styled a preacher at all. He was
a statesman, a councillor, a diplomatist, a partisan,
an advocate, but in no strict sense a religious
teacher. His work lay in the Sanhedrim, not in the
temple; his genius was political, his efforts were for
the service of the State. The office of preaching was
reserved for his Christian consciousness; it had no
place in the heart of his Judaism.
We must conclude, then, that when Paul speaks
of having at one time preached circumcision, he is
speaking of a Christian and not of a Jewish period.
He is virtually telling us that, when he first went
out from Jerusalem, he did not at once go to
Ephesus, or Corinth, or Rome, but only the length
of Mesopotamia. In emerging from the creed of
ancient Israel, he did not all at once stray beyond
its borders, did not wholly pass the limits of the old
tradition. He passed beyond the environments of
legalism so far as these professed to be the ultimate
standard of morality; he went back from the age of

96 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Moses to the freer atmosphere of the age of Abraham,
and found in that atmosphere a more healthy res
piration; but he still attached himself and his
Christianity to an institution of that age which was
purely ceremonial, and he was still unable to disso
ciate the universal hope from the national rite of
circumcision. I have now answered the two questions proposed
at the beginning of this chapter. I have indicated
to what extent the gospel of Paul was as yet uni
versal, and to what extent it was still limited and
particular. The result has been to establish the
position that the Christian illumination of Paul was
a process of education, — a process by which he pro
ceeded step by step from the knowledge in part to
the knowledge in full. This, accordingly, seems now
the proper place to inquire what were the sources of
Paul's Christian education. One would imagine be
forehand that he had peculiar facilities for such an
education. True, he had been born a little out of
due time; he had not been an actual spectator of the
life and work of the Master. Yet in the strictest
sense he was a contemporary of that life and work.
His years probably ran nearly parallel to the years of
Jesus. The disciples of Christianity's dawn were
still alive and active, and we have evidence from
Paul's own epistles that they were accessible to his
intercourse. Under these circumstances we should
expect that Paul would have immediately proceeded
to fill up the blanks in his own Christian knowl
edge by a reference to contemporary experience.
His vision of Christ had been only a vision of

PauVs First Gospel. - 97
the closing drama, and precisely of that stage of
the drama where the scene was transferred from
earth to heaven. The first step of Paul's edu
cation must clearly be the filling up of the earthly
blank in his knowledge of the Son of man. His
vision had been only that of a resurrection Christ;
his earliest journey must be a retracing of his steps
into those human scenes which preceded the resur
rection. In seeking a knowledge of that past, should
we not have expected that Paul would have gone
directly and immediately to the living sources of
tradition? Should we not have thought that, in the
very presence of contemporaries whose memory was
charged with the personal incidents of the Master's
life, he would have hastened at once to supply the
vacancy by seeking from these a first-hand portrait
of Jesus? It seems at first sight of all things the
most natural that Paul, in his earliest search for the
human memories of Christ, should have drawn his
information from that band of primitive disciples who
had been with Him from the beginning, and had
followed Him to the end.
And yet we must confess that in this matter we
are doomed to experience a surprise. In point of
fact Paul's earliest resort for information is not to
contemporary sources. Desirous as he must have
felt to supply that which was lacking in his knowl
edge of the earthly life of Jesus, he does not imme
diately repair to those streams of living tradition
from which at once the want could have been
compensated. On the contrary, his immediate re
sort is to the Old Testament. His resurrection

98 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
vision had told him that Jesus was the Messiah:
instead of inquiring what this Messiah had act
ually been, he immediately proceeds to inquire
what He must have been. He does not repair,
as we should naturally expect, to the living voices
of Peter, James, and John, but to the prophetic
voices of Isaiah, Hosea, and the Psalmist. He
wants to know, not so much what really happened as
what the Scriptures predicted would happen. In
his earliest epistles we look in vain for any his
torical reminiscence of the man Christ Jesus.
Neither in the two letters to the Thessalonians,
nor in the single letter to the Galatians, do we find
the slightest reference to the daily life of the Christ
of Palestine. It is only when he comes to write
to the Corinthians that we discover unmistakable
evidence of his sympathy with the historical tra
dition. His proofs of the resurrection Christ em
brace a circumstantial narrative of facts which could
only have been learned from contemporaneous sources;
but even here it would be too much to say that it
was based on these facts. On the contrary, we are
continually surprised to find that the main stress of
Paul is laid upon the proof that Christ was raised ' ' ac
cording to the Scriptures. " We marvel at the ten
acity and at the pertinacity with which he reiterates
the assertion; and from our modern point of view,
we wonder at the importance with which he invests
it. We want to hear about the five hundred by whom
Jesus was beheld simultaneously; we want to know
what manner of men they were, and with what de
gree of emphasis they asserted their conviction. It

PauVs First Gospel. 99
is rather damping under these circumstances to be
perpetually directed to a remote past, and told to
find our comfort in the fact that He was raised ' ' ac
cording to the Scriptures."
Yet a deeper reflection will convince us that, how
ever unnatural all this seems, it is only unnatural
from our point of view. If we throw ourselves back
from the nineteenth century into the first, we
shall find that Paul's conduct in this matter is
not only free from artificialness, but is the genuine
impulse of a spontaneous human nature. For, let
us consider the difference between the religious
standpoint of the first and nineteenth centuries. In
our age the objection to Christianity is its miracu-
lousness; in Paul's age the objection to Christianity
was its seeming unscripturalness. The opposing
element in the mind of Paul was not the supposed
violation of nature's law involved in a Messiah rising
from the dead; it was the apparent verdict of the
Old Testament that the Messiah could not be dead
at all. To the mind of his countrymen, originally
to the mind of himself, the notion of a suffering
Messiah was at variance with that will of God which
was expressed in the Jewish scriptures, and which
to him was synonymous with the law of nature.
When therefore Christianity presented itself, his
first and foremost question was, What did the Bible
say? He did not ask whether it would violate the
laws of the physical universe; that was to him a
subordinate consideration. His immediate concern
was whether it would violate that order of Divine
prophecy which had permeated like a thread the

100 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
contents of the Old Testament, and had constituted
to the heart of Israel the most unchangeable thing
in the universe.
Let me illustrate the feeling by a familiar ex
perience of modern life. There is a widespread
belief in some quarters that there are at the present
day certain spiritual manifestations revealed through
the movements of certain articles of furniture. If
the evidence for this belief were to be estimated
simply by the number of those who have professed
to witness the manifestation, it would be as demon
strable as any proposition of Euclid. Measured by
such a standard, the "five hundred brethren at
once " would be nowhere; the testimony for this
later miracle embraces not hundreds but thousands.
And yet, the large majority of professing Christians
would never dream of even examining one of the
witnesses; they would, and actually do, reject the
testimony without inquiry. Why? Simply because
the thing which is attested appears to them to be
at variance with the doctrine of the Bible. They
would deem it impiety to take into a moment's'con-
sideration any of those outward circumstances which
seem to make for or against the theory, because they
are convinced beforehand that, if the theory were
proved, the Old and New Testaments would be
disproved. It is no opposition to the miraculous
that prompts the ordinary Christian to foreclose this
question of modern spiritualism. Every Christian
believes in something equally miraculous, and mir
aculous, moreover, in a somewhat similar direction.
The Catholic recognises the truth of transubstantia-

PauVs First Gospel. 101
tion, the belief that the Divine Sphit can transmute
itself into material elements; the Protestant, without
accepting a transmutation, equally coincides in the
conclusion that the Divine Spirit can manifest itself
in these material elements. It is therefore no sense
of supernaturalism that repels the Christian con
sciousness from the modern belief in the manifesta
tion of spirits through material forms. It is the
Christian consciousness itself that constitutes the
ground of the repulsion. It is the belief that the
new life is opposed to the old, the conviction that
the modern form of revelation would contradict in
its earthliness and compromise in its humanness
those lofty and Divine precepts which have de
scended from the spirit of Christianity.
Let us apply this to Paul. Previous to his con
version, he was told on every hand that there had
appeared in the heart of the Jewish theocracy a
series of new spiritual manifestations. Paul did
not make the slightest effort to test the reality
of these; he decided beforehand and in advance
that they could not be real. His reason for this
decision was not any sense of scientific uniformity.
He had no objection to a miracle, and was quite
ready to admit any alteration in the law of nature,
provided it did not touch the first link of the chain.
That first link of the chain was to him the will of
God, as revealed and expressed in the pages of the
Old Testament. But then, in the view of Paul
these new spiritual manifestations did touch the
first link of the chain; they seemed to him to be
at variance with the prophecies of the Old Testa-

102 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
ment. Such a consideration was sufficient to his
mind to decide the case at once. No amount of
external testimony would have warranted the ac
ceptance of statements whose acceptance would con
tradict the verdict of the Jewish Scriptures. Even
if such statements had been verified it would have
availed them nothing. To the mind of the Jew
there were in existence undoubted facts, which were
with equal undoubtedness to be refused admission
into the mind of man — facts which had their origin
in a power which was not Divine, and their place in
an economy which was founded on other laws from
those of truth.
By-and-by Paul was converted, not by the force
of external testimony, but by the force of a sub
jective and personal experience. Even then, how
ever, the difficulty which had presented itself to
the anti-Christian leader continued to present itself
to the Christian missionary. The main obstacle to
be combated as an apologist was precisely that
obstacle which originally had made him an op
ponent. He had been so inveterate a Judaiser
that the habit survived his entrance into Christi
anity. On the threshold of his new call, it never
occurred to him that the question of his opponents
could be other than this, "Where is Abel, thy
brother," what have you done with the Old Testa
ment? It was a sense of that question that drove
him at the outset, not into Jerusalem, but into
Arabia, not towards the scene of the new manifes
tations, but into the region of the ancient covenant.
He communed not with flesh and blood, just because

Pauls First Gospel. 103
flesh and blood could not give the testimony he
desired. He wanted not the testimony of the present
but the witness of the past; he was in search, not
of facts to corroborate the words of men, but ol
something to harmonise the words of men with the
word of God.
This explains the seeming waste which, from an
educational point of view, is involved in Paul's
Arabian journey. It seems to the reader as if, even
from his own standpoint, he must have been con
sciously losing time; was it not like going to a
school of mathematics for the purpose of learning
music? Undoubtedly; but it so happened that
Paul could not begin to learn music without a
knowledge of the mathematics. He was deeply
impressed with the beauty and the inherent har
mony of the Christian principle, but he wanted to
know that the Christian principle was itself in a
straight line with the principles of his fathers.
He wanted to ascertain for purposes of defence
what he had formerly denied for purposes of ag
gression — the unity between the new covenant and
the old, the conformity of the life of Jesus to the
prophetic will of God.
It was when Paul emerged from Arabia, it was
when he came forth into the vicinity of Gentile
scenes, that he began to feel the inadequacy of his
method. To begin his defence of Christianity by'
a study of the Old Testament was a fitting course
for a missionary to the Jews; was it the fitting
course for the Apostle of the Gentiles? Was it not
clear that to them the main subject of inquiry was

104 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
not the consistency but the veracity of the alleged
facts, — not their congruity with the Old Testament,
but their compatibility with human experience?
Paul felt that it was so. He felt that his previous
method had been one-sided, adapted only to a class.
He desired to adapt Christianity to the other class —
those for whom he felt himself specially destined.
But how was he to accomplish this? The new
method clearly demanded a new training. His
knowledge of the Old Testament was an advan
tage among the Jews; it could contribute nothing
to his success among the Gentiles. To succeed
amongst them he must go to school not with his
fathers but with his brethren. He must consult
his contemporaries who had been the contemporaries
of Jesus. He must learn from eye and ear witnesses
what had been the actual history of that life of
which he had been only permitted to see the ideal
glory. And this leads me to counteract an impression
which prevails extensively in Christian circles — that
Paul professed to have derived his information con
cerning the events of Christ's life from supernatural
sources. The opinion is based upon the passage in
Galatians i. 11-16, in which Paul lays claim not
only to an originality of thought, but to an original
ity in the mode of its communication. He declares
that the gospel which he preached was neither after
the manner of man, nor received from man, that it
had come to him directly and immediately from the
revelation of God. The natural inference has been
that Paul here professes to have received a knowledge

PauVs First Gospel. 105
of the gospel history without the aid of history, —
a record of the life and acts of Jesus without any
medium to record them. But, however, natural be
the inference, the thought is highly unnatural. Are
we to suppose that Paul received facilities for ob
taining a knowledge of the life of Jesus which were
not received by those whose actual commission was
to write that life? The third evangelist, in the
preface to his gospel, is not ashamed to confess that
his knowledge of the life of Jesus was based upon
sources not supernatural but natural, — that he was
inspired to write his narrative by the fact that others
had written on the same theme, and that he was
in possession of traditions derived from the earliest
contemporary witnesses. Are we to suppose that
Paul, whose mission was not that of a biographer
but of a preacher, should have deemed himself be
yond the necessity of consulting those records of the
time which the third evangelist had made the basis
of his sacred history?
But the truth is, Paul makes no such claim. In
the passage from Galatians which seems to express
the claim, he is speaking not of a gospel history, but
of a gospel call. The message which he professed to
have received by an original channel was not the
account of Christ's life, but the revelation of Christ's
universality. One has only to read the passage in
order to be convinced of this. Strictly speaking, the
originality to which Paul lays claim is an originality
of ordination. He says, "When it pleased God to
reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him
among the heathen, immediately I conferred not

106 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
with flesh and blood." He means to say that his
commission to preach the equal privileges of the
Gentiles was not a commission derived from any
authority delegated to him by the original apostles;
it came to him by a direct act of Divine ordination
which had made him one of their number, and had
placed him in a position as independent as their
own. He had been the first to receive a revelation
of the universal scope of Christianity, and he had
received that revelation by a communication of the
Divine Master equally direct, though not equally
visible. He had been set apart to his specially
apostolic work by a special act of priestly consecra
tion, and that act of priestly consecration had been
performed in his inner spirit by a hand and by a
voice impalpable to the earthly sense.
And this explains what otherwise would be in
explicable in the reasoning of Paul's argument in
this chapter of Galatians. On the popular view
that Paul intended to lay claim to a supernatural
communication of the gospel facts, how are we to
account for such words as these ? ' ' After three years
I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with
him fifteen days. But other of the apostles saw I
none, save James the Lord's brother."1 Does he
mean to imply that the fact of having only seen two
contemporaries was a proof that he had received his
facts supernaturally ? If so, Paul was on this occasion
singularly illogical and wonderfully unlike himself.
In order to obtain a natural knowledge of the gospel
facts, he only required to meet precisely those two
» Gal. 1. 18, 19.

PauVs First Gospel. 107
persons whom by his own admission he did meet.
The whole length and breadth of the earthly life of
Jesus was compassed by their testimony. Or will
it be said that the strength of his argument lies in
the shortness of that period during which he abode
with Peter? I must reply that, if his design was
merely to avoid the imputation of receiving facts by
natural means, the time of his abiding was much too
long. Fifteen hours would have been amply sufficient
to have put him in full possession of all the salient
features of the gospel history; fifteen minutes would
have sufficed to have thoroughly established in his
mind a conviction that the faith in Christianity
rested upon a purely historical basis. If Paul's
motive was to suggest the inference that he had
received no outward knowledge of the facts because
he had only seen two disciples, he managed to sug
gest an inference of precisely the opposite intent.
But the case is very different if we suppose his
object to have been the proof of his independent
ordination. Two of the original apostles could very
easily have taught him; two could never have or
dained him to the apostolic office. From the histori
cal narrative of the Acts we gather that the apostolic
brethren were in the habit of supplying vacancies
left in their ranks, but we learn from the same nar
rative that the vacancy was supplied by the brethren
as a whole. If Paul had been set apart for his
apostolic work merely by the delegated authority of
the original apostles, his own position is that he
must have received that authority from a general
conclave of all the apostles together, whereas in

108 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
point of fact, previous to obtaining such a position,
he had only seen two of them. He had never been
in a situation in which he could receive the hands of
the presbytery. He had never met in conclave with
those original disciples of the Lord from whose
united assembly, and from whose combined will,
could alone come an ordination to the apostolic
office. The circumstance that he had only seen two
was an incontrovertible evidence that, whencesoever
he derived his authority to be an apostle, he did not
and could not derive it from the will of man.
It is in this light that we must interpret another
passage in which Paul seems to lay claim to a
supernatural avenue for the attainment of historical
knowledge. I allude to the passage, 1 Corinthians
xi. 23, in which, speaking of the Lord's Supper, he
says, ' ' I have received of the Lord that which also I
delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus the same
night in which he was betrayed took bread. " Paul
is here commonly supposed to mean that the histori
cal fact of the institution of the Supper was com
municated to him in a manner unhistorical, and
by a process supernatural. The original disciples
learned it through their actual presence at the scene;
Paul was not present at the scene, and therefore on
this matter he had no direct historical testimony.
Under these circumstances it would have seemed
the most natural course to get the historical evidence
next best — to consult the testimony of those who
had been so present. Paul, however, is supposed to
be stating that he scorned such subservience. He is
supposed to indicate that he had received an account,

PauVs First Gospel. 109
through a supernatural channel, of those precise
words of institution which had fallen upon the nat
ural ear of the original disciples.
A thought more grotesque, an idea more incon
gruous with the sphit of the New Testament in
general, and with the spirit of Paul in particular,
was perhaps never conceived. It is contrary to
every analogy, contrary to the whole Divine econ
omy. The New Testament emphasises the parsimony
of miracles, and disparages the use of wonderful
signs; Paul, throughout the whole course of his
epistles, never alludes to one such individual sign
as occurring in his own experience. But if we look
at the matter in the light of Paul's claim to apostolic
ordination, it all becomes clear. The original dis
ciples had prided themselves on the fact that they
had received the Lord's Supper from the Master's
own hand. Paul denies that in this respect he is
one whit behind them: " I too have received of the
Lord that which I have delivered unto you." He is
not speaking, as I take itj of the words of institution
at the sacrament, but of the sacrament itself. He
says that no contrast can be drawn between his
apostolic ordination and that of the original dis
ciples on the ground of intercourse with the Master.
He claims as immediate an intercourse with the
Master as ever they possessed. He refuses to admit
that their first participation in the Lord's Supper
enjoyed any privilege which had not equally been
granted to him. If they had received the sacred
elements from the Master's own hands, so had he.
If they had listened to the Master's own voice in

110 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
the words of original institution, so had he. If they
had recognised the Master's actual presence in the
holy feast, so had he. He was conscious that when
he had first participated in that bread and wine, he
had been as really and truly in contact with Jesus
as those who had heard His voice and seen His form
on the shores of the Galilean lake. The ordination
which he claimed was a priesthood after the order of
Melchisedec — a priesthood which he had derived from
no second-hand source, but from the actual touch
and impact of the Divine life itself; and it was to
emphasise this conviction that he uttered the words
to the Church of Corinth, ' ' I have received of the
Lord that which also I delivered unto you."
We arrive, then, at this conclusion, that Paul's
claim to originality was the claim not to an inde
pendent channel for the communication of facts, but
to an independent channel for the receiving of ordi
nation. At no time does Paul profess to have ob
tained a knowledge of facts in any other than a
natural way. At the stage where we have now
arrived he wanted above all things to obtain such
a knowledge. He was beginning to find that the
conformity of the gospel history to the prophecies
of the Old Testament, however powerful an argu
ment it might be with the Jew, had no value what
ever with the Gentile. The Gentile demanded a
proof for that alleged history itself. Where was
Paul to get such a proof? He never dreamed of
getting it supernaturally; it was clear to him that,
if it came at all, it must come through the medium
of contemporaneous testimony. Accordingly, we are

PauVs First Gospel. Ill
not surprised to find that it is to such testimony
Paul makes his earliest appeal in the sphere of his
Gentile apostleship. We learn from the passage
already quoted from Galatians that his first visit
to Jerusalem after his Arabian struggle, was a visit
just to those two men who, of all others, were best
adapted to satisfy such a need — Peter and James.
It was not merely as leaders of the Christian Church
that Paul sought their intercourse; they were only
leaders of the Christian Church because they had
been contemporaneous witnesses of leading incidents
in the life of the Master. The incidents to which
they witnessed were not identical; the testimony of
the one supplied what was lacking to the other.
The witness of Peter ranged over the days of the
Master's manhood; the witness of James embraced
the period of His early youth. Peter had been with
Him from the opening ministry on the shores of
Galilee to the closing scene in the Garden of Geth
semane; James had been with Him ere ever that
ministry had begun, and had been a spectator of
His life around the family altar. These two lives
were precisely the medium through which Paul's
Christian education required to travel. He had
begun, as we have seen, at the closing stage of the
Master's history. His first introduction to Chris
tianity had been precisely on that spot where the
earthly eyes of the earliest disciples had bidden it
farewell. Paul had begun where they ended — with
the scene of resurrection. His first impression had
been a sense of Christianity's Divine power; it was
necessary that he should move backwards to take up

112 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
that humanity which he had left behind. He had
seen the ideal Christ, but he had not yet beheld the
earthly man. That vision he could never behold in
the flesh; he must receive it on trust from those
who had been companions of His human way.
Where could he better receive it than from the
testimony of those two lives which, when taken to
gether, embraced both the man and the child — the
life of him who had followed the Master on the
sea of human trouble, and the life of him who, on
the shores of Galilee, had witnessed the develop
ment and the dawn?

CHAPTER VI.
PAUL'S SECOND STRUGGLE AND ITS RESULT.
Paul, as we have seen, had immediately after his
conversion to Christianity experienced a great
struggle in Arabia. We have pointed out that it
was the conflict rather of the missionary than of the
man. It came from the sense of incongruity be
tween his conviction of an apostolic call and his
experience of a physical thorn. He recognised the
thorn as a mark of the Divine displeasure, and
the problem in his mind was to determine how, with
the evidence of such displeasure branded on his
forehead, he could go forth as missionary to the
Gentiles. His Arabian struggle was the effort of his
soul to experience a liberation from his thorn — not
by reason of his thorn's physical pain, but on ac
count of its moral significance. He wanted to feel
that he went forth in the eyes of the heathen ac
companied by the unblemished favour of God, and
without any outward mark to indicate the presence
of God's disfavour.
The result of that struggle we have seen. It ended
rather in a passive than in an active resignation. It
did not bring Paul to his subsequent stage of glory-

114 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
ing in tribulation; it only brought him to a state of
mental quietude. He yielded himself up to the
mighty power oi God. He surrendered himself to
the thought that this power might be magnified
through the very weakness of its instrument, and
that the very hindrance which his thorn undoubt
edly presented to missionary success might serve
still further to manifest the Divine glory. When
Paul therefore emerged from Arabia, it was in the
state of one who had experienced a restraining in
fluence upon his sorrow. That sorrow had not been
turned into joy, but it had been compelled to sleep.
It had been forced to remain quiescent beneath the
sense of a Divine all-ruling Will, whose purposes ad
mitted of no scrutiny, and from whose acts there
could be no appeal.
But now I must observe that Paul himself never
regarded his Arabian struggle as anything more
than the initial stage of his conflict. He says of
his thorn, in words more than once already referred
to, "I besought the Lord thrice, that it might de
part from me. " The words seem to me to indicate that,
to the retrospective experience of Paul, the struggle
of his spiritual life embraced three distinct stages,
comprehended three successive battle-fields in which
he contended with the old enemy for different issues.
The first of these conflicts is the Arabian struggle
already described. As we have said, it was a
struggle rather of the missionary than of the man.
It was the effort of Paul to reconcile his call to apos
tleship with a sense of that ceremonial uncleanness
which had been hitherto deemed a barrier to the ser-

PauVs Second Struggle and its Besult. 115
vice of the sanctuary. That battle-field had been
won; the conscience of Paul had triumphed by put
ting itself under the will of the Highest. But, clearly,
the victory which had been gained was as yet a very
small one. The struggle which the apostle had ex
perienced was only his struggle as an apostle. It
was rather official than personal. It was awakened
by the contrast between that work of grace which he
was required to perform for others and that mark of
Divine disfavour which he felt existing in himself.
But sin has never perfectly revealed its sting until
it reveals itself to the man as a man. Hitherto the
personal life of Paul had been somewhat veiled from
his sight by the appalling sense of his apostolic mis
sion. It was comparatively easy to lull that storm
to rest. From the standpoint of the Divine agency,
the defectiveness or the perfectness of the human
instrument was a matter of indifference; in the work
of the apostleship God was all in all. But it was a
very different matter when sin confronted the man, —
when the problem before him was not how he should
succeed in his work, but how he should be right in
his conscience. Such a question, in the very nature
of the case, cannot be solved by an appeal to the ab
solute power of God. The sphere of conscience is
precisely that region in which He leaves a margin to
the creature's will. When the problem confronts a
man in this direction, he requires to battle it out on
human grounds, to weigh the testimony of his own
heart, to wrestle with himself until the breaking of
the day. Such was to be Paul's second struggle.
He was to meet with the shadow of his former self,

116 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
to see it no longer through a mere official veil, but
face to face and man to man. He was to confront
the spectacle of sin as sin — not in its ceremonial un
cleanness, not in its liability to punishment, not in
its disadvantageous consequences to a Christian
apostle, but simply and solely in the unrest it
occasions to a human mind.
I have called Paul's first conflict the Arabian
struggle, because its sphere was Arabia. Perhaps
I shall not be far astray if I call his second con
flict by the name of the Antiochian struggle. If
Arabia was the scene of his Judaic Christianity,
Antioch was probably the spot where his Judaism
received its first serious check. That city was
rapidly becoming the new centre of the Christian life.
Jerusalem, which had been the parent stream of the
Christian faith, was beginning to be left behind as
the river of that faith broadened its banks. The
shadow of the temple worship was receding, and the
ark of the new covenant was being transplanted into
another scene. That scene was Antioch. There was
no spot in the world more unlike in every particular
to the associations of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the
scene of unity; Antioch was the place of variety. Jeru
salem revealed the necessity for a rigid agreement;
Antioch displayed the impossibility of imposing such
a concord. Jerusalem had room only for one phase
of belief; Antioch was, by the very nature of its
population, the sphere of many minds. Into this
sphere Christianity had come at the very moment "
when Paul was passing through his first experience
of struggle. The followers of Jesus were founding

PauVs Second Struggle and its Besult. lit
a new capital — a capital which was to be a more
powerful centre for Christianity than ever Jeru
salem had been for Judaism. Its comparative power
was to lie in its comparative liberality. It was a
soil fitted by its very nature to receive all manner
of seeds, and to nourish growths of vastly different
kinds. To plant Christianity there, was already to
transplant it, to modify it, to enclose it in a new en
vironment. It was impossible henceforth that it
should ever be the rigid, narrow, monotonous thing
which it had been in days of old. It was inevitable
that it should become less Jewish and more human,
and it was specially inevitable that the rite of cir
cumcision, which had constituted a part of its original
bond of fellowship, should be superseded and sup
pressed by the bond of Christian love.
We find, both from the narrative in the Acts and
from the testimony of the epistles, that, within a few
years of his conversion, Paul had already become
part of the new Christian centre at Antioch. The
significance of this fact for Paul, as well as for the
other disciples, cannot be overrated. It was the
entrance into a different atmosphere — an atmos
phere rather larger than purer. It embraced, as we
have seen, greater varieties of mind, but for that
very reason it embraced greater susceptibilities to
evil. Jerusalem had been a sphere of restrained
vices. The heart of man there was no better than
elsewhere; but there it was prevented from reveal
ing itself as elsewhere. It was under the dominion
of law, and of a law so rigid as to extend to the
minutest details of human action. But the soil of

118 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Antioch was essentially lawless. It was a sphere-
in which man had cast off all restraint, and had
abandoned himself to the impulse of his own will.
Nowhere, perhaps, in the lawless Gentile world had
the spirit of licence taken so deep a hold. The
passions of men seemed to have broken loose.
Licentiousness, profligacy, immorality in every form,
was rampant. All the bands of restraint by which
religion imposes a fetter upon human vices had been
long since rent asunder, and a specimen was given to
the world of human nature in a state of spontaneous
freedom. There could be no more fitting sphere in
which to demonstrate the utter futility of the rite
of circumcision as a moral educator of mankind.
Hitherto human nature had not been seen in its
strength by the Christian disciples; it had been seen
only in that state of repression to which it had been
reduced by a long subjection to law. Circumcision
had got the credit of effecting more than it really
did; it had been thought to subdue the passions
which were already more than half conquered. But
here, in this soil of Antioch, the case was very dif
ferent. The passions of men were untamed, and the
hearts of men were unaccustomed to control. What
could a rite or ceremony do against the force of such
a stream? It could only manifest its own impotence
in the fact of being swept away. In the spectacle
of human nature overflowing its embankments at
Antioch, the Christian disciple must have awakened
for the first time to the utter inadequacy and in
competence of Jewish ceremonialism, must have
perceived for the -first time how powerless to the

PauVs Second Struggle and its Besult. 119
Balvation of the Gentiles was that ancient sacra
ment of circumcision, which had been for ages the
symbol of admission into the national communion.
I am far from thinking, however, that in the
abandonment of the rite of circumcision, Paul was
merely or even mainly influenced by his geographical
surroundings. Doubtless on him, as on others, the
vehemence of human vices at Antioch produced a
powerful sense that there was wanted a stronger
than any physical restraint. But it seems to me
that the ice of his Judaism was broken, not so much
by looking on the sins of others as by a sudden
awakening to the sense of his own. If it be asked
why I regard Paul's awakening to the sense of personal
sin as an event contemporaneous with his entrance
into Antioch, I mus,t reply that I believe his per
sonal conviction of sin to have reached its intensest
form only subsequently to the visit to Jerusalem
alluded to in the previous chapter. The earliest
revelation which Paul received was, as we have
seen, not so much one of human guilt as of human
equality. His first perception had been that of the
risen Christ, and his vision of the risen Christ had
mainly and primarily suggested only the claims of
the Gentiles. In order to awaken Paul into a sense
of personal sin, it was necessary that he should go
back over that road which the original disciples had
first travelled. He had only seen the Christ in His
form of Divine exaltation; it was necessary that he
should see Him in His form of earthly lowliness.
His Christian education required, as we have said, to
be a regress, a stepping backward over untrodden

120 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
ground. Christ had only been brought before him
in a superhuman aspect; he had to retrace his way
into the scenes of His human ministry. He en
tered into these scenes for the first time when he
went up to see Peter at Jerusalem. In his inter
course with that disciple, and in his intercourse with
the Lord's brother, he came into his earliest contact
with the man Christ Jesus. It was no longer an
apparition in the clouds, it was no longer a light
of supernatural radiance, — it was a human soul re
vealing the beauty of humanity, and revealing that
beauty through the laws of natural development.
In his intercourse with those brethren who had
been with the Master in the days of His earthly
struggle, Paul must have received his first impres
sion of the inherent loveliness and the sublime
sacrificial strength of the human life of Jesus.
Now there is no truth more intuitively certain
than the fact that such a vision is necessary to a
man's sense of sin. It is a great mistake to imagine
that any man can recognise himself to be living in
a valley merely by being in the valley. He only
comes to recognise the vale by having his eye cast
upon the mountain; it is from the sense of height
that he receives his impression of lowliness. And
what is true in the world of nature, is true in the
world of mind. It is equally true both in the in
tellectual and in the moral sphere. No man can
arrive at a sense of his own ignorance except by
receiving some rudiments of human knowledge; no
man can arrive at a conviction of his own sinfulness
except by coming into contact with a higher and

PauVs Second Struggle and its Besult. 121
a purer life. It is from the sight of moral beauty
alone that a man can awaken to the conviction of
his spiritual deformity; it is only from the vision
of light that he can recognise the presence of his
darkness. These are truths as experimentally cer
tain as any mathematical axiom, and it is in their
light that we ought to interpret the historical se
quence of Paul's spiritual experience. His vision
of his own inherent depravity ought to be dated
from his vision of the human loveliness of the Son
of man. That vision only came to him in the day
when the human life opened upon him, when he
made a step backward from the Christ on the plains
of Damascus to the Christ on the shores of Galilee.
It took its rise from that visit to Jerusalem in
which he came into personal contact with those
who had both seen and handled the word of life,
and was brought into personal fellowship with the
immediate disciples of the Lord. Amid the solitudes
of Arabia he had only communed with the Christ of
supernatural power; in the companionship with
Peter and James he received his first impressions
of the moral strength and beauty of the Christ of
history. And with that vision he received at the same
time his first impressions of his own moral turpi
tude. The sight of supernatural glory cannot
awaken in man a sense of human degeneracy.
Nothing but a human loveliness can impress a
human soul with its own sin. It is from the vision
of the human Christ, imparted during the fifteen
days in Jerusalem, that I date the beginning of that

122 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
personal struggle which left such a prominent im
press on the apostle's future life. The nature of
that struggle will be found delineated in the seventh
chapter of Romans. I have no doubt whatever that,
although written in the present tense, this chapter
is, and is intended to be, a biographical record. I
do not read it as a statement of what was passing
in the apostle's mind at the time when he wrote the
epistle, but as a narrative of what passed through
his mind in the days when he was first awakened
to the sense of the awful contrast between himself
and the Son of man. He expresses it as a present
experience, to indicate the vividness with which it
still lived in his thoughts. It had left its imperish
able marks upon him. Its memory was as fresh
and green as if it had happened yesterday. As he
thought of it, it seemed to him as if he were living
over the struggle again — reproducing the pain of the
old conflict, and undergoing the mental crucifixion
of former years; and he expressed this sense of
vividness by transforming the history into a descrip
tion, and depicting the past experience as an event
of the present hour.
Let it be observed that in the very heat of this
mental struggle Paul never for a moment loses sight
of the fact that the struggle itself was the result of
a higher and not of a lower life; he says that sin
assumed to him its fearful appearance, and worked
in him the sense of death "by that which is good." *
He never for a moment doubts that his pain is the
fruit of a higher joy, that his perception of the
i Bom. vii. 13.

PauVs Second. Struggle and its Besult. 128
valley comes from the sight of a mountain. That
which has awakened him to the vision of his own
deformity is itself a vision of beauty; it is Christ
alone that has shown to him his distance from
Christ. He has become the partaker of what might
be called a double consciousness. There are two
lives within him — one pointing to the heavens, and
the other to the earth; and in the conflict of these
two lives, he feels as if he were two men. But he
never forgets the fact that the lower or earthly man
has only come into consciousness by reason of the
higher or heavenly one; the birth of the Christ
within him has alone revealed the life of the first
Adam. The higher life is to Paul his real self, the
lower life is his imprisonment. His higher life has
been born in a dungeon, and has come to the recog
nition of its chains. It feels itself to be in a
position which it has no right to occupy. There is
a contradiction between its will and its power of
performance; it desires to be free, but its fetters
impede its way. It has aspirations toward the true
and good, but they are destroyed when they touch
the chains of the prison-house. Paul has awakened
to the sense of a deep antagonism in his own nature,
— an internecine war between two lives which are
striving for the mastery, and struggling for mutual
extermination. His most prominent impression is a
sense of utter helplessness, ' ' Who shall deliver me
from this body of death?" He is more impressed
with his helplessness than with his unworthiness.
He feels that in the inner man he does delight in the
law of God, and that, if left to his true self, he

124 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
would be pure. He cries out for something to put
him in a normal position, to restore him to his
native freedom, to give him the right and the power
to breathe his natural air; and the deepest grief of
his soul proceeds from his perception that, in spite
of the strength of his own desire, he is himself utterly
unable to realise the aspiration of his heart.
Now, it is from this sense of helplessness that I
date the first step of Paul's real departure from
Judaism. His first real departure from Judaism
was not his acceptance of Christianity; neither he
nor his Christian contemporaries ever dreamed that
in embracing the faith of Jesus they were surpassing
the faith of Israel. The beginning of Paul's rupture
with Judaism was his rejection of the doctrine of
circumcision. We have seen that Paul's Christianity
had indeed produced a change in his attitude towards
the national religion, but it was a change in the
direction of conservatism; he had only gone back
from the legal to the patriarchal. When he emerged
from Arabia, he was still an adherent of the faith of
Abraham, and still held that the main portal into
the temple was the gate of circumcision. But as he
drew near to Antioch, and heard the diverse voices
of many minds, he began to ask if this one gate
would suit them all. As he drew nearer still, and
beheld the unrestrained vices of many hearts, he
began to ask if, even when admitted, this one gate
would be fit to hold them in. Above all, as he
turned his eye inwards upon that Jerusalem experi
ence which he had gathered by the way,— as he
thought of the new and human vision which he had

PauVs Second Struggle and its Besult. 125
received of Christ's beauty from his fellowship with
the primitive disciples, and as, by reason of that
vision, there rose within him as there had never risen
before, a sense of his personal deformity, he began
to ask for the first time the most solemn question of
all — Was the gate sufficient for himself?
The answer to that question was not difficult. It
was impossible that Paul, when once awakened to
a sense of the vehemence of the old life within him,
could ever imagine that it could be restrained by
such an embankment as circumcision. But if so,
what then? If circumcision was not fitted to be an
aid in restraining the passions of Christians, had it
a right to have any place at all within the Christian
system? If it was not calculated to be a gate of
restraint, what claim could it have to be a gate of
entrance? Were not the passions of the heart
the result of a fleshly or carnal element? How
could a carnal element be expelled by that which
was itself carnal? Was not circumcision simply a
ceremony of the flesh, and as such, how could it have
any power over the spirit? Had there not been an
error in retaining this old gate of Judaism? Were
not the limits even of Arabia too narrow to be a
basis for the creed of Christendom? Had not the
time come in which it would be desirable to widen
the portals of the Christian Church, and to admit
future adherents within her pale upon larger and
more spiritual grounds?
It is from this period that I date the beginning of
what may distinctively be called Paul's Gentile life.
I say the beginning. I shall presently show that

126 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
the Gentile life retained for a time a survival of
Judaic culture. But meanwhile it is to be remarked
that Paul now, for the first time, displays an antagon
ism to that which was the main object of the Jew's
religion — the flesh. To the mind of every Jew the
test of religious sanctity was the wholeness of the
outer man; it was precisely on this ground that Paul
himself had uttered his first prayer in deprecation of
his thorn. But at the present stage of his experience,
the element of Paul's former glory had become the
element of his aversion. He had conceived for the
first time a disposition towards asceticism — a desire
to be emancipated from the world as a world: it is
nothing less than this that breathes in the aspiration,
" Who shall deliver me from this body of death?"
His second prayer in deprecation of his thorn pro
ceeded from exactly an opposite motive to that which
had dictated his first. When first he " besought the
Lord that it might depart " from him, it was because
he was at that time resting under the Jewish con
viction that the thorn was an interference with that
wholeness of the flesh which the Jew above all things
reverenced. But now when for the second time he
beseeches the removal of his thorn, it is for precisely
the contrary reason. It is because the flesh in every
form has become to him an object of aversion, and
because he looks upon his thorn as simply a mani
festation of that flesh. If he had any longer believed
it to be an interference with the carnal, he would at
this stage have reverenced it; but he looked upon it
as itself simply a part and illustration of that great
principle of materialism which he had begun to re-

PauVs Second Struggle and its Besult. 127
gard as the enemy of the spirit, and from whose
dominion and influence he was panting to be free.
What, then, was Paul's refuge from this second
struggle? We have seen his refuge from the first
conflict. We have seen how, under the shadow of
the Arabian mountains, his sense of missionary hope
was stimulated anew by considering how his very
disqualification must tend to magnify the power of
God. Here was a conflict of a different kind, which
needed a different close. The subject of Paul's
second struggle was not his inadequacy as a mis
sionary, but his frailty as a man, and his frailty by
reason of that flesh which, in the view of the old
religion, had constituted his glory. The problem
was, how was Paul to get free from this flesh? — who
was to deliver him from its body of death? Was
there any hope of an emancipation? — any prospect,
in the nature of things, that a time would come in
which the fetters of the spirit would be struck off,
and the soul would dwell aloft in the region of its
own uninterrupted purity?
In the view of Paul there was such a prospect.
I have said that this present stage of his experience
grew out of his first reaction against Judaism; yet,
strangely enough, it was from Judaism itself that he
received his earliest solution of the problem. In
breaking away from the old religion, he did not
break from it instantaneously; in emancipating him
self from its present surroundings, he found his im
mediate refuge in its Messianic hope. It is at this
stage that Paul enters upon that phase of religious
experience which a few years afterwards appears so

128 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
conspicuously in his Epistles to the Thessalonians,
and which constitutes the earliest epistolary land
mark we possess of his spiritual development. We
have seen that he was first presented to Christianity
in its supramundane form. The Christ whom he
saw on the plains of Damascus was really the Christ
of the future, — Christianity emancipated from all
local conditions. It is not surprising that a man,
whose first vision of Christianity had been the vision
of its immortalising power, should have fixed his first
Christian hope upon the fact of immortality. Christ
was to him not an earthly memory. He was un-
associated to his mind with the record of any human
experience; he knew Him only as in the future He
was to be. Is it wonderful that to him the future
should have contained all his hope? Is it wonder
ful that, in his inability to go back into the scenes
of the human history, his aspirations should have
pressed forward into scenes not yet historical, and
should have revelled in the prospective joys of days
that were still to come.
This, then, was Paul's second refuge from that
thorn in the flesh which had become to him the
representative of the flesh itself. The world was to
him a scene of misery; but there was another world.
He was living in a state of things which made the
bearing of life itself a cross; but there was coming
another state of things which would reverse all
present conditions. The sufferings of the Messiah
had been accepted in the room of the ancient sacri
fices, and through their acceptance prosperity had
been secured to mankind. But it never occurred to

PauVs Second Struggle and its Besult. 129
Paul at this stage of his experience that the benefits
of the Christian sacrifice were to take effect here
and now. It was to a future sphere that he looked
for the glorious results of the reconciliation be
tween God and man. This earth as it stood was to
him incapable of reconciliation, — it wanted renewal
through its whole centre and circumference. Noth
ing but an abolition of the present system of things
could remedy the evils of the flesh, or make it a fit
tabernacle for the indwelling of the Divine Spirit.
The first coming must be supplemented by a second.
Paul, indeed, was not peculiar here; he held it in
common with all the disciples. But his peculiarity
lay in the fact that to him the second coming seemed,
in order of time, to have taken precedence of the
first. The Christ whom he saw at Damascus had
been rather the Christ of the return than the Christ
of the original advent; he had been born out of due
time, in the sense that he had been privileged to wit
ness the earliest of those manifestations which his
contemporaries referred to the latter times. It is
not surprising, therefore, that his gaze should orig
inally have fastened upon the second coming, almost
to the exclusion of the first. He was as yet in the
days of his spiritual youth, and he had that experi
ence which is common to all youth — the tendency
to see the future at the door, and to behold it with
out perspective. To-morrow was in its impression
more vivid than to-day, and to the interests and
claims of to-morrow the mind and heart of the
apostle were absorbingly directed.
That such is the prevailing tone of Paul's mind

130 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
at this period will be apparent to any one who
studies carefully the sphit and tenor of his two
epistles to the Thessalonians. It would not repre
sent the tenor of these epistles to say that they con
tain many references to the second coming; they
are themselves essentially and exclusively epistles
of the second coming. They breathe and exhale the
atmosphere of a life that is to be. They are not,
indeed, speculative in tone, but purely practical;
yet their practical element itself is founded upon
grounds not of the present but of the future, and
the virtues which are most commended are those
which stretch into that future. The Thessalonian
converts are exhorted to an attitude of waiting.1
They are incited to a spirit of hope.2 They are
enjoined to cultivate a spotless life, that they may
be pure in the sight of the second advent.3 They
are commanded to put a restraint upon their sorrow
in the vision of the approaching joy.4 They are
asked to maintain a watchful demeanour in the
light of the imminence of this revelation.5 The
recompense they are required to look for is a recom
pense entirely beyond the present scene of things,
one which is only to be reaped when the present
scene shall have passed away.6 So far from expect
ing their harvest from the ripening and development
of the world in which they move, their greatest hope
of a harvest is to be found in the sense of that
world's moral retrogression and apostasy.' It is
not surprising that, as the sum and consummation
1 l Thess. 1. 10. « 1 Thess. 11. 19. ' 1 Thess. iii. 13.
* 1 Thess. iv. 13 et seq. 6 1 Thess. v. 1 et seq.
• 2 Thess. i. 5-10. ' 2 Thess. il. 1 el seq.

PauVs Second Struggle and its Besult. 131
of the whole, the Christian virtue which shines as a
star in the kingdom of the Father is the virtue of
expectant endurance, and that, in predominance over
all other things, they are asked to cultivate the
" patience of Christ. " x
Such, according to Paul at this stage of his his
tory, was to be the first effect of the Christian sacri
fice. The sacrificial life and death of the Son of
man had taken the place of the Jewish offerings,
and had purchased, alike for Jew and Gentile, a
reconciliation to the favour of heaven. But whereas
to the Jew the favour of heaven was manifested in
the things that are seen and temporal, it was by the
mind of Paul referred to the things that are not seen
and eternal. It did not occur to him at this stage
of his experience to look for the fruits of Divine
reconciliation in an improvement and a development
in the constitution of the present world. From the
constitution of the present world his mind had ex
perienced a revolt. There was a rupture between
his sympathies and the works and ways of men. A
hard and fast line had been drawn between his con
ception of what actually was, and his conception of
what ought to be; and it did not as yet enter into
his thoughts to conceive the possibility of a Divine
advent, whose professed object should be to restore
and renovate the existing fabric. The existing fabric
was destined to pass away. Every stage of its his
tory was to be a stage downwards, a step nearer to
the completion of its process of dissolution. The
scene of man's amelioration was to be a new heaven
l 2 Thess. ill. 5.

132 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
and a new earth. Physical nature and human nature
had alike proved themselves inadequate to the res
toration of the Divine image; in the destruction of
physical nature, and in the transformation of human
nature, could the restoration of that image alone be
found. The position here assumed by Paul is at first
sight one of worldly pessimism. And yet, a deeper
reflection will show us that in its essence it was
not so. Looked at from his present attitude, Paul
might be regarded as an ascetic, as a man whose
only desire was to be emancipated from contact
with material forms. And yet in reality nothing
could be further from the fact; strictly speaking,
the reverse was true. So far from wanting to be
emancipated from material forms Paul desired to
enjoy with these forms a closer and a more blame
less contact. However much he had broken with
the doctrine of circumcision, he had far from broken
with the secular hope of the Jewish nation. He had
accepted Christ as the realisation of the Messianic
idea, but he had accepted Him in His most Messianic
and Judaic aspect. He saw in Him one who had
purchased by a Divine sacrifice a future inheritance
of temporal glory, whose fulness and completeness
would compensate for the dearth and barrenness
of the present scene. It was no mystical inherit
ance on which his mind was now set. It was a
world such as his countrymen had loved to picture
— a world of thrones and principalities and powers,
in which the highest seats would be reserved for
the best men. It was a land which should realise

PauVs Second Struggle and its Besult. 133
the dreams of patriarch and prophet — a land flow
ing with milk and honey, abundant with the fruits
of plenty and of peace. It was a country which
should be the highway of the nations, the focus of
culture, the meeting-place for all the products of
human civilisation — a region in whose prosperity
the prosperity of the surrounding earth would be
secured. Paul's hope of the second advent was a
secular hope, and his reason for desiring it was his
attraction towards the secular. If he had despised
the flesh, if he had looked down upon materialism
in itself, he would have seen in its abasement no
ground for regret. It was because he did not de
spise the flesh, it was because he saw in the material
world the possibility of better things, that he de-
shed the advent of these better things. It was
precisely because in principle he was no ascetic,
that he longed for the abolition of what he believed
to be the corruption of God's way upon the earth;
it was his hope for a new and a higher physical
world that prompted him to pray that the present
system of things might come to an end.

CHAPTER VII.
PAUL'S THIRD STRUGGLE AND ITS RESULT.
I have said that when Paul speaks of having
besought the Lord thrice for the removal of his
thorn, he seems to me to indicate that the struggles
of his spiritual life had divided themselves into
three distinct and successive classes. The first class
consisted of the conflicts of the missionary — the
struggles of the prospective apostle of the Gentiles
to overcome the barrier of his own humiliation.
The second embraced the conflicts of the man — the
wakening in the human heart of the sense of its
own sin by reason of its very contact with a higher
and a holier life. One other class still remained to
complete the good fight in which the human spirit
had to engage ere it could finish its course with joy.
Hitherto its struggles had all been with itself; it
was now to enter into battle with others. Its
previous warfare had arisen from the contrast be
tween its own light and its own darkness; its re
maining strife was to arise from beholding its actual
light imputed to motives of darkness.
I have called the first struggle Arabian, because it
took place under the shadows of Sinai. I have called

PauVs Third Struggle and its Besult. 135
the second Antiochian, because it found its initiative
movement contemporaneously with the time when
Antioch began to be the second centre of the
Christian Church. I shall call the third Galatian,
because it seems to have had its beginning and to
have experienced its fiercest hour in connection with
that Church of Galatia to which the apostle dictated
one of his epistles.
It will be observed that these three struggles
exhibit the progress of Paul's mind through three
different spheres. The Arabian conflict brought
him into contact with the contrast between himself
and the Divine life. The Antiochian conflict brought
him into contact with the contrast between the
higher and the lower nature within himself. The
Galatian conflict was to bring him into contact with
the contrast between himself and others. In the
first instance, his struggle arose from contemplating
his own darkness in comparison with the light of God.
In the second instance it arose from contemplating
the darkness of one part of his nature in comparison
with another side which had been illuminated by
the Divine Spirit. In the third instance, it was to
arise from hearing the light which was in him itself
called darkness, from being confronted with opposi
tion and with obloquy, not in those respects in
which he was blameworthy, but precisely in those
aspects of his character wherein he had experienced
the renewing effects of grace.
This third conflict, then, came neither from God
nor from his own nature, but from the malice of his
contemporaries. It marked the earliest division in

136 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
the Christian camp, the first moment in which there
began to appear any difference of tendency among
the followers of the Cross. Hitherto the community
of Christians had refused to regard itself as a dissent
from the faith of Judaism. Judaism had looked
upon it as a dissent, but the Christian community
had taken a different view. The only difference
between the followers of Christ and the followers
of the ancient worship had up to this time been, that
the former had proclaimed the realisation of what
to the latter was still only a hope. In such a claim
there was no heresy. It was perfectly competent
for a Jew at any time to say that he recognised in
the world the presence of the looked-for Messiah.
The recognition might be a mere fancy, and in any
case it would be necessary to subject the statement
to the test of examination; but the statement in
itself was in no sense adverse to the sphit of
Judaism, and in no sense disqualified a man for
being a member of its communion. Accordingly, we
are not surprised that the first followers of Jesus did
not regard themselves as the less Jews because they
were Christians. It might even be said for them,
and be claimed by them, that they were Jews in a
peculiar sense, — that they were animated by a
patriotic zeal to see the realization of the national
hope, and to hasten the advent of the national glory.
Whatever opposition they encountered from the
mass of their countrymen, it was originally an
opposition in no sense connected with any charge of
disloyalty to the faith of their fathers. They were
opposed at first on grounds political rather than

PauVs Third Struggle and its Besult.^ 137
religious, and even while objects of secular suspicion,
were allowed to retain their place in the membership
of the Jewish synagogue.
But it was a very different matter when the
Christian community began to modify the worship
of the past. To say that the Messiah had come
was not in itself a heresy; it was a thing to be
determined by evidence. But to say that because
the Messiah had come there was no longer any need
for circumcision, was to strike at the very roots of
the old religion. When the Christian community
called in question the doctrine of circumcision, it
turned the opposition against itself into a new
channel. It was not possible any longer to regard
it as a Jewish sect; it assumed the aspect of a
separate religion. It was inevitable that it should
be so. From a Jewish point of view, no one can
wonder at the horror with which the movement
against circumcision was received by those who
still retained the desire to be ranked as members
of the Church of Israel. The case may be paralleled
by imagining a section within the Church of Eng
land who should profess to dispense with the sacra
ment of the Lord's Supper, on the ground that
Christianity had opened the way to a more inward
and a more mystical communion. The Church of
England is vastly tolerant of different shades of
religious belief within her own pale — more tolerant
than any other Church in Christendom. But it is
safe to say that, in such a case as this, there would
not be one dissentient voice as to the judgment
which ought to be pronounced; High, Low, and

138 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Broad Church alike would unite in demanding that
the adherents of this new tenet should be forced to
leave the fold. And why? Because this ceremony
of communion involves something more than a doc
trine. The doctrine which it involves might be had
without it. But it constitutes, itself, the essential
bond of church membership — the badge which dis
tinguishes those inside from those outside the pale.
So was it in even a more pronounced sense with the
ceremony of circumcision. If the Lord's Supper is
the badge of fellowship with the Church, circum
cision was the badge of fellowship alike with the
Church and with the State; it was that which
distinguished the Jew both in religion and in politics
from the inhabitants of all other lands. It had, no
doubt, a doctrinal bearing; it symbolised the sacri
ficial surrender of the soul to God. But it was not
its doctrine which made it indispensable; that could
have existed in its absence. It was the fact that
it constituted to the Jewish nation the ground of
its political and religious communion, which placed
the man who should violate it in the position of one
who had committed treason against his country.
That man was Paul. It was destined that he
should be the first to whom the task should be
committed of exposing the inadequacy of circum
cision to constitute the life of a religious system.
It is not surprising that on Paul should have fallen
all the odium which such a task involved. His
opposition to the doctrine of circumcision was not
only the first step in the final rupture between
Christianity and Judaism, it was the initial move-

PauVs Third Struggle and its Besult. 139
ment in the rending of that robe of the Master
which had hitherto been seamless. It revealed for
the first time the discords which already lay latent
within the heart of Christendom. It separated the
army of the " Captain of salvation" into two great
camps, which, however closely they might join to
gether against a common enemy in time of war,
were ever to be in mutual antagonism in the season
of outward peace. From the very beginning Paul
had recognised that he had a mission to the Gentiles,
but he did not recognise at the beginning that his
mission to the Gentiles was to lead through any
other than the old familiar way. Under the shadows
of Sinai he had begun to breathe a freer and a more
salubrious atmosphere — the atmosphere of patri-
- archal times, but it was still the native air of Israel.
He had realised the universality of that promise
which had made Abraham the medium of blessing to
all the families of the earth, but it had never occurred
to him that this blessing should come through any
other door than the old gate of circumcision. Now
for the first time, he had burst the barriers of that
gate, had become, in an absolute sense, the apostle
of the Gentiles. He had recognised the truth not
only that the Gentile should have the Gospel preached
equally with the Jew, but that he should be allowed
to receive the Gospel through his own natural chan
nels. He might obtain the patriarchal privilege
without subjection to the patriarchal conditions,
might be reckoned a child of Abraham without
undergoing the ceremony of circumcision.
The result was that Paul immediately became the

140 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
mark for general obloquy throughout the theocratic
community. Not only did Christianity pass into a
more distinctive opposition to Judaism, but, within
the pale of Christianity itself there arose the inter
necine strife between a Judaic and a Gentile prin
ciple. Upon Paul, as the representative of the Gen
tile principle, the weight of the recrimination fell.
That recrimination was bitter and deep, and its sting
lay in the fact that it attacked the apostle in what
he believed to be his strong points. It was on the
ground of an apostolic call that he had ventured to
form and to follow an independent personal opinion;
it was natural, above all things, that the earliest as
sault should be made precisely on this claim to
apostleship. Accordingly, the first attack on Paul
was directed against the very fact of his mission.
He had claimed to have received a call through as
direct a communion with the Master as had been en
joyed by the earliest disciples. Where was the evi
dence for such communion? He had based it upon
a vision; what proof was there that the vision was a
reality? It was not in vision that the Master had
appeared to them. Their apostolic call had been
founded on a communion which had manifested
itself in an intercourse with the man Christ Jesus,
which had received the proof of its reality from the
sound of a human voice and the touch of a living
hand. But here was a man who professed to have
obtained his mission from a voice that had passed
away from earth, to have been impelled by the touch
of a hand that had vanished from the human scene.
How could such a profession be substantiated?

PauVs Third Struggle and its Besult. 141
What evidence was there that it was not a dream or
a delusion, the offspring of madness, or the creature
of imagination? It was the call to a new gospel, a
gospel which cut at the roots of all that had been
cherished by ancient Israel; surely such a call must
be supported by irresistible and incontrovertible evi
dence — evidence resting upon a higher and a more
impregnable ground than the uncorroborated visions
of an individual soul.
From this doubt as to the accuracy of Paul's ob
servation, the transition was easy to a disparage
ment of his character. Had his actual life been har
monious with his apostolic claim? Had his conduct
in the outward world tallied with his professed ex
perience of an inward illumination? If it had not
done so, there was no need of further argument;
his mission was at once disproved and discredited.
Accordingly, the next attack on Paul was directed
not so much against his opinions as against his
personality. Instead of examining the historical
circumstances under which he professed to have
received his vision, his Judaic adversaries con
fronted what appeared to them to be the imperfec
tions of his apostolic character. No one can read
the Epistle to the Galatians, and the two epistles to
the Corinthians, without being impressed with the
fact that the life of the apostle was being subjected
to a severe and an unjust criticism. In three direc
tions we find that his ministerial character is assailed.
It is assailed in respect of its power; insinuations
are ventilated that his letters express a more author
itative tone than is borne out by his actual presence.

142 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
It is assailed in respect of its motives; suggestions are
made that he is using his apostolic claim for the sake
of obtaining a livelihood. It is assailed in respect of
its consistency; assertions are spread abroad that he
himself has not been uniform in his repudiation of
the doctrine of circumcision, but that in practice
he has veered about like the changes of the wind.
It is to meet these charges mainly that the
epistles to Galatia and Corinth are written. It is
in these that he claims the signs of an apostle, and
appeals for corroboration to the testimony of his
converts. It is in these that he asserts the un
selfishness of his motives, and declares how, in the
midst of ministerial work, he has laboured for his
daily livelihood by the toil of his own hands. It
is in these that he maintains the uniform consist
ency of his practice, and appeals in confirmation
of that consistency to the persecutions he had never
ceased to suffer. Reading between the lines of
these epistles, we see a retrospective light cast
back on the intermediate years between his letter
to the Church of Galatia and his letter to the
Church of Thessalonica. In his epistles to the
Thessalonians there is as yet no note of internecine
war. The only struggle which there manifests itself
is the conflict between the soul and the present
world — a conflict which drives the apostle to seek
his hope in another and a future world. But here
Paul's foes are those of his own household, and the
attack directed against him is an attack not against
his weakness but against the points in his life which
were really strong.

PauVs Third Struggle and its Besult. 143
We are led, therefore, to the conclusion that this
third struggle in the spiritual experience of St.
Paul must have had its origin at a period subse
quent to the writing of the epistles to the Thes
salonians, and previous to the writing of those to
the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans. It ushers
us, accordingly, into a new and distinct epoch of
Paul's spiritual history. It is at this stage that,
in my opinion, we are to seek for the third of those
occasions in which, according to his own testimony,
he besought the Lord for the removal of his thorn.
For it must be evident, even on the most superficial
view, that in this attack upon his apostolic preten
sions, the sense of his physical defect must have
returned to him with redoubled force and with
intensified pain. He claimed to be possessor of
apostolic power. Might not his enemies point to
his thorn, and say, "Physician, heal thyself." If he
had been 'given the power to cure others, why did
he carry in his own body the marks of dilapidation
and disease? The signs of an apostle were the
possession of healing gifts, alike over body and
mind. Was it reasonable to suppose that a man
who possessed such gifts would himself be in a
condition of corporeal weakness, would himself re
quire the aid of those very bodily ministrations
which it was his special prerogative to alleviate
and remove? Was not the very fact of such
bodily weakness a conclusive and irrefragable
proof that Paul did not possess those powers
which he professed to wield, and that the
heavenly vision on which he based his apostolic

144 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
claim had existed only in the dream of his
own imagining?
Such was, undoubtedly, the reasoning of Paul's
enemies. It is not too much to say that never before
had his thorn cost him such pain. Not even under
the shadows of Arabia had it brought to him so
much bitterness. Under the shadows of Arabia its
sting consisted in awakening the memories of past
evil; here, for the first time, its sting was turned
against that in Paul which was really good. His
thorn was no longer an attack merely upon that
which needed penalty and expiation, it was an attack
on that which marked the growth of a new life.
We have evidence from the second group of his
epistles how keenly he had felt this sting. We
have evidence that in this third and final struggle,
there was revealed to Paul's own mind how much of
the human element was still left within him. He
had imagined that, by fixing his thoughts entirely
upon a future world, and seeking to forget the
present hour, he could emancipate himself from all
earthly annoyances. That imagination was now
proved to be a dream. The attack on Paul's
character, the attack on that part of his character
which he felt to have been purified, roused again
all his interest in the passing hour. It showed
him that the Thessalonian standpoint was as yet
impossible. He could not find rest from the
present by merely surrendering himself to a hope
of the future; the present was a [fact, the future
was an idea, and the fact was stronger than the
idea. Men recriminated him in the actual world;

PauVs Third Struggle and its Besult. 145
he could not keep down his indignation by simply
telling himself that there was another world coming
in the future. If there was to be a refuge from
present evil, it could only be found in present good.
To emancipate himself from earthly annoyances by
simply cherishing the faith that the earth and all
therein would by-and-by be burned up, was to com
fort himself by a mere negation; it was to conquer
his annoyances by suppressing the cause of them.
There was clearly a higher state possible — to conquer
them while their cause yet remained. Hitherto he
had only cherished the hope of putting them down;
the highest course was to rise above them without
putting them down. That goal could not be reached
by the Thessalonian method; he felt so now in his
deepest experience. He might still cherish the hope
of the advent of a better world, but that hope could
not be the immediate source of his strength. The
immediate source of his strength must be an im
mediate good, something which could be realised
here and now. If he was to reach an asceticism
which would lift him above the world's sting, he
must reach it not by seeing in the dim future the
coming of another world, but by an instantaneous
translation into some higher and heavenly life.
It was while meditating on this theme that there
came into the mind of Paul a new and a great
thought — a thought which was to transform his
whole spiritual experience, and to make him, in his
own words, ' ' a new creature. " He had been anxious
to prove that he possessed the signs of an apostle;
but were the signs of an apostle the ultimate evi-

146 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
dence of Christian power? Were there not signs
lying behind the apostolic? Was not the ultimate
evidence of Christian power the possession of higher
marks than those which designated apostleship —
the marks of the Lord Jesus? And were not the
marks ol the Lord Jesus precisely those credentials
which he, of all men, could reproduce? His enemies
slighted him because he was the possessor of a thorn;
but had not the Master a whole crown of thorns?
Was not the life of the Son of man essentially a life
of sorrows? was not His greatest miracle the power
to bear these sorrows? Why should this element
have been altogether overlooked by those who laid
claim to Christian apostleship? Men seemed to
think that the only miracles of the Divine life
were miracles of action; did they not forget that
the Divine life itself was a miracle of bearing? If
he, Paul, could succeed in a reproducing that life, if
he could succeed in repeating, in his own experience,
the patience, the gentleness, and the resignation
with which the Son of man bore His cross, would
he not furnish by the very possession of his thorn
a higher proof of apostleship than could ever be
given to the world by the mere spectacle of its
removal? And here it was that there burst upon the mind
of Paul a new prospect of emancipation from the
troubles of earth. In the epistles to the Thes
salonians his only solace had been the hope that
there would come in the future, and perhaps in the
near future, an advent of the Lord which would
produce a change in earthly conditions. The hope

PauVs Third Struggle and its Besult. 147
now dawned upon him that this change might come
not in the future but in the present, that, instead
of needing to wait for it, he might at this very
moment be translated into a new atmosphere, made
the recipient of a higher life. He had been looking
forward to the time when he should be caught up
to meet the Lord in the air; might not his spirit be
caught up now? Was the presence of the Master
limited to an hour of death — either the death of
the individual or the death of the world? Was
there no possibility of being ushered into union
with the life of Christ until the silver cord was
loosed and the golden bowl was broken? Could
the sphit of man not be translated into the upper
air while yet it was environed in this tabernacle
of clay? If the Son of man Himself had spoken
of dwelling in heaven even while He was yet on
earth, might not His followers also be in heaven
while yet they trod the earthly scene? In a word,
might not a disciple of Jesus be lifted without
death into close and immediate communion with
the life of God, be translated in his higher nature
into an existence separate from and above the
world, and made a citizen of the heavenly state
whilst yet in human form he inhabited the sphere
of men?
Such was Paul's question. The answer to it was
the close of his third great struggle, the response to
his final petition that his thorn might depart from
him. That answer was immediate. Paul seemed
to find in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,
the goal after which he had been striving for long

148 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
and weary years. Even in the solitudes of Arabia
he had found no permanent rest from his thorn.
He had only rested there under a sense of the
overwhelming power of God, under a conviction
that God's power might be perfected through the
very instrumentality of his physical weakness. But
here he was able to take a higher flight, to reach a
deeper rest. There had burst upon him the con
viction that the Divine power of Christianity was
itself simply the strength to sustain weakness, that
the earthly glory of the Master had mainly con
sisted in His ability to support with unmurmuring
love the weight of a bitter thorn. And the thought
entered into the mind of Paul that he, by the very
fact of his suffering, might be united to Christ.
The thought entered into his heart that the very
physical weakness which seemed to deny the truth
of his apostolic claim might become the vehicle
for lifting him into the immediate presence of the
Master. His cross was a reproach amongst men;
what if it should raise him into the life of God?
He felt that it had so raised him. He felt that,
instead of needing to wait for the advent of heaven
to earth, he himself had already made his advent
from earth into heaven. He had been translated
without seeing death. He had been borne aloft
into the third heaven. He had been carried up
into the very bosom of the Master and made to
lie upon His breast. He had been allowed to
anticipate the second advent, to enter here on
earth into the fellowship, the communion, the
citizenship of the life everlasting. And the gate

PauVs Third Struggle and its Besult. 149
by which he had entered in was just the despised
gate of his own sufferings, just the avenue of his
thorn. The hand by which he had clasped the
Messiah was the pierced hand which made him
the byword of his contemporaries; the door by
which he had approached the presence of the
Divine life was precisely that battered, mutilated
door which in the view of his countrymen pre
cluded him from any share in that presence. In
a deeper sense than ever before, God had now
said to his soul, "My strength is made perfect in
your weakness."
Here, then, is a new stage of Paul's spiritual
experience. He is no longer merely waiting for
Christ's second advent; he has gone himself to
meet it. He is no longer solacing himself with
the thought that a time is coming when he shall
be lifted above the present world; he is solaced
with the conviction that he has been lifted above
the present world already. The epoch through
which we are passing in St. Paul's spiritual his
tory is that period extending from the writing of
the epistles to the Thessalonians to the writing
of the letter to the converts of the world's metro
polis. The materials for estimating its character
will be found in the epistles to the Galatians,
Corinthians, and Romans. The attitude of Paul
in all these writings is the attitude of a man who
has emancipated himself from the cares of the
present world by a process of spiritual asceticism;
so far, the letters to the Galatians, Corinthians,
and Romans are in harmony with those to the

150 Spiritual Development of St, Paul.
Thessalonians. But the difference lies here: the
asceticism in the epistles to the Thessalonians
is the asceticism of a man who looks forward to
a coming heaven; that of the four later epistles
is the asceticism of a man who believes himself
to have already entered into heaven and to have
left the present world actually behind. That this
is the character of these later letters it would
not be difficult to prove. It would be very easy
to draw up from each of them a catalogue of
passages corroborative of the assertion that Paul's
attitude to mundane things is that of one who
looks down upon a surmounted standpoint. I
shall, indeed, hereafter show that in the latest
of the letters — that to the Romans — there are
already discernible the traces of a further transi
tion, the foreshadowings of a subsequent stage of
development. Nevertheless, the general tone of
these four epistles is the same, and, as I have
said, nothing could be easier than to prove it
by quotations. I think, however, that in this
instance there is a more excellent way. I be
lieve the best method will be to take up the
points in these epistles in which the spiritual
nature of Paul exhibits a development from his
previous standpoint, and to consider in what re
spect his attitude towards current opinion has
undergone a change of posture. It will be found
that in no case has his later stage denied or
falsified the old. It will be found that the new
culture has exhibited itself not in the way of*
negation but by the process of supplement, not

PauVs Third Struggle and its Besult. 151
by destroying the ancient landmarks but by fill
ing up that which is behind. No doubt, when
we fill up that which is behind, we have altered
the aspect of all our former view; the discovery
of one hidden feature of a landscape may trans
form to our mind the whole scene. None the
less does it remain true that the transformation
has been effected not by elimination but by in
crease, not by pulling down but by building up.
To a more detailed consideration of this subject
w« shall revert in the next chapter.

CHAPTER VIII.
DEVELOPMENT OF PAUL'S RELIGIOUS VIEWS.
There is a strong analogy between the physical and
the spiritual nature of man. No change can take
place in any part of an outward organism without
producing a change in every part of that organism.
Even so is it in the world of mind. The entrance
of a single new idea might be thought to be a very
small thing. In reality, however, it is impossible
that any single idea can enter the mind without pro
ducing a change in every department of thought.
The casting of a stone into the water is in itself a
merely local occurrence, but its effect is unlimited;
it sets in motion circles without end. Even so, the
birth of a thought has issues far beyond itself; it
wakens eddies which stir all the depths of the spirit
and pulsate through every pore of the man's mental
being. We have seen that in the mind of Paul there was
born a new thought. We have seen that his third
spiritual struggle had been closed by his awakening
to the conviction that he himself had already passed
beyond the reach of his earthly cares. Ho had come
to learn something of the luxuries of death without

Development of PauVs Beligious Views. 153
its pains. He had been lifted on this side the grave
into an atmosphere above the earth, from which he
looked down upon his former self and saw all things
changed. It was impossible, indeed, that such a
change in his own standpoint could take place with
out modifying his view of the whole past. How
radical was the transformation he himself declares
by describing himself as a new creature to whom old
things had passed away. Nevertheless, as we have
said, the change in Paul's view is not to be looked
for in the direction of revolution. It was not a de
velopment by revolt but by supplement. Things
were made new to him not by a destruction of the
past, but by a vision of the past from the height of a
higher hill. The landscape wears a different aspect
from different positions. Paul had reached a radi
cally new position, and his landscape was renewed.
The old forms were there, the old substances were
there, the old groupings were there; but there was a
light playing upon them which did not play before,
and the effect of that light was to make all things
new. Let us now go on to see in what respects this new
light was likely to modify, and actually did modify,
Paul's previous system of thought. What was likely
to be the first direction in which the change in Paul's
mental attitude should begin to manifest its effect?
Clearly, its earliest influence would be exhibited in
supplementing his view of the doctrine of resurrec
tion. I do not say that in every case such would
have been the first result, but in Paul's case it not
only was so but could not have been otherwise. We

154 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
have already indicated that Paul was pre-eminently
and essentially the apostle of the resurrection. He
was distinguished from all the other primitive dis
ciples in this, that he alone came to the knowledge
of Christ after the visible form of Christ had passed
away. His earliest association with the Master had
been the association with one who had triumphed
over death. He had not even been drawn to Him
by any human traditions of His earthly hfe and
ministry: these all came to him subsequently. His
first sight had been the sight of the unearthly Christ,
of the Christ who had been great in spite of earth.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the earliest note
of Paul's gospel should have been the note of resur
rection. That it was the earliest note of his gospel
is abundantly evident from his epistles to the Thes
salonians, where from beginning to end the mind of
the reader is made to centre on the hope of the com
ing Lord and the accompanying transformation of
all things. But the point for us to observe is the
fact that in the epistles to the Thessalonians this is
still only a hope. The resurrection from death, the
abolition of the old system, the translation of the
soul into a higher life, is as yet with Paul merely
something which is to come, an event which is to be
consummated at the end of the days. But with the
close of what I have called the Galatian struggle
there comes a change of thought. At the close of
that struggle we have found Paul permeated by a
new consciousness — the sense of being actually and
at this moment in union with Christ. The effect of
such a consciousness upon the old belief in resur-

Development of PauVs Beligious Views. 155
rection was inevitable. It was not destructive but
reconstructive; it brought the idea from the future
into the present. The resurrection from the dead
ceased to be regarded as a mere event; it came to be
viewed as a process — a process whose consummation
was, indeed, in other worlds, but whose beginning
and development were here. If Paul had already
been translated into the life of Christ, if his own
consciousness told him that he had passed even now
beyond the bounds of death, was it not clear that
henceforth the idea of resurrection must itself change
its aspect, that the rising from the dead must here
after be regarded, not as a mere catastrophe taking
place at the end of all things, but as a process of
upward development, whose beginnings are in the
world below and whose consummation alone is in
the world above?
And this view of the subject clearly appears in
that remarkable passage of St. Paul's epistles which,
more than any other, represents his doctrine of re
surrection — the fifteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians.
Let us look for a moment at that verse, which is the
nucleus of the whole passage, " So aTso is the resur
rection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is
raised in incorruption: it is sown in dishonour; it
is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is
raised in power: it is sown a natural body; it is
raised a spiritual body. " 1 There are two questions
which arise in connection with these words, — What
is that which is sown? and What is the nature of the
sowing? To each of these we would briefly advert.
1 Cor. xv. 42-44.

156 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
And first, when Paul says, "It is sown in corrup
tion; it is raised in incorruption: " of what is he
speaking? What is the "it"? Most, people will
answer spontaneously, " The human body, of course."
And yet, the context of the passage does not gram
matically bear out this view. The subject of the
sentence is not the body but the resurrection itself,
"so is the resurrection of the dead. " Paul is not
speaking of the gradations through which the body
passes, but of the gradations through which the
resurrection passes. He wants to emphasise his be
lief that the resurrection is itself a process in which
the incipient stage is sowing and the final stage
reaping, in which the beginning is weakness and the
consummation power, in which the opening scenes
are in dishonour and the ultimate sights in glory.
This is unmistakably his meaning, and it is in strict
harmony with the whole previous context. In that
context he has been labouring to show that the
quickening of the seed is, even in physical nature,
not an act but a process. A necessary part of the
seed's development is that stage of dishonour which
marks its incorporation with the soil. Its resurrec
tion begins, not with that morning in which it ap
pears in fruit or flower, but with the day in which
it is laid beneath the ground: its burial is the first
step in its rising. Paul says that in this respect the
resurrection of the human spirit bears a striking
analogy to that of the physical seed. To the human
spirit as to the physical seed, there comes a time of
fruit and flower, a morning in which old things have
passed away and all things are made new. But with

Development of PauVs Beligious Views. 157
the spirit, as with the seed, this is not the beginning
but the end of resurrection. Here, too, we behold,
not a sudden catastrophe, but only the last stage of
a great process of development whose earliest stage
was underground. The spirit, like the seed, had to
climb a ladder of resurrection — a ladder whose sum
mit, indeed, was in the heavens, but whose base was
planted underneath the earth. The birth of the
risen life was not in the world above but in the
world below.
It may be asked why we should speak of the first
stage of resurrection as a stage of the human spirit;
why not regard it as having found its inauguration
in the planting of the body within the ground? The
answer to this question is really the answer to the
second of those inquiries involved in this passage of
St. Paul. If the first question is, "What is that
which is sown? " the second is, " What is the nature
of the sowing?" The popular view is, that when
Paul says, " it is sown in corruption," he is speaking
of the process of burial, is alluding to the humilia
tion of that moment in which the once vigorous
human body is sent to mingle with the dust. A
little reflection will convince us that this is not
Paul's meaning. We in modern times are so famil
iar with the disposal of the dead by interment, that
we forget how comparatively rare was this practice
in the ancient world. We forget that cremation,
and not burial, was the mode of sepulture most
widely prevalent in the thought of those lands out
side of Judea. We must remember that the epistle
in which the reference occurs was written to the

158 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Church of Corinth — a city in the very heart of Gen
tiles, and permeated by Gentile associations. Is it
conceivable that, when Paul wished to describe to
them the humiliating nature of that first stage in
which resurrection had its birth, he should have
adopted a metaphor which, however familiar to the
modern ear, was to those to whom he was speaking
an association of ideas unknown in fact?
We conclude, then, that when Paul speaks of the
seed being sown in corruption, he is not alluding to
the modern practice of interring the body in the
ground. He is not, in fact, alluding to the body at
all. He is speaking of the principle of Divine life.
He is trying to emphasise his belief that the life of
Christ in the soul has its beginnings in great, humil
ity. He means to say that this life, instead of wait
ing for the purification of the natural man, descends
into the natural man in his present unpurified con
dition. It does not tarry until the house has been
emptied, swept, and garnished; it comes down into
the house while it is yet full of corruption, uncleansed,
unbeautified. It comes as the light comes into the
physical world. It rises in a special corner of the
soul while all other corners are as yet in night. The
hour in which the Divine life first enters into the
heart of man is precisely that hour in which the
heart of man is in its deepest and darkest gloom.
The seed which is sown in it is doubtless a principle
of vitality, but it is a principle of vitality which has
emptied itself into humiliation, which has conde
scended to dwell amid conditions that are foreign
to its own nature and natural barriers to its own

Development of PauVs Beligious Views. 159
development. It has done in the soul what the Son
of man did in the world, — poured out its native
glory and assumed a servant's form.
Such is here Paul's view of that great process of
resurrection which was at one time regarded by him
as a mere sudden catastrophe taking place at the
end of all things. What led him to change his
thought was his consciousness of a change in himself.
He felt that there had come into him a new life —
that very life of which he had been dreaming in his
epistles to the Thessalonians. He felt that it had
come to him without waiting for his purification,
that it had descended upon him while yet he was
encompassed by the frailty of the flesh, that it had
been sown in corruption, in weakness, in dishonour.
And because he felt this in himself,' he felt it to be
a possibility for all men. The resurrection from the
dead ceased any more to be to him a mere final
catastrophe; it became a part of human life itself.
It came to be regarded as a great process of develop
ment — a process which has its beginnings amid the
miry clay of earth, and which finds its initial move
ment amid the things which are seen and temporal.
It was by him to be looked upon henceforth not as
something whose coming would follow the dissolu
tion of body and soul, but as a life whose advent
would begin while the soul was yet in the body, and
which would enable a man, even in the presence of
worldly forms, to feel that he had passed already
' ' from death unto life. "
I come now to the second of those phases of
thought in which Paul's new experience exercised a

160 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.-
modifying influence upon his former opinions. If
the first and immediate change was that produced
upon his view of resurrection, the second was that
effected upon his view of revelation. It would per
haps be more correct to say that Paul's sense of
personal elevation into the Divine life for the first
time developed the idea of revelation. The first idea
of every religion is not that of revelation but of in
spiration. When the question first occurred to the
mind of man, ' ' How can God commune with the
human soul?" the answer which immediately sug
gested itself was that of a communication from with
out. Some thought of God as speaking audibly in
the thunder-cloud and in the other voices of nature.
Some thought of Him as sending messages to the
soul through the ministry of angels. Some conceived
Him as making His will known by a dream or a
vision. Some figured Him as creating within the
heart a state of ecstatic rhapsody which, for the time,
made the man cease to be human, and caused him
to become a mere passive organ of the Divine will.
This last form is the idea of inspiration proper, and
constitutes the earliest mode of prophetic illumina
tion. The man is lifted out of himself, raised beyond
his own consciousness, and deprived of his individual
personality. He is made, for the time being, a breath
of the Infinite Mind, and is compelled to become the
recipient of a message which he does not understand.
But this inspiration is the opposite of revelation.
It is distinctly different from a communication be
tween the Divine and the human; it is the sublima
tion of the human into the Divine. It is really an

Development of PauVs Beligious Views. 161
erasure of the individual life of the creature. It is
not a mode whereby the thoughts of God are made
the thoughts of man; it is a device by which the
thoughts of man are annulled and God becomes all
in all. Revelation is precisely the reverse of this.
Instead of being a depression, it is an elevation of
the human. Instead of being an annihilation of the
creature to make room for the Creator, it is a lifting
up of the creature to a spiritual level with the
Creator. However startling the assertion may sound,
it is literally true. No mind can reveal itself to
another mind unless they meet on a common bridge.
The point in which you reveal yourself to me is not
the point in which you are my superior, but the
point in which you are my equal. It is through a
community of experience that I receive the revela
tion. It is precisely because I have found a spot in
which my mind is not different from yours, precisely
because I have experienced a feeling which corre
sponds and responds to the feeling of your heart,
that I am able to recognise in your words a revela
tion to my soul.
Now, I have said that to Paul belongs the pre
eminence of having first passed over the boundary-
line that divides inspiration from revelation. In
him for the first time we find a disparagement of
supernatural gifts in comparison with habitual atti
tudes of mind. Very strikingly is this evinced in
the thirteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians. He here
declares, in language which to his contemporaries
must have appeared very bold, that though he could
speak with the tongues of angels, though he had

162 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
faith that could remove mountains, though he had
knowledge that could understand all mysteries, it
would profit him nothing without the possession of
love. He declares that love is distinguished from
the other gifts of God precisely by the fact that
it is not supernatural, that it is something which
' ' abideth." The possession of prophetic powers, the
possession of mystical knowledge, the possession of
supernatural tongues, is but a transitory thing, and
it is transitory precisely because it is a state of
ecstacy in which the man is lifted out of himself and
made a passive organ; the moment he returns to
his humanity he loses his inspiration. But love is
a state of permanent equality between the man and
his object. It is a condition which can only exist
where there exists already a bridge of connection
between two minds. It is founded upon the pos
session of a common quality. It is built upon the
fact that one being is already in sympathy with
another. No being can be in sympathy with
another unless on the ground of equality: they can
only meet in love where they have already met in
nature. And therefore it is that in one of his later
epistles Paul insists on a community of nature as
a preliminary condition to any revelation between
God and man. I He says that the love of God is
beyond the knowledge of every man who has not
himself already been ' ' rooted and grounded in love, "
that it is only by the possession of this kindred
mental state that one is able to comprehend the
Divine nature in its fulness.1 The thought is very
i Eph. 111. 17-19.

Development of PauVs Beligious Views. 163
close to the standpoint of the fourth Gospel. ^ Paul,
like John, sees in love the very nature of God — the
length and the breadth, the height and the depth of
His being. \ Like John also he sees that, to com
prehend this love, a man must himself be loving,
that, to catch a beatific vision of the Divine life, he
must aheady be partaker in his own heart of that
which constitutes the essence of Divinity. The
latest utterance of the Christian consciousness is
here but a re-echo of the Gospel's initial word,
"Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see
God." And this explains the meaning of one of the most
remarkable passages in Paul's epistles — the second
chapter of 1st Corinthians. The idea of that chapter
clearly is that a man can only understand . God by
being already recipient of the life of God. The
thought is strikingly brought out in verse 11, "For
what man knoweth the things of a man, save the
spirit of man which is in him? even so the things
of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God."
What Paul says is this: In the human world none
but a man can know a man. A dog cannot know a
man; it can see, and even imitate his outward ac
tions, but it cannot know himself. Even so, in the
spiritual world none but God can know God. The
recognition of the Divine demands the possession of
Divinity, or, which is the same thing, necessitates
a participation in the Spirit of God. In order to
understand a description of any earthly object it is
necessary that the object in some form should have
already passed through our experience; the eye must

164 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
have seen it, or the ear must have heard it, or the heart
must have conceived it. If the object has been
foreign to the soul, it can never be revealed to the
soul until a faculty has been created whereby it
can be imagined. So is it with the spiritual world.
Originally, it is foreign to the natural mind; eye
has not seen it, ear has not heard it, and therefore
the imagination cannot reproduce it — heart has not
conceived it. Its nature is love, and love is unintel
ligible to the loveless. No words can make it intel
ligible; you can print it in four letters, but to print
it is not to reveal it. You can only reveal it by
imparting it. If you would communicate to any
heart a revelation of the love of the Father, you
must first create within that heart the idea of father
hood and the sense of a father's love, must first
inspire the soul to whom you speak with a spirit
kindred to the message which you bring, and ren
der luminous the narrative of Divine affection by
implanting in the heart the feeling of human
tenderness. I pass now to the third of those doctrines which
received a fresh development from Paul's new stand
point; I mean his view of that relation in which
Christ stands to the human soul. The starting-
point of this inquiry is the fifth chapter of Romans.
The key-note of that chapter is struck in two words,
"much more." It is a key-note of conscious pro
gress. Paul distinctly implies that at the time
when he was writing that epistle he was quite
aware of naving taken a step in upward develop
ment. He says, in verse 10, "For if, when we

Development of PauVs Beligious Views. 165
were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the
death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we
shall be saved by His life." Can any one fail to
perceive that Paul is here recording an autobio
graphical experience, that he is describing precisely
those phases of the spiritual life through which he
himself is conscious of having passed? Can any
one fail to see that he is drawing a contrast be
tween the height which he had then and there
attained, and the valley which he had inhabited in
the days of old? He tells us that there was a time
in which Christ was to him simply a reconciler, a
time in which he valued Christianity only as a
source of peace to the conscience that had outraged
God. He goes back in thought to the days oi the
Arabian desert, when he stood under the shadow of
Sinai, and felt, for the first time, the sense of his
own unworthiness. He remembers how, under that
shadow, there had come to him a comfort in the
thought that the justification of man in the sight
of God had always lain in God's sight of a coming
sacrifice, had always consisted in the Divine vision
of a perfect offering yet to be. He remembers how,
at that time, the beauty of the Christ derived to him
its power from the fact that it stood between himself
and the blaze of the Divine purity, that it interposed
a mediating veil between his own miserable rags and
the spotless vesture of the Eternal. But now Paul
had transcended that position. He had not, indeed,
contradicted it; it was still as true to him as ever.
But it was no longer the whole truth. Christ was
still his reconciler, but He was something more;

166 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
He had become his second self. It was no longer
enough for Paul that a daysman should stand be
tween himself and the majesty of the heavenly
Father; he must himself be united to that days
man. He had reached a point of the hill in which
he had ceased to look up to the sunbeam; the
sunbeam had flooded him with its own light. He
had once been saved by Christ's work; he was now
saved by His life. He had once beheld the image
of Christ in the heavens; he had now entered with
in those heavens. The spirit of Christ had become
his own spirit, the life of Christ his own life. He
was no longer a beholder; he was a recipient. He
was no longer a man contemplating his deliver
ance from bondage; he was a man who had for
gotten the memory of his former chains in the
glad air of a liberty wherewith Christ had made
him free.
If now we turn to another passage of this same
epistle, we shall find confirmatory evidence that
Paul was conscious of a changed relationship be
tween himself and the Master. In Romans viii.
29, 30, he says, — "For whom he did foreknow, he
also did predestinate to be conformed to the image
of his Son; moreover whom he did predestinate,
them he also called: and whom he called, them
he also justified: and whom he justified, them he
also glorified." Who can fail here again to recog
nise the notes of Paul's own biography, the record of
his own spiritual experience? He is quite conscious
in looking back that he has passed through four dis
tinct stages— predestination, calling, justification,

Development of PauVs Beligious Views. 167
and glorification. And the reader is quite conscious
with him that these had hitherto been precisely the
stages in which his life had approximated to Christ.
In looking back on the course of his spiritual his
tory we see that he had drawn near to the Master just
in these four degrees. We see him, according to his
own testimony, experiencing at the hour of birth
that act of Divine predestination which set him
apart for the cause of Jesus, "God separated me
from my mother's womb." We see him next receiv
ing the call to a ministry, arrested by an act of
Divine grace, and compelled against his will to fulfil
the destiny of his birth. We see him then under the
shadows of Sinai, alone with the contemplation of
his past, and solitary in the prospect of his future;
yet even amidst his pain recognising the comfort of
the truth that his past could be atoned by a perfect
righteousness, and his future vindicated by a perfect
ing life; the age of predestination and the age of
calling has been succeeded by the age of justifying.
But even yet the development is not complete; he
has not yet reached the goal of his predestination —
the conformity to the image of Christ. That goal
came with the fourth and final stage — glorification.
It is the word we habitually use to describe the state
of the blessed dead; we speak of such as entering
into glory. Paul in a physical sense was not dead,
yet he is not afraid to appropriate even on earth the,
condition of the saints departed. He is not afraid
to say that without passing through the valley of the
shadow he has entered already into the promised
land, has become partaker already of that beatific

168 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
glory which belongs to the life of those that have
fought a good fight and finished their course. He
has passed without dying from the Church militant
into the Church triumphant, and has exchanged the
sense of justification by Christ's blood for the deeper
sense of renovation by Christ's life.
And what is this sense of renovation by Christ's
life? It is simply that to which Paul had declared
himself predestinated from the beginning — conform
ity to the Master's image. The goal to which he
had been travelling had all along been this goal. I
do not say he had all along recognised it; I believe
he had not. It is one thing to see the course through
which you have come when you have gained the top
of a hill; it is another thing to trace that course
when you are walking amid the encumbering shadow
of the trees. In the period immediately subsequent
to his Arabian experience Paul was walking under
the shadow of the trees, and the prospect of the hill
top was hidden. There was present to him as yet
only a sense of his own nothingness, and Christ was
realised by him simply as the perfect righteousness
that stood between himself and the majesty of heaven.
Let us suppose that at this stage it had been told
to Paul that a time was coming when he should utter
these words, "We, with open face beholding as in a
glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the
same image from glory to glory, " what would have
been his impression? He would have said, ' God
forbid that I should utter such blasphemy.' He
would have repudiated with horror and indignation
the thought that he, a poor sinner, who owed every-

Development of PauVs Beligious Views. 169
thing he possessed to an act of Divine clemency,
should aspire to be himself on terms of equality with
that Divinity which had pardoned him. It would
have seemed the wildest, the most daring presump
tion, that a creature which only yesterday had been
dragged from the pit and from the miry clay, should
immediately and instantaneously lift his head to
claim fellowship with God Himself; if such a thought
had entered his mind, he would have rent his clothes
and implored forgiveness. But now from the top of
the hill all was changed. He perceived that all
along he had been travelling towards an unseen goal,
a goal larger and deeper than his most aspiring
dreams. He perceived that the object for which he
was destined had been nothing less than a participa
tion in the Divine image, nothing less than conform
ity to the very nature of God. In former days he
would have deemed the dream of such a destiny
blasphemous; it had now become essential to his
very existence. It was no longer enough for him to
be a Christian; he must be a sharer in the life of
Christ, a partaker of His image, a member of His
body. It was no longer enough for him to be recon
ciled through Christ's sacrificial blood; he must him
self be inoculated with that blood, mu3t himself be
sent forth to fulfil the ministry of reconciliation. He
must become the glory which he had gazed upon,
must grow into the brightness on which his eyes had
rested. And this I take to be the time in which Paul
made a remarkable discovery in the field of his
spiritual experience. He found that all this time

170 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
he had been unconsciously repeating that very form
of suffering through which the Son of man had
passed. The discovery is announced in a passage
which we have aheady quoted by anticipation, but
whose full light can only be seen from the summit
of Paul's experience; I mean those words which
he writes to the Church of Galatia, "God forbid
that I should glory save in the cross of the Lord
Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto
me, and I unto the world." He declares in these
words that his own personal sorrow has followed
exactly the order of that road which the Master
had pursued in ascending the Dolorous Way. His
own experience had been that of a double cruci
fixion; the world had first been crucified to him,
and then he had been crucified to the world. His
first feeling had been that of simple pain, simple
privation, simple resignation. The light of the
world had gone out from him, and had left him
mute and cold. He was dumb, indeed, under the
mighty hand of God; he had murmured not at the
dispensation. But there is a vast difference between
the dumbness of submission and the song of acqui
escence, and all the vastness of that difference had
not as yet been felt by him; it was only an outward
crucifixion. But now the crucifixion itself had been
crucified; the muteness had passed into song. His
spirit had accepted the thorn — accepted it not as
a necessity but as a privilege. He had ceased to
receive his calamity merely as a mandate of the
Divine Will, beneath which he was bound to bow;
he had come to welcome it as itself a gift of God.

Development of PauVs Beligious Views. 171
The world was not given back to him, but he was
made independent of its restoration. He had ceased
to value or to regret that which was once a neces
sity of his life; he was "crucified to the world."
Now it was in this twofold experience that Paul
discovered the striking analogy between his own
cross and the cross of Christ. His mind immedi
ately reverted to the scene in the garden of Geth
semane. He remembered how, on that occasion, the
Master too had experienced a double crucifixion.
He, like His disciple, had besought the Lord three
times.1 His first prayer was for the removal of His
thorn, "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me."
He had cherished a hope that He would be per
mitted to remain in the world until He should have
witnessed the visible establishment of His kingdom.
That hope had been dashed by the current of events.
The world was passing away from before His eyes,
and the figure of death stood in the breach. It was
a moment of outward crucifixion, and He felt it,
sorrowed over it, prayed against it. Then came the
two succeeding prayers, intermediate between the
weakness and the strength — the prayers in which
the Son of man had asked exemption not from His
thorn but from His desire to be rid of it, "If this
cup may not pass from me, except I drink it, Thy
will be done." And then, as a result of this latest
prayer, the strength had come. The Son of man
had risen erect in the scene of His former sorrow,
and had confronted the spectacle of death without
a pain. He had accepted His cup as a gift from
1 Matt. xxvi. 39-44.

172 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
the Father, had accepted it as itself a step in the
development of His kingdom. The thorn had not
been removed, but He had ceased to desire its re
moval. The gate of death had not been shut, but
He had determined to make it the opening into a
wider life; the world had been crucified to Him, but
He was now crucified to the world.
Such in my opinion was the striking analogy
which led Paul to the conclusion that he had been
made conformable to the image of the Master, which
led him to see in his own cross a repetition of that
form of suffering which had constituted the cross
of his Lord. The impression derived from this
analogy never forsook him; it remained with him
steadfast to the end. Whatever subsequent devel
opments he was called to pass through, he never
outgrew nor superseded the vividness of this ex
perience: the future might broaden it, but it could
not deepen it; it was already full. Hence through
all his subsequent epistles there runs one common
refrain — "Crucified together with Christ, I live;
yet not I, for Christ liveth in me." From the day
when he penned his letter to the Galatians until
the day when he finished his course in the Roman
capital, there appears, under endless variations, the
one perpetual strain — the conviction of membership
in a Divine body, and the confidence of fellowship
with the sufferings of the Lord.
But Paul could not go so far without going fur
ther; the change in his relation to Christ's person
involved a change in his relation to Christ's work.
What was that work? Why was the Son of man

Development of PauVs Beligious Views. 173
called to experience this double process in the bear
ing of the cross? Paul answers, "He hath made
Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we
might be made the righteousness of God in Him." 1
The idea evidently is that, in order to be the recon
ciler of fallen humanity, the Son of man had to put
Himself in the place of fallen humanity. Before He
could forgive, before He could atone, it was neces
sary that He should clothe Himself in the likeness
of that which was naturally adverse to Him.2 It was
necessary that He should environ Himself with the
circumstances, with the weaknesses, with the diffi
culties, of those who stood in His way, that He
should try to see with their eyes, and, in a measure,
to feel with their hearts. He must, in short, become
the substitute for humanity, must put Himself in
sympathy, even before He put Himself in fact, into
the position of those who had violated the Father's
law, and must impute to Himself by an act of Divine
imagination the frailty of those lives which had thus
been tempted to transgress.
Such was the work of Christ as Paul conceived it.
In all this there was to him nothing new. Even
before he became a Christian he must have gathered
from the later Isaiah that the Messiah, when He
came, would be one who should bear the sins and
carry the sorrows of His people, one on whom the
Lord should lay the iniquities of us all. But the
newness of Paul's present thought consisted not in
his knowledge of the fact, but in his mode of apply
ing it to his own practical experience. In the days
i 2 Oor. v. 21. ' Kom. viii. 8.

174 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
3f old, in the days when he had just emerged from
the Arabian solitudes, and recovered from the first
overpowering sense of the stern heights of Sinai, his
comfort had lain in the reflection that, since Christ
had reconciled the world, he too was reconciled.
But now such a thought was no longer sufficient for
him; it was still true, but it had ceased to be ade
quate. It was no longer enough for Paul that he
3houldbe reconciled; he must be a reconciler. It
was no longer a sufficient consolation that he had
ceased to stand in a relation of enmity to God; he
must himself become partaker of that work by which
this enmity had been superseded. Had he not been
made conformable to Christ's image? Had he not
received the indwelling of the very life and soul
which dwelt in the Son of man? For what had he
received it? not surely that he might be a mere
passive recipient. Did not the conformity to the
Divine image demand a conformity to the Divine
life? If he had received the impress of Christ's
person, was it not that he might repeat the form of
Christ's work? Must not he too, like his Master,
begin by putting himself in the place of others, and
begin by doing so in thought before he did it in
fact? Must not he too, by an act of Divine im
agination, empty himself into the circumstances of
fallen humanity, and endeavour to realise in his
experience the frailties and the difficulties of erring
souls? He had freely received; must he not now
freely give? He had himself been reconciled; was
it not henceforth his province and his duty to take
up for others the ministry of reconciliation? 1
1 2 Cor. v. 18.

Development oj PauVs Beligious Views. 175
That this experience in the heart ol Paul came
to him not at the very beginning but by a process
of after development, is to my mind borne out by
the fact that the later tone of his writings is much
more mild than the earlier. If we take this middle
group of his epistles, and consider that to the Gala
tians as standing at the beginning, and that to the
Romans at the close, we shall be struck with the
comparative mellowness of the latter fruit. The
epistle to the Galatians is like the primrose after
winter. It rises with fresh life — life prophetic of a
warmer day, yet it is itself still struggling with the
cold, and still impeded by the survivals of a more
primitive culture. It is an epistle of storms, where
in the mind of the apostle reveals at every turn that
it is in the presence of his enemies, and betrays in
every expression how little it has yet learned to bear.
But it may be said that this is the last blast of Paul's
winter; every after-stage of the day is increasingly
mild. Even ere the epistle closes, we have a hint
of warmer weather, " Henceforth let no man trouble
me, for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord
Jesus." The words indicate that the mind of Paul
is already conscious of getting beyond its trouble,
aheady awakening to the sense that the worst is
over. What is it that mitigates his pain? It is the
gradual dawning of the knowledge that he has a
higher ordination than the laying on of visible hands,
that the marks of Christ's own hand have been im
printed on his frame. He feels that he has become
partaker of Christ's own nature, and that, being
partaker of His nature, it is too late in the day to

176 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
disturb himself as to whether he has received a gen
uine visible ordination. He feels something more
than that. If he is partaker of Christ's nature, is
he not thereby precluded from asserting himself
thus violently against the follies of his weak brother?
Does not the possession ot Christ's image demand
the participation in Christ's work, and does not that
work consist in bearing the sins and weaknesses of
those who are still in the valley? Is it not incum
bent on him, as one who has received the spirit of
the Master, to put himself in the place of those who
occupy an opposite standpoint from his own, to throw
himself into sympathy with their difficulties, and
seek to reproduce in his experience that very view
of the controversy which has set them in the mean
time in antagonism to his work and teaching?
And when we come to the epistle to the Romans,
" we find that Paul has already put in practice this
new vision of the crucified Christ. In his letter to
the Galatians, he had written amid storm and stress,
amid the sense of injured honour, and the contempt
of a mind which had come to look down upon the
mean and beggarly elements of former days. But
when he took up his pen to write to the Church
of the great metropolis, it would almost seem as
if the reconciliatory spirit of that metropolis had
already affected his soul. It would almost seem as
'if, in the presence of that vast capital which had
gathered together the various types of man as a hen
gathereth her chickens under her wings, the indi
vidual differences between him and his adversaries
were lost and overshadowed in the perception of a

Development of PauVs Beligious Views. 177
mightier underlying unity, in the vision of a bond of
humanity which made all men one. Be this as it
may, it is certain that in this epistle to the Romans
the mind ol the apostle has overleapt its earlier
bitterness, has passed beyond that middle wall of
partition which in days of yore divided him from
Judaic Christianity. He had, begun under the
shadows of Mount Sinai, and then he had revolted
from these shadows; he now goes back to incor
porate the shadows with the sunlight. It is not
that he had ceased to recognise the existence of a
middle wall; it is present to his eye as clearly and
as opposingly as ever. What he does recognise is
something above the wall, beneath the wall, and
running through the wall. What is that some
thing? Is it the vision of Christ's atoning work?
In one sense, that had been known to Paul from the
beginning, — known to him even while he remained
in the faith of his fathers. The knowledge of that
fact had not been sufficient to free him from polemi
cal bitterness, nor to prevent him from applying to
his adversaries his scourge of small cords. But what
lifted Paul out of his bitterness was the knowledge
of an additional fact which had only recently burst
upon his view. It was the vision of the truth that,
if he were a follower of Christ, he must himself be a
sharer in Christ's atoning work. It was not enough
to be reconciled; he must be a reconciler. And
what did this mean? Was it anything less than the
identification of himself with his adversaries, tne
putting himself in the place of those who had
maligned him? Hitherto he had only felt that

178 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
he was right and that they were wrong. He felt
that still; he was as conscious as ever of the mean
ness and the poverty of their religious views. But
now the meanness and the poverty of these views
became to him a source not of repulsion but of
attraction. He felt that they constituted the very
cross which he was called to bear. He felt that
without them he would be denuded of his participa
tion in Christ's atoning work. How could he empty
himself into the lives of others unless he were im
pressed with their emptiness? Was not his very
aversion to the narrow and limited creed of his
countrymen a ground for entering into sympathy
with that creed? Was it not the very opportunity
given him to take up the cross of his Lord, to put
himself in the place of his opponents, and to impute
to these opponents in the days of their broadened
life the place he had himself acquired? Such was
the thought of Paul, such was the germ of his later
mellowness. He had received the sphit of the
Master, and therefore he felt bound to receive the
Master's ministry of reconciliation. Henceforth his
work as an iconoclast was over, and his work as a
reconstructor had begun. The gate was already
ajar whose full opening was to reveal the length
and the breadth of his developed Christianity. To
the consideration of this process of subsequent ex
pansion it will now be our province to turn.

CHAPTER IX.
THE PORESHADOWINGS OP A NEW DAT.
We have now arrived at a point in Paul's spiritual
history in which we seem to have reached a culmi
nation. We have seen his Christian consciousness
ripening from its dawn to its maturity. - We have
marked the growth of his spirit from its environ
ment amid the Arabian solitudes to its emergence
into the life and light of religious liberty. We have
observed the process by which his mind passed from
a Judaic into a Gentile Christianity, from the vision
of a kingdom still in the future to the realisation of
the truth that he was in possession of that kingdom
here and now. We have considered the transition
by which he advanced from the desire of personal
reconciliation to the desire of being a personal recon
ciler, from the gazing on Christ's image to the par
ticipation in that image, from the justification by
faith to the sanctification by love. And now the
question which suggests itself is this, What more
remains? Would it not seem as if the man had
climbed his highest, as if there were no further
height to gain? Can there be any deeper depth of
Christianity than the bearing of Christ's image, and,

180 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
if a man has consciously reached that, can he get
nearer to the root of life? In the epistles to the
Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, we have seen
Paul attaining this goal. What further progress
can any future writing reveal? Must he not hence
forth be content simply to hold his own, to occupy
the ground he has possessed, and dwell in the light
he has already conquered?
And yet, a moment's reflection will convince us
that the most important stage of Paul's development
is still to come. If we were to express the matter
epigrammatically, and in language itself Pauline, we
should say that Paul had now reached the length
and depth of Divine love but not yet the breadth of
it. He had reached the length of Divine love; he
had recognised the fact that the purpose of God in
Christ had stretched back beyond the limits of his
torical Christianity, and had embraced the history of
the Old Testament. He had reached the depth of
Divine love; he had realised the truth that, in order
to be a follower of Christ, it was not enough to be
a partaker of His benefits, it was necessary to be a
distributer of His benefits. But there was one fact
he had not yet seen, and that was a vital fact — the
necessity that Christ's kingdom should be a power
embracing everything. He had felt its power within
himself; he had become conscious that he was ani
mated by the identical sphit which dwelt in the
Master. But the verv consciousness of this anima
tion made him feel bound to be an ascetic. His first
Christian hope, as we have seen, had been the hope
of a new world, and this implied a despair of the old

The Foreshadowings of a New Day. 181
one. This earlier form of asceticism had, indeed,
passed away. He had awakened to the truth that a
man might enter into Christ's life without dying,
and become a citizen of heaven while yet he trod
the earth. But to the mind of Paul this new thought
was as yet only the exchange of one form of asceti
cism for another. It seemed to him that, having
entered into the life of Christ, he was by that very
fact separated in the meantime from the life of the
world as a world. He no longer looked forward
to an absorption in a future kingdom, but he had
found an equally complete absorption in a kingdom
which had already come. He no longer dwelt on
the thought of a time when the world and its works
would be burned up; but if so, it was only because
to him the world and its works had been virtually
burned up aheady. The deepening of the new
Christian life had come to him with somewhat of
the same effect which had been produced upon his
physical eye by the shining of the light from
heaven: it had left in shadow a great portion of
that earthly scenery which of old had been to him
the glory of the universe.
The truth is, Christ to Paul did not yet "fill all
things." He filled Paul's own world, but Paul's own
world was as yet a very small thing; it did not
stretch beyond the experiences of his religious con
sciousness. He had learned to sympathise with
those beneath him; he had learned to make allow
ance for the wants of his weak brother. So far the
life of Christ had to him been great gain. But it
had not yet occurred to him that, to see Christ in

182 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
all His fulness, he would require to reach a wide as
well as deep sympathy. It had not yet occurred
to him that, if Christ was to be all in all, he would
require to seek Him not only in the meagre faith of
his weak brother but in that secular life of the
world which to immediate perception revealed no
faith at all. It was one thing, and a very grand
thing, to have a spirit of Divine imputation whereby
he was able to live in the experience of a brother
less enlightened than himself, and to recognise be
neath his shortcomings the glimmerings of a larger
life; but ft was another and a much higher thing
to pass beyond the limits of what had hitherto been
regarded as the realm of Christian brotherhood, and
to recognise in the secular movements of a pagan
world the preparation of many mansions in the
house of the Father.
This was the day which was now about to dawn
on the eyes of the Gentile apostle. He was about
to enter into a new environment. Hitherto he had
been environed successively by the atmosphere of
Jerusalem and the atmosphere of Antioch; he was
now to be drawn within the influence of a larger
atmosphere. The course of his journey was leading
him step by step into proximity with that great city
which constituted the centre of all civilisation — the
metropolis of the Roman empire. As the shadow of
that city broke upon his view, there broke also on
his view another shadow — the vision of a kingdom
which" should incorporate all things. The vision of
such a kingdom was inevitably suggested by the
empire of the Caesars. The design of that empire

The Foreshadowings of a New Day. 183
was incorporation. It aimed at universal dominion,
but it aimed at a dominion whose universality should
not crush the individual lives within its range. Its
object was rather to appropriate than to annihilate
the possessions of its enemies. It was willing to
take within its Pantheon the gods of conquered
nations, provided that these would submit to draw
their inspiration from the Roman state. And the
effect of this policy justified the expectation. The
gods of conquered lands did not long occupy the
Roman Pantheon without becoming Roman. In due
time they lost their foreign character, became ac
climatised to the soil on which they were bidden to
dwell, and breathed the atmosphere of that empire
to which originally their only attitude was sub
servience. Such was the visible kingdom which first sug
gested to the mind of Paul the defectiveness which
still hovered over his conception of the kingdom of
Christ. Why should the empire of Christ be less
incorporative than the empire of the Caesars? If
an earthly and purely external power had been able
not only to incorporate but to acclimatise the
foreign elements of the world, ought not a power
professedly rooted in the deepest instincts of man's
spiritual nature to manifest the same universal influ
ence? Was not the Messiah to receive the heathen
for His inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the
earth for His possession? Was it not the prerogative
of the kingdom of God that it should rule all things?
Did the Roman empire possess a power which was
denied to the Spirit of the Highest? If this purely

184 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
earthly force had been able by purely earthly means
to ingraft into itself all other forces of men, ought
not the power of the Divine Spirit to find also its
perfect manifestation in the union and blending of
its life with the lives of outer things?
It must not be imagined that this thought en
tered the mind of the apostle suddenly or abruptly.
The periods of natural development are in no case
marked off from each other by a distinct wall or
boundary-line. We have dates to indicate the time
when winter ends and spring begins, yet these dates
are purely artificial. There are days of spring in
the heart of winter, messengers which, like John
the Baptist, are sent in advance by the coming
year. The periods of human life are not abruptly
separated from one another. There is a nature of
the child and a nature of the man, yet the flashes of
the man prefigure themselves in the life of the
child. Like the grapes of Eshcol, the fruits of ri
pened development are born beforehand into the
unripe age and exist as specimens of the time that
is to be. Spiritual life follows the same law. It
too has its seasons, and its fruits appropriate to each,
yet the fruits of the coming season always in meas
ure reveal themselves amid the immaturities of the
earlier age. It was so with Paul. I have marked
out his epistles to the Galatians, Corinthians, and
Romans as distinguishing a special period in his
spiritual history — a period riper than the time which
went before and more cultured than the time
which was coming. Yet, perhaps it may have
shown survivals of the past, and it certainly did

The Foreshadowings of a New Day. 185
Bhow anticipations of the future. The latest letter
of the group — that to the Romans — though it is still
within the boundary of the old, betrays aheady a
glimmering of the new. As the eyes of the apostle
became fixed on the great metropolis, the spirit of
that metropolis began to exert over him a mesmeric
influence. He was fascinated by the gaze, fasci
nated by the vision of something which seemed to
mimic in visible form the ideal of the Messianic
kingdom. He beheld the exhibition of a unity and
a universality which ought at least to have been
paralleled by the empire of Christ's religion. He
was grieved that it had not been so paralleled. He
was awakened into regret that Rome occupied alone
a position of catholicity which the dominion of
Christ should have shared with her. He set him
self to inquire into the elements of this imperial
greatness, set himself to consider whether such
elements were at variance with the Christian ideal,
and whether the Christian ideal might not appro
priate them as her own.
He found that there were three elements which
had fascinated and retained the hearts of the Gen
tile nations around this great centre of the world —
the Roman ideal of law, the Roman ideal of power,
and the Roman ideal of glory. Roman law was the
most distinctive feature of the imperial greatness —
the one feature which the empire has transmitted
unimpaired to posterity, and by which she, being
dead, yet speaketh. To the eye of Paul, the spec
tacle it presented must have been specially alluring
He saw what must have seemed to him an effort of

186 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
the secular to imitate the sacred. Nowhere had
the Gentile exhibited such a resemblance to the
Jew. Rome had actually succeeded in doing what
Judea had aspired to do; she had promulgated a
series of enactments which were designed to rule
the conduct of all the world. The question occurred
to Paul in what light this mighty system of juris
prudence was to be regarded. Was not the Jewish
law ordained by heaven? If so, could this Roman
law be rooted and grounded in justice? Could any
system of human morality be allowed to rival the
influence of the Divine commandments; if Mount
Sinai had received the light, must not the Palatine
Hill occupy the shade? But to Paul thus meditat
ing there rose a third alternative. Might not Mount
Sinai and the Palatine Hill be both manifestations
of a law from heaven? What if the theocratic com
mandments of Judea and the imperial enactments
of Rome had each come from the same source;
what if there was a law deeper than both, which had
embraced both and revealed both! Was there not
a commandment written in the heart, which was older
either than the summit of Mount Sinai or the city on
the top of the Palatine, — a commandment which had
its origin in the depths of human nature, and derived
its credentials from the writing of an invisible hand?
It was this inward questioning which led Paul to
a very remarkable conclusion, a conclusion which at
one time he would certainly have shrunk from arriv
ing at. He had all along recognised the fact of the
inward authority of conscience, but he had hitherto
recognised that fact only in its relation to Christi-

The Foreshadowings of a New Day. 187
anity. Here, in this epistle to the Romans, and
under the strong influence of the Romans, he was
driven to take a wider view. There began to break
upon him the conviction that the inward law called
conscience had a purpose outside the present circle
of Christianity. There began to dawn on him the
thought that the Gentile had not, any more than the
Jew, been left without God in the' world, that to
the one as much as to the other there had been a
preparatory legal training. He expresses this with
unfaltering confidence in his letter to the Christians
of the metropolis, ' ' when the Gentiles, which have
not the law, do by nature the thingsr contained in
the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto
themselves : which show the work of the law written
in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness,
and their thoughts accusing or else excusing one
another."1 In these remarkable words Paul has
made a great advance in breadth of sentiment, has
revealed himself in a more distinct sense the apostle
of the Gentiles than ever he had done before.
Hitherto, he had been the Gentile apostle simply in
the sense that he proposed to offer them salvation
without passing through the gate of Judaism. He
here takes a bolder stand. He declares that the
Gentiles had received the offer of salvation by no
mere act of immediate grace, but on the ground of a
historical training. He says that they too, as much
as the children of Israel, had been led by the Divine
hand through a preparatory wilderness. To them,
as to the Jew, there had come a revelation of the
» Bom. ii. 14. 15.

188 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
requirements of God; the only difference had been
that while to the Jew it was written on tables of
stone, to the Gentile it was inscribed on the tablets
of the heart. In this recognition of the inherent and
universal authority of conscience, Paul reached
at a bound the idea of a natural religion; shall we not
rather say, he reached at a bound the truth that the
principle of the Christian life had its root in no
merely Jewish soil but in the needs and aspirations
of the universal heart of man?
The second element in the empire which attracted
the eye of Paul was the Roman ideal of power. The
Roman ideal of power was freedom. Other empires
had based their aspiration on the attainment of a
standard of mere mechanical force. The standard
which Rome set before herself was not mechanical
but mental. Her ideal of power was not the working
of a mighty engine through the force of physical
appliances; it was the impelling strength of a human
will. What she valued above all things was the
sense of mental unrestrainedness, the feeling that
she could do what she liked. The idea of a para
mount will, of a will which neither brooked nor re
ceived any contradiction in the achievement of its
desires, was for her the pole-star which directed all
her way; it was at once the goal to which she
travelled and the light which helped her to travel.
To the eye of Paul, marking the almost uninterrupted
success with which that goal had been pursued,
Christianity must have presented for a moment a
painful contrast. The watchword of Christianity
was not power but service, her ideal was not a sov-

The Foreshadowings of a New Day. 189
ereign but a minister. In the vision of this self-
sacrificing life, side by side with that spectacle of
imperial life whose motive was unrestrained will,
the apostle felt for a time as if the earth and the
fulness thereof were not the Lord's. It is rather
significant that it is in his epistle to the Romans we
find him most confronted with that aspect of Chris
tianity which suggested the idea of shame.1 Else
where he speaks of its persecutions, of its hardships,
of its outer and inner conflicts, of the watchings and
fastings which its path involved. But here, in the
presence of imperial Rome, all these difficulties of
the Christian life are forgotten in the sense of a more
absorbing difficulty — the trial of human pride. In
the vision of service side by side with power, in the
sight of ministration standing at the very doors of
majesty, the apostle feels that his converts are in
curring a greater danger than they could ever have
experienced from the fear of martyrdom — the danger
of being ashamed of a faith which seemed to isolate
them from the prizes of human life.
What, than, is Paul's refuge under these circum
stances? Does he decry the Roman element of
power? Does he exalt the sense of shame as a
means of impressing man with his own nothingness,
and depreciate the possession of influence as a source
of pride? None of these things. On the contrary,
his aim is rather to find a mitigation of the contrast
between Rome and Christianity. Instead of trying
to impress the world with the belief that the power
acquired by the empire was a worthless thing, he
J Bom. 1. 16; v. 5.

190 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
seeks rather to show that, unconsciously to the em
pire herself, her power was really the result of the
Christian principle. Wide as seemed the difference
between the regal majesty of Rome and the sacrifi
cial service of Christianity, Paul had awakened to
the discovery that the majesty was founded upon
sacrifice. Let any man read the sixth chapter of
Romans and he will be convinced beyond controversy
how thoroughly this thought had taken possession of
the apostle's mind. In that chapter Paul virtually
says: "You, Romans, boast of your freedom, and ye
do well, but you have mistaken the source of your
freedom. You imagine that you have derived it
from the exercise of independence; it comes in fact
from the intensity of your service. The reason why
you are great as an empire is that you are dutiful as
citizens. You have yielded yourselves into member
ship with a body -politic, and you have received back
from the united organism the strength of that life
which you have contributed to create. I tell yon
that there is no such thing as freedom from service;
there is only freedom in service. If you want to be
free from one law, you must embrace another law.
If you would rise into empire over the things of the
past, you must devote yourselves to some new and
fresh ideal. Your whole success as a political power
has been based upon such devotion, based upon your
self-surrender to the majesty of a thought to which
your contemporaries were deaf and blind. I, as a
Christian, seek no other method. I, like you, am in
search of a universal kingdom, but, unlike you, I re
cognise the truth that the founding of a universal

The Foreshadowings of a New Day. 191
kingdom demands before all things a surrender to
the Will of the universe." 1
The third element by which Paul was attracted in
the vision of the empire was the Roman ideal of
glory. The Roman ideal of glory was conquest; it
was that process of removing obstacles whereby the
sense of freedom was realised. As long as anything
was external to the empire it was a barrier to its ad
vance. Accordingly, it became the goal of every
Roman citizen to transform the external into the
internal. Roman conquest consisted in laying hold
of those nations that stood outside the gates and
dragging them inside the gates. The only way to
realise the sense of freedom was to have nothing out
side at all. The Roman empire was by no means
anxious nor even desirous to exterminate its enemies.
What it did desire was to transform its enemies into
national dependencies. It was quite willing that the
opposing nation should keep its manners, its religion,
and its laws, provided only it would consent to have
the Roman wall extended beyond its boundaries.
Its whole political policy, in short, alike in peace
and war, consisted in a process of appropriation, by
which it gathered into itself and transferred into its
own service those very influences which in the days
of old had been adverse to its life.
And here again to the eye of Paul there rose a
striking parallel. There had been a time in which,
as a Jew, he had looked upon the kingdom of God as
something which could only exist by the extermina
tion of the pains of life. There was a time in which
' Bom. vi. 12-18; compare viii. 2,

192 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
he had held it to be impossible that the sufferings of
human nature could be pressed into the service of
God. We have seen how under the shadows of
Arabia he had been oppressed by the thought of
his own thorn. He had for the time found refuge
from this oppression only by an appeal to the all-
conquering strength of the Almighty, only by the
reflection that the glory of God would be magnified
in exalting him in spite of his weakness. This was
a vision of conquest, but it was not a vision of Roman
conquest; it was a subduing of suffering by an act
of extermination. It proposed to destroy the enemies
of the kingdom by putting them out of existence.
There had not yet dawned on the mind of the apostle
the vision of a kingdom of God whose enemies should
be suppressed not by destruction but by incorpora
tion, whose opposition should be conquered not by
sweeping them off the face of the earth but by lifting
them within the boundaries of the Divine empire.
That vision, that possibility, broke upon the eye of
Paul only when he stood face to face with the spec
tacle of the Roman State. He there beheld the
vision of an empire which had subdued its foes by
utilising them, which had risen into strength by con
verting its enemies into members of its own body.
And the thought occurred to Paul, ought not the
kingdom of Christ to do the same? Why should
not the all-conquering force of Christianity be also
manifested by the utilising of those materials which
had hitherto been deemed antagonistic to its pro
gress? Hitherto, the religion of Christ had been
glorified merely as a power which freed men from

The Foreshadoiuings of a New Day. 193
suffering; might it not be glorified as a power which
freed men through suffering? Why should not the
sorrows of life be themselves made the allies of the
kingdom of God; why should not the cross become
itself the crown? So Paul asked, and the answer
appears in the epistle to the Church of that metro
polis which had suggested the problem. Nowhere in
previous epistles does his view of human suffering
exhibit so roseate a hue.1 It is no longer merely
something from which he expects to be delivered;
it is something which he expects, itself, to deliver
him. It is no longer the prison-house from which
he hopes that Christ will set him free; it is the
key which unlocks the prison-house and ushers
him into the glorious liberty of the sons of God.
There is a ring of Roman triumph in such words as
these — ' ' We glory in tribulations also : knowing that
tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experi
ence; and experience, hope; " 2 and in those other
words in which he expresses his permanent superi
ority to fear — "Who shall separate us from the love
of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecu
tion, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors,
through Him that loved us."8 It is "in all these
things," not "over them." He has claimed for
Christianity the Roman method of appropriation, of
incorporation. He has asserted for Christ the right
to rear an empire after the manner of Caesar — by
making friends of the once adverse forces, by trans-
i The nearest parallel Is 2 Cor. iv. 17.
2 Bom. V. 3, 4. 3 Bom. viii. 35, 37.

194 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
forming the weapons of the enemy into the defences
of the kingdom.
Such are the evidences of that influence which the
spectacle of the Roman empire was aheady begin
ning to exert over the mind of Paul. He was like
the children of Israel standing on the borders of the
promised land. Christianity had hitherto been to
him a desert experience. It had been grand, but it
had been solitary. In its latest development it had
been something which had lifted Paul into a new
world, but it had lifted him into an isolated world.
He had been caught up to meet the Lord in the air,
but for that very reason he had been separated from
the life of the common ground. Christ had become
to him not only a hope of glory, but a positive
glorification; yet the glorification had been hitherto
purchased by leaving the lower world in the shade.
It had not occurred to Paul that Christ ought to
become the glory of the world as a world. It had
not occurred to him that the heavenly places of the
universe which remained to be filled were precisely
those places called mundane, precisely those haunts
of men which had been habitually assigned to the
Prince of the power of the air. But now there was
breaking upon the apostle's mind the first wave ol
this great thought, and it was coming from the
shores of that empire whieh of all others had
mirrored most in its secularism the plan of the
kingdom of God. Paul there beheld the image of
a kingdom whose glory consisted precisely in its
incorporative or reconciling power. Reconciliation
had been for him the Christian watchword. But

The Foreshadowings of a New Day. 195
when he saw the shadow of the Roman empire he
asked himself if he had been true to his watchword.
Had he not hitherto claimed too little for Christ?
Was it enough that He should be the reconciler of
the soul; ought He not also to be the reconciler of
the world? Was it not His province to do for the
realm of spirit what Rome had done for the realm of
physical dominion — to find a field for its manifesta
tion in the life of all secular things? The vision of
Rome was to Paul the first-fruits of the promised
land. It came to him as a prophecy and presenti
ment of what was to constitute Christianity's highest
glory, and in that sense of prophecy and presenti
ment he had already made his moment of transition
from the Christ of the inward spirit to the Christ of
the universal world.

CHAPTER X.
PAUL AND CHRISTIAN IMPERIALISM.
We have now arrived at that stage of Paul's Chris
tian experience in which it was to become a world-
experience. Christ had hitherto been to him the all
of existence; he was now to become the All "in all."
Up to this time He had been simply the secret of
PauVs life; He was now to be revealed as the secret
of universal life, the presence and the power that
filled all things. The steps by which this fulness of
Christ was realised were to be the steps of a descend
ing ladder. We have already seen that Paul's pro
gress in the knowledge of Christ moved in a pre
cisely opposite direction to that of the original apos
tles. They began with the human Jesus, and had
to ascend to the conception of the Christ dwelling in
the heavens; he began with the Christ dwelling in
the heavens, and had to descend to the thought of
the human Jesus. His conception of Christ's union
with humanity had already been completed so far as
he himself was concerned, but it was still inadequate
as regarded the world. In his progressive descent
of the humanitarian ladder he had not yet reached
that step in which the Christian principle united

Paul and Christian Imperialism. 197
itself with the secular life. The religion which he
had left had been a theocracy, a rule of God over
the whole world. But the new religion had not as
yet to him become theocratic; it had hitherto only
ruled himself. The time was coming in which he
was to behold it in larger proportions, to discern its
wider scope, and to recognise its universal bearing.
The period of Paul's life which was to exhibit this
broader view of Christianity is that which compre
hends the group of his epistles from the letter to the
Church of Philippi to the second letter to Timothy.
They may be called distinctively the epistles of the
captivity. With perhaps a partial and inconsider
able break, the environment of Paul's subsequent
life was to be that Roman capital whose vision had
stimulated him into a wider spiritual path. He had
all along intended to visit Rome, but he had not
expected to reach it in the way in which he ulti
mately did. He had planned to come as a mission
ary; in point of fact he came as a prisoner. At first
sight it might appear that in this respect his mis
sionary dream had been dispelled. It might seem
that to reach Rome as a prisoner was for him equiv
alent to not reaching Rome at all. He himself, at
all events, took the opposite view of this matter;1
he regarded his bonds as a gain. Nor is it hard to
see that he had grounds for such congratulation. The
man who had appeared as a political prisoner before
three Judean governors, and who had come to Rome
with the express purpose of vindicating the loyalty
of his faith before a criminal tribunal, was in a much
> PhU. 1. 13, and sequel.

198 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
higher position of influence, notwithstanding his
bonds, than would have been occupied by an itinerant
Jewish missionary wandering after the counsel of his
will. It is safe to affirm that such a missionary
would never have wandered into the focus of metro
politan power, never have seen Rome at its centre.
But, coming as a political prisoner, Paul came in
stantaneously into the centre. He was brought into
the vicinity at once of the highest and of the lowest,
was placed in a position both to review and to be in
terviewed. His earliest influence fell precisely upon
that class which formed the nucleus of the empire —
the military. In reaching the military, he put his
foot at once upon that ladder which communicated
with every grade of the Roman World, which led
upwards to the throne of the Caesars and downwards
to the life of the populace. Looking on that ladder,
Paul had a glimpse, in a moment, in the twinkling
of an eye, of the whole system of that wondrous
polity which had secured and retained the allegianee
of the world.
And in that glimpse of the Roman empire there
broke upon the mind of Paul a discovery which
exerted an important influence on all his subsequent
writings. He found that , notwithstanding the ladder
of communication between the heights and the depths
of the empire, there was in point of fact very little
communication itself. Rome had aimed at the estab
lishment of a unity between all parts of the State.
But Paul found that the unity which had been at
tained was after all only an external one. The link
between the highest and the lowest was simply the

Paul and Christian Imperialism. 199
binding of an outward chain; the highest never itself
came into actual contact with the lowest. Paul in
short discovered that the empire had a defect in its
own machinery, and precisely in that part of its me
chanism of which it was most proud — the interpene-
tration of its members. He saw that in the deepest
sense there was no such interpenetration. He felt
that the empire was deficient in that very point at
which it had chiefly aimed, and he felt that Chris
tianity alone could supply this deficiency. He had
come to Rome to defend his loyalty; how could he
better accomplish this end than by indicating to the
Roman citizen the true mode of realising his own
ideal? That this thought passed through the mind of Paul
is to me evident from a passage written at an early
stage of his captivity. In one of the epistles of his
Roman imprisonment he thus speaks of Christ : ' ' Now
that He ascended, what is it but that He also de
scended first into the lower parts of the earth? He
that descended is the same also that ascended up far
above all heavens, that He might fill all things. " 1
I do not think these words can be adequately under
stood without reference to Paul's special environ
ment. He was standing in the metropolis of the
world and looking at the world in its heights and
depths". Between its heights and its depths he saw
no communion. There were men that went up the
ladder and there were men that came down, but the
men who went up were not the same as the men that
came down. There were many instances of elevation
1 Eph. Iv. 9, 10.

200 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
whereby the sons of the people reached the heights
of the empire, and there were many instances ol
depression whereby the leaders of the empire were
precipitated to the level of the people. But to the
eye of Paul there did not present itself any instance
of a life, which had risen to the heights, voluntarily
descending again to the depths in order to elevate
his fellows. There were numberless illustrations of
successful ambition, of arduous climbing rewarded
by attainment of the goal. But the ambition never
seemed to pass into ministration. It did not strike
the man who had reached the goal that he had reached
it for a purpose, that the measure of his power was
the measure of his human responsibility. It did not
strike him that the attainment of personal power
was only valuable in so far as it opened up a road
to human helpfulness. There is no profit to the
valleys in the mere fact of ascending to the moun
tains, unless the design of the ascent is a subsequent
descent, a communication to the valleys of the moun
tain light.
Such was the thought of Paul as through the
windows of his prison he surveyed the empire.
Now it seemed to him that Christianity could have
furnished an ideal which would have enabled the
Roman world to supply this defect, and I believe it
was this idea which prompted him to use the language
of the Ephesian epistle to which we have referred.
Divested of all figure and separated from all local
colouring, the passage seems to me to amount to this:
"In your metropolis there is no communication be
tween the men who ascend and the men who descend,

Paul and Christian Imperialism. 201
and, because there is no communication, your own
ideal of empire is not realised. But we, Christians,
worship an ideal whose exaltation is only precious
because it is the result of a voluntary depression; in
our empire the Man who goes up is the same Man
who once went down. We commemorate His ascen
sion into power because He has ascended into a power
from which He once descended. He desired to fill
all things, to join the extremities of the social ladder.
In obedience to that desire He emptied Himself. He
came down into the haunts of human misery, of
squalor, of crime; He made trial by contact of what
He had only known afar off. He had all along the
right to rule by power, but He desired to rule by
sympathy. He wished His government to be no
arbitrary one but a government built upon the wants
of men, responsive to those needs of the lowest which
are the needs of all. He came down to learn these
wants, and He has ascended only to give them effect.
His ascension is the lifting up of humanity; He has
carried into the highest the report of those things
which are required by the lowliest; in the worship
of His imperialism we commemorate the filling of
all things."
Such is, I believe, a paraphrase of the thought
which Paul meant to convey in this passage of
Ephesians. It was dictated by a sense of that defi
ciency which he observed in the working out of the
Roman ideal, by a desire to present the empire with
a new and higher ideal which, even while transcend
ing its own, would enable its own to be realised.
Paul meant to suggest that, if men would take the

202 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Christian ideal as their standard of heroism, they
would themselves be constrained to repeat the same
process of ministration. His aim is not to inculcate
a dogma; it is to inspire a common life. In a
passage which, whether written earlier or later, is
almost contemporaneous, he expresses this aim still
more pronouncedly. "Let this mind be in you," he
says, "which was also in Christ Jesus." He then
goes on to tell his hearers what mind it was that he
desires to be in them. He describes the history of
that mind as the history of a descent from the high
est height of power to the lowest depth of humilia
tion. He traces its downward course step by step
until it reaches the common ground where all life
claims brotherhood, — from the form of God to the
form of an angelic servant, from the form of an
angelic servant to the likeness of a man, from the
likeness of a man in his glory to the fashion of a
man in his transitoriness, from the shifting fashion
of the human to the final stage of the mortal —
death. And then, having brought the Son of man
to this lowest ground of abasement, the Jewish cap
tive turns round and addresses his captors. He de
clares that their imperialism was excelled by the
majesty of the Crucified. He declares that, not in
spite of but by reason of this humiliation, He had
risen into a height of empire before which theirs
must bow, " Wherefore God hath highly exalted Him,
and given Him a name that is above every name:
that to the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of
things in heaven and things in earth, and things
under the earth. " 1 1 Phil. 11. 5-10.

Paul and Christian Imperialism. 203
What did Paul mean to teach the Roman world
by the presentation of such an ideal? Nothing less
than a new model of government, a model which,
without one change in its existing constitution,
might instantaneously become its own. He meant to
tell it that hitherto it had failed to realise, failed to
utilise, the resources of its own dominion, that its
empire was smaller in extent and less powerful in
regal authority than it ever ought to have been. It
had sought to bind together the fragments of the
world from without; the only certain bond was a
union from within. There was no empire whose
extent could be compared to the empire of the heart;
he who should conquer that, was king indeed. But
he who would conquer that, must stoop to the utter
most, nethermost. He must come down to those
common wants which lie at the base of all life, and
which, because they lie at the base, are alone fitted
to be the binding chain of humanity. At the middle
of the ladder men cannot be united; the wants there
are artificial, and they are exchanged hour by hour.
But at the foot the wants of men are common and
permanent. Hunger, thirst, cold, weariness, mo
ments of isolation, forms of poverty, imminent
shadows of death, are absent from no special caste,
and are found at all times. They are felt by Caesar
as much as by his household. What if Caesar could
be brought to feel them for his household! What if
his position at the top of the ladder, instead of re
moving him above the cries of the multitude, should
bring him more into contact with these cries! What
if, just because he stood on the height, he were made

204 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
in a special sense susceptible of impressions from
below, in a special sense recipient of the plaints and
sorrows of the valleys beneath!
It is at this stage, at this moment when the sins
and sorrows of the empire are pressing on his mind,
that there breaks upon the view of the apostle what I
cannot otherwise describe than as a new thought — a
thought which amounts to nothing less than the dis
covery of an outer membership in the body of Christ.
From the days when he wrote his first epistle to the
Corinthians, the figure which he had adopted to ex
press the communion between Christ and His people
was the idea of that connection which subsists be
tween the head and the members of a human body.
The headship of Christ had become to him a dearer
expression than the kingdom of Christ, and there is
no wonder. For the head of a body is a conception
not only different from, but in some respects the
reverse of, the king of a state. The king of a state
rules by giving his impressions to the members; the
head ol a body rules by receiving its impressions
from the members. The king governs by command
ing; the head in one sense may be said to reign by
obeying. The king is the first mover and the mem
bers are his servants; the head only begins to act
after the communication of the members, and may
be called the servant of all. It is not surprising,
therefore, that to the mind of Paul this latter figure
should have become a peculiarly endearing symbol
for expressing the relations of the communion-table.
To be a member of Christ's body was to make Christ
recipient of all those impressions of pain which

Paul and Christian Imperialism. 205
existed in the heart of the creature; His capacity
for headship was itself His capacity for suffering.
In all this there was nothing new to Paul. It
was the thought which had dominated his mind
since the second period of his Christian life — that
period in which he began to realise eternity not
merely as an existence of the future but as an ex
istence of the present hour. But now, standing
under the shadow of the Roman empire, there flashes
upon his mind a thought which certainly seems to
me an addition to his past experience. Hitherto,
the membership in Christ's body had been viewed
by him simply in its relation to the Church. In his
epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians a new leaf
is added to the communion-table, and he declares,
almost in so many words, that the members of the
state are also parts of the body of Christ. In these
epistles he appears to me for the first time to extend
the sacramental relation from the inner to the outer
court of the tabernacle. I base this opinion not
upon his recognition of Christ's Messianic reign over
the nations; that was an idea as old as Judaism
itself. But the point here is, that the Messianic
reign itself is represented as a bodily burden-bear
ing. Christ bears the pains not only of the members
but of those things which the members have touched.
There is a sacramental continuity established be
tween the Church and the world, so that He who
carries the burdens of the Church carries the bur
dens of the world too. "He gave Him to be head
over all things;"1 "Ye are complete in Him, which
is the head of all principality and power."2 Let us
1 Eph. 1. 22. 3 Ool. 11. 10.

206 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
observe what is implied in this language. Nothing
less than the clothing of secular royalty in a new
and sacrificial symbol. Hitherto, headship had been
the prerogative of the priest; it was now declared to
be the prerogative of the king. In the eyes of the
Roman world, in the eyes of praetor, proconsul, sen
ate, emperor, there is flashed the image of a king
dom not before seen amongst the Gentiles, not be
fore seen amongst the Jews, — a kingdom whose
characteristic is service, whose watchword is priest
hood, whose sceptre is sacrifice, and whose strength
of power is the weight of its burden-bearing.
Such is the new figure of empire which breaks
forth in those writings of St. Paul that bear the
impress of the Roman captivity. Foreshadowed in
the epistle to the Romans, promulgated in the
epistle to the Ephesians, and reiterated in the
epistle to the Colossians, it becomes henceforth not
only the centre of his religious thought but the
root of his humanitarian sympathy. Sacrifice takes
a new and a higher place in his system. It is no
longer merely the cloud which obscured for a time
the empire of the Son of man; it is itself the em
pire of the Son of man, the source of His author
ity, the sceptre of His throne. It is no longer
simply the impediment which must be got rid of
ere the kingdom shall come; it is itself the coming
of the kingdom.1 The exaltation of Christ is hence
forth with Paul not the conquest but the result of
His cross. If He has received a name before which
every knee must bend, it is because He Himself has
' Of. Col. 1. 11.

Paul and Christian Imperialism. 207
bent the knee to humanity. To crown Christ simply
as a king is to crown Him on the ground that He
has risen above the circumstances of human pain and
human weakness; but to crown Him as the head is
to put the diadem on His brow on precisely the op
posite ground — on the ground that human pain and
weakness have become universally His own.
In assigning to the Son of man this transformed
ideal of government, Paul was really idealising it
for all time. In the precincts of his lonely dungeon
he was effecting a greater revolution than he had
wrought through all his missionary labors. He was
putting into the hearts of men a thought that
was to germinate and grow. Quite unconsciously
to himself, he was at that hour the maker of modern
history. He was weaving a conception of empire
which was destined to captivate and to dominate the
human mind. He was striking the first decided
blow at dominions, and principalities, and powers, —
at every form of government in which the will of
the individual had aspired to obliterate the will of
the community. He was occupying the position of
a political protestant. He was advocating the right
of each man to be an integral part of the state, pro
claiming the duty of each sovereign to bear the
burdens of those beneath him. He did not pro
pose such a goal as a limit to imperialism but as
an extension of the boundaries of empire. He pro
posed it as the highest conceivable kind of govern
ment, as the only kind of government which would
ultimately exert a universal and a permanent sway.
If he had offered the suggestion in the interest of

208 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
a democracy, it would inevitably have perished at
its birth; it would have been crushed by the power
of the Caesars. But when he offered it as a wreath
to his own Divinity, when he proclaimed it as a
thought which he would like to see realised in the
empire of the Son of man, he immediately disarmed
all criticism. He was presenting to the imperial
world an ideal of government constructed in its
own interests, constructed with a view to the en
largement and consolidation of the title of king.
He was assigning this ideal to no earthly potentate
but to the Being whom he himself worshipped as
Divine. To the Roman world, therefore, his atti
tude was the reverse of revolutionary. Nay, that
world had already in some sense been prepared
for the new evangel. The idea was half in the
ah. His theory of government was to the Latins
what his sermon on Mars' Hill was" to the Greeks,
— an amplification of that thought after which they
had been seeking, and whose imperfection had im
peded their own progress. Seneca had but recently
told his Roman countrymen that they were members
of a Divine body; Paul put a head upon the body
and made it human.
From this time forth the Christian creed became
in its essence humanitarian. It had all along been
so in its practice. On the lips of the Divine Foun
der Christianity had taken the form of a religion
adapted to the wants of man as man; His own
favourite name had been the Son of man. With
the dawn of theological systems there had come the
danger of a limitation; the servants of Christ had

Paul and Christian Imperialism. 209
for a time been separated from the common earth
and placed on a mountain apart. But with the
realisation of this new thought heaven and earth
again met together. To say that Christ was the
head of principalities was to give Him a far
wider range than merely to say that He was the
head of the Christian body. As the head of the
Christian body He could only come into contact
with man in his religion; as the head of princi
palities He came into contact with man in his
manhood. The inner circle of membership still
remained, but an outer circle was added to it.
There was still a communion of faith wherein the
Master met in an upper room with His disciples;
but in addition to this there was another com
munion wherein the Master came into contact with
those who were not His disciples— a communion in
which He met the multitude in the desert, and broke
the bread to them on the ground of their hunger
alone. To sit at the head of the inner table was to
have communion with man on the ground of his
religious affinity. But to sit at the head of the
outer table was to have communion with man on
the ground of his being a creature. It was to stoop
beneath the sphere of religious affinity into the
sphere of nature. It was to become the high priest
of the uncircumcised, of the unclean, of the unre
deemed. It was to become affected with want be
cause it was want. It was to take up into His
sympathy the great fact of sorrow, irrespective of its
origin and independently of its cause, to incorporate
sufferings which perhaps were even now the fruit of

210 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
sin, and which, just because they were sufferings,
had become the prerogative of royalty. Therefore,
in this bold figure of secular headship we have the
dawn of a humanitarian Christianity — a dawn whose
full unfolding was perhaps invisible even to the
apostle himself, but which yet bore within it the
germ of boundless possibilities. The conception of
God's kingdom which it suggested was one which
was to bear fruit undreamt of in the philosophy of
that time, one which was to influence the course of
future governments and to turn into new channels
the stream of old faiths. It was one of the most
silent movements in the whole history of man, yet
it set in motion a train of consequences whose force
is not yet expended and whose issues are still un
realised. But, what we are here concerned with is the effect
jf the new conception on the mind of Paul himself.
We have seen that the history of Paul's mind has
been hitherto the history of a development in which
the spirit of the man has descended from the heavenly
to the earthly sphere. We have seen how, beginning
with the vision of the glorified Christ, and finding,
therefore, his first Christian ideal in the thought of
something which transcends the earth, he has yet
been step by step descending the Jacob's ladder.
Starting with the Divine and superhuman, we have
found him approaching ever nearer to the mundane
and the earthly. The goal towards which he tended
was, as I have said, precisely the opposite of that
which was the goal of the other apostles. Their
starting-point was to be his landing-place. They

Paul and Christian Imperialism. 211
looked first upon the human Christ and thence rose
up to the Divine; he looked first upon the Divine
Christ and thence came down to the human. He
began with the Christ of resurrection, the life that
had risen above the changes of the world. His
original theology, therefore, bore a character corre
sponding to such a vision; it dealt with themes
which were rather intellectual than practical, rather
speculative than utilitarian. But in proportion as
he approached the starting-point of the first disciples,
in proportion as he came into contact with the traces
of Christ's human ministry, his own teaching became
more human. It was not that he changed his system ;
it was rather that he saw a new and wider applica
tion for his system. He perceived that the doctrine
and work of the Master had a wider bearing than he
had originally supposed, that they were not simply
tokens of admission into another world but means
for managing the affairs of this. He perceived that
the deepest power of the Gospel lay in its adaptation
to present need, in its provision for the wants df the
hour, in its capacity to support the burdens of earthly
life. To him, in short, Christianity was ever more
and more revealed as a secular force, the most power
ful and influential of all secular forces — a force
which had its province in the commonplace duties
of the day, and which must find its consummation
in the civilising of the united world.
Such is the order of Paul's development — a de
velopment from the celestial to the mundane.
There are times in the history of every man in which
the order of his development is quickened. There

212 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
are moments of acceleration in which the natural
fruit of years is compressed into the growth of
months. Such a moment had now come to Paul.
His course, hitherto, had been steadily towards the
earthly and the human, but it was now to be rapidly
so. The crisis of his life was his Roman captivity.
It placed him in an instant at the very centre of the
world's movement and showed him man in all his
phases. It revealed to him the need of a larger and
a wider scheme of salvation than he had hitherto
conceived. It taught him the necessity of a contact
between the Divine and the human based on broader
lines than those of assimilation, a contact which
should have its ground not alone in the creature's
faith but in the creature's need. It led him to the
conclusion that man's claim to the Divine sustenance
is not his fulness but his emptiness. It showed him
that the ultimate meeting-place between the Infinite
and the finite was the creature's sense of want, and
that, in the power to come into contact with this
want, the kingdom of God had passed from the
empire of sovereignty into the empire of headship.
Here, then, is the task which now lies before us —
to unfold the steps of that process by which Paul
realised the full scope and bearing of this new con
ception. " Unfold " is, indeed, the most appropriate
word. The idea of government at which Paul had
now arrived was already an all-embracing idea; it
comprehended within itself the minutest details of
secular life, and there was no limit to its far-reach-
ingness. But just on this account its full scope
could not at once be seen — not even by the man

Paul and Christian Imperialism. 213
who had conceived it. To the. mind of Paul, as we
have seen, the idea at first came only in its religious
garb, or, to speak more correctly, in a garb distin
guished from the world. Like everything else in his
development, this thought had to work downwards,
had to descend from the skies to the plains. It was
originally no more than the ideal of a heavenly life,
a life worth admiring and worth aspiring to. Paul
did not at once perceive that if a man came to ad
mire that heavenly life, there would be a transforma
tion of all secular life. He did not at once perceive
that such an idea as the headship of Christ could
not be anything without being everything, could not
take possession of the throne of theology without
influencing and dominating the most common affairs
of the passing hour. It was one by one that to the
eye of Paul this idea of the Divine headship was
seen embracing the circles of everyday experience.
He beheld it gradually descending from the height
to the plain and from the plain to the valley, until
it comprehended in the sweep of its downward move
ment the minutest and most trivial incidents in the
life of the individual man.
How are we to trace the steps of this develop
ment ? How shall we determine the order in which
Paul realised the applications of this new idea of
government ? We have from his hands four epistles
of the first captivity — those to the Philippians,
Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon. We cannot
tell with any confidence in what order these were
written, nor, if we could, would it much avail us.
In whatever order they come, they are almost con-

214 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
temporaneous. The distance between them can be
measured at most only by a few months.- Between
the earliest and the latest there does not intervene
space enough to justify us in seeking in them stages
of comparative development. We must abandon,
therefore, any hope of tracing the order of Paul's
later stages by determining the sequence of these
epistles. But there is another source of suggestion
open to us. There is a peculiarity common to nearly
all the writings of St. Paul. Each epistle consists of
two parts — one doctrinal and the other practical, and
the doctrinal invariably comes first. Why does the
doctrinal come first ? Why does the discussion of
things in heaven precede the direction towards
things on earth ? Modern usage would certainly
reverse the process. The inductive method of
science has taught men to begin with matters of
personal observation and thence to ascend to the
theoretical and the abstract. But Paul was not a
modern ; he was a scion of the stock of Abraham,
and he retained even in his Christianity the traditions
of his nation. These traditions pointed in an exactly
opposite direction to the modern method of induc
tion ; the Jew began with God and thence he de
scended to man. Moreover, as we have seen, Paul's
own development had been in this and not in the
modern direction. His earliest vision had been a
vision of the things above, not of the things on the
earth ; it was precisely here that his experience had
been distinguished from the experience of contem
porary apostles. Is it strange that the method of
his life should have become the method of his

Paul and Christian Imperialism. 215
thought? Is it strange that the steps of that order
which he had described in his own experience should
have become the steps of that order in which he
beheld the unfolding of all things? His own spir
itual history had been a progress from heaven to
earth; was not the progress from heaven to earth
the natural course in which he should realise the
fulness of every doctrine?
Accordingly, in considering the development of the
thought in these later epistles, we shall adopt this
order which we have found in the mind of Paul him
self. Wherever he speaks of Christ's headship in its
theological or abstract bearings, we shall assume that
we are dealing with the thought in its earlier aspect,
in that aspect in which it first presented itself to his
mind. Wherever, on the other hand, he speaks of
the headship of Christ in its earthly or human rela
tions, wherever he deals with it in its reference to
social or domestic problems, we shall take it for
granted that the idea has presented itself to him in
its later or more developed form. We shall thus
preserve the analogy of that development which we
have found everywhere else in the spiritual life of
this apostle, and shall see him at the end, as we have
seen him at the beginning, unfolding in the order of
his thought, from the vision of Christianity on the
height to the vision of Christianity in the vale.

CHAPTER XI.
PAUL AND THE UNIVERSE.
I now proceed to unfold the order of that develop
ment by which the mind of the Gentile apostle
applied to life's different phases the new idea of
Divine government. In accordance with the prin'
ciple stated in the previous chapter, I shall look for
the steps of that development in the descent from
the Divine to the human. I shall seek first of all
for any modification which this thought exerted on
the apostle's view of the universe at large, and after
wards I shall endeavour to find the traces of its in
fluence in any modification of his attitude towards
the common things of earth and time.
What, then, was Paul's view of the universe at
this stage of his pilgrimage? Naturally speaking, it
ought to have been a very black one. He was a cap
tive in chains. He had been interrupted in his
missionary labours. His work had been seemingly
brought to a close at the very moment when he was
beginning to prosper. He had been placed in the
most thoroughly unsympathetic atmosphere which
had ever yet environed him — an atmosphere in which
he had neither the geniality of friendship to cheer

Paul and the Universe. 217
nor the warmth of enmity to stimulate, but simply
the chill of cold indifference. Opposition is a form
of sympathy; it indicates that a man's views are at
least an object of interest. But indifference is the
absence of all interest either repulsive or cohesive;
it is the simple negation of sympathy between one
mind and another, and therefore it is the most soli
tary atmosphere which any mind can occupy. Such
was Paul's atmosphere in Rome. He had passed be
yond the reach either of praise or censure, either of
friends or foes. He had neither the admiration of
his Gentile converts nor the malignity of his Jewish
adversaries; he had simply the unintelligent gaze of
a new world which did not understand him. If there
ever was a time in which Paul might have thought
darkly of the possibilities of life, it was now. If
there ever was a time in which we should expect
him to take a gloomy view of the universe, it would
be in these days when he was writing his Ephesian
and Colossian epistles. And yet we shall find that it
is precisely in these days that his view of the possi
bilities of life becomes wider and brighter. The
period of Paul's life which of all others is most
joyous is the period of the Roman captivity. There
is a freedom and a conviction about his utterances
at this time which goes beyond the force of all his
previous utterances. His hope is more abounding,
his view more large, his joy more spontaneous. It
seems as if a weight were lifted, as if a source of op
pression were removed. And we shall find that this
elevation of spirits was not something aimless or
arbitrary; it came from an elevation of standpoint.

218 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
The brightening of his own sky resulted from a
brightening of the universal sky, from a more san
guine conception of the possibilities of creation at
large. Let us briefly consider the direction in which
this clearing of the atmosphere appeared.
Two extreme views have been held as to the
nature of this universe — that of the optimist and
that of the pessimist. The former is represented by
the state religion of the Chinese empire; the latter
by the creed of ancient Buddhism. The Chinaman
looks upon this world, in so far as it is contained
within the bounds of his dominion, as having already
reached the limit of perfection and surpassed the
necessity for improvement. The Buddhist looks
upon this world as being in its very nature a scene
of misery, incapable of being improved and unable
to be transcended. I have called these the extremes,
because they represent to their full extent the oppo
site views of the universe. There are many inter
mediate shades between them, approximating either
to the one side or to the other; but nowhere else is
either view expressed with such uncompromising
force. The nearest approach to the Chinaman is the
Jew. Hisjriew of the world was, on the whole,
optimistic. He moved between two golden .suns:
he had a paraSiie~in the past and a paradise in the
future. Latterly/he had a paradise also in the
present. He came to believe in the possibility of
justification by law, in other words, of being
made perfect by the successful observance of a
series of national statutes. When he had reached
such a thought as tbis, his optimism was equal

Paul and the Universe. 219
to, and analogous to, the optimism of the Chinese
empire. Paul, being a Jew, and a Jew of the later age,
shared at first in the optimism of his country and
his time. We have his own warrant for saying that
he originally believed in the inherent perfectibility
of human nature, the law was once to him what
it was to his countrymen — a ladder on which the
human soul might climb from earth to heaven.
When he embraced Christianity he abandoned this
sense of present optimism; he ceased to believe
that the law was adequate even to convert, much
less to perfect, a human soul. The immediate effect
of his Christianity was to drive him into an oppo
site extreme. At no time, indeed, did he ever
become a pessimist in the absolute sense. At no
time did he abandon his Jewish conviction that
there was coming in the future an age of purest
gold whose splendour would dispel the present dark
ness and usher in the reign of the Messiah's king
dom. Yet, at first to the mind of Paul there was
no connection between the coming age of gold and
the present age of iron. If he was an optimist for
the future, he was on that very account a pessimist
for the passing hour. It seemed to him that the
only value of the hour lay in the fact that it was
passing. In giving up the possibility of justification
by law he seemed to have given up everything that
made present life worth possessing. The trials and
struggles of the common day presented themselves as
barriers that must be overcome ere the day of the
Lord should dawn — things which ought, indeed, to

220 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
be boine with patience, but whose only virtue con
sisted in the lesson of patience which they taught.
The sufferings of this life, so far as this life was con
cerned, had as yet revealed no value. His eye con
templated them only in their relation to a state
of existence before whose glory they would pass
away. Even in that passage which, of all others in
his earlier epistles, comes nearest to the recogni
tion of a remedial element in sorrow (2 Cor. iv. 17,
18), the remedial element is made to depend for its
recognition on the contemplation of the objects
which are above, "while we look not to the things
which are seen, but to the things which are not
seen." The reason is plain. Paul had as yet looked
only on the unseen realities. He had hitherto viewed
the Gospel of Christ only in its relation to a life
incorruptible, undeflled, and unfading; and therefore
he could at first contemplate the sorrows of Ihe only
in their bearing on this great beyond. His vision
was perfectly true, but it was not yet full; it was
just and accurate, but it did not embrace all the
scene. That the sufferings of life had a bearing on
the future world was true, but they had also a bear
ing on the present world. Paul had seen the one
half of the landscape and it was the higher half;
but the lower half remained to be seen, and without
it the vision of Christ's kingdom was not complete.
That vision was to be completed in the Roman
captivity. It found its beginning in that new con
ception of the kingdom of God which contemplated
the Messiah not as the sovereign of a state, but as
the head of a body. The doctrine of the secular

Paul and the Universe. 221
headship of Christ transfigured the whole aspect of
earthly sorrow. If the empire of Christ consisted in
His power to bear the infirmities of the bodily mem
bers, if His highest strength was manifested in His
capacity to receive those impressions of pain which
the bodily members bore, it followed beyond all
question that the sorrows of this present life had
themselves an optimistic bearing. They were no
longer merely the penalties of past transgressions,
they were no longer even merely the training for a
state of glory; they were themselves a state of glory.
They were at the present moment, now and here,
the direct and immediate source of that empire and
dominion which the Messiah already wielded, and
were to be in the future the source of that dominion
which was yet to be added to His sway. Paul does
not scruple to declare that the Messiah's earthly
kingdom was only lacking in perfection because it
was lacking in its full amount of suffering, and that,
when it reached its complete incorporation of human
sorrow, it would reach its perfect empire over the
hearts of men.1
Accordingly, if at this latter stage Paul had been
asked his opinion of the present system of things,
his answer would have been different from what it
would havp been in earlier days. In earlier days he
would have pronounced the present system of things
to be either absolutely good or absolutely bad accord
ing to the state of his own experience. In the stage
immediately preceding his conversion his attitude
would have been optimistic; in the stage immediately
i Col. 1. 24.

222 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
following that event his tendency would have been
pessimistic. In both cases, however, his view would
have been determined by the belief that the present
system of things was already a completed quantity,
that the world as it now stands is finished. But
when he had reached the days of the Roman cap
tivity this was precisely the belief which had been
shaken. He had come to the conclusion that the pre
sent world is not a finished structure, that it is only a
structure in the process of building. He would have
deprecated any judgment as to its ultimate deformity
on the ground of its actual appearance. He would
have done so precisely for the same reason that he
would have deprecated any criticism of a physical
building while it was in the act of its formation. He
knew that the building stage was of necessity a stage
of deformity and apparently a stage of confusion.
He attributed the seeming inequalities of the world
to the fact that the world was not completed, that it
was only in process of growth. " All the building,
fitly framed together, groweth unto an holy temple in
the Lord, " 1 " the whole body fitly joined together
and compacted by that which every joint supplieth,
maketh increase unto the edifying of itself in love, " '
are the words in which he expresses his sense of the
present position of things. He has come to contem
plate the scenes of time as the scenes of an unfin
ished drama, whose present aspect may be grievous
and whose actual manifestation leaves much to be
desired, but which yet can only be judged with
reference to a concluding act towards which they
1 Eph. 11. 21. * Eph. iv. 16.

Paul and the Universe. 223
are hastening, and to whose climax they are un
consciously contributing.
It will be seen, then, that at the period of the
Roman captivity Paul's attitude towards the world,
as a world, had been reversed. He had ceased to
view it merely as a foil to bring out the resistance
of the kingdom of God; he had come to look on it
as itself an essential part of that kingdom, one of the
rooms in the many mansions of the Father. There
is another point, however, to which I wish to invite
attention, a point of not less clearness and of still
greater importance. The doctrine of the secular
headship of Christ not only opened up to Paul a
more optimistic view of the universe; it would hardly
be too much to say that it first revealed to him the
universe itself. It did for him very much what
the telescope does for the man of science. In one
respect the telescope has enlarged our vision of the
field of nature; but, paradoxical as it may seem,
there is another respect in which it has made our
universe smaller. It has caused us to experience
somewhat of that feeling which we get by travelling
— that the circle of life is not so big as we thought
it was, and that the things abroad are unexpectedly
related to things at home. If the telescope has
widened our sense of the universe's vastness, it has
lessened our sense of its variety. It has everywhere
simplified and minimised the materials of actual
existence. It has shown us that the laws which
operate in our globe are operative through all space.
It has taught us that there is an analogy between
all the works of nature from the least unto the

224 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
greatest. It has made us aware that, while "star
differeth from star in glory, " it is the difference not
of kind but of degree, and that the life of the small
est is supported by the same great principle which
regulates the being of the largest. Above all, it has
revealed to us the fact that between the remotest
points of space there is stretched a cord of continuity
by which the extremities of creation are joined and
the many are made one — a cord which binds together
things that were once thought to have no affinity,
and makes it impossible to touch a part without
directly affecting the whole. It is here that specially
Paul's new conception of the system of nature car
ried with it a telescopic effect. It was the discovery
of a principle of continuity, of a cord by which things
were bound together which had once seemed hetero
geneous. It was the awakening to the knowledge
that the system of nature is not a series of isolated
objects, but a connected and united universe, a life
which circulates, indeed, through endless varieties
and manifests itself in numberless forms, but which
through all vicissitudes and through all variations
preserves an unbroken unity and retains a common
element. This was the great fact which burst upon
the mind of the Gentile apostle when he conceived
this new idea of Divine government, and I now
proceed to consider the nature of that change which
it produced upon his view.
The popular notion is that the conception of the
universe entertained by the Jewish nation is in itself
more favourable to the religious life of man than the
conception of the universe which has been prevalent

Paul and the Universe. 225
since the days of Copernicus. The idea is enter
tained that the belief in the earth as the centre of
the universe is naturally and necessarily calculated
to increase man's faith in the providential care of a
Supreme Intelligence. And yet I think a deeper
reflection will tend at least greatly to modify this
view. I have no doubt indeed that, other things
being equal, the belief in the earth's centrality was
a factor favourable to faith. But the qualifying
clause is a most important one. Provided those
parts of the universe which lie above and below the
centre are analogous in their nature to the parts
embraced within the centre, I should concede at
once that the Ptolemaic system of astronomy would
lend itself to religion better than the Copernican.
But if, on the other hand, the Ptolemaic system of
astronomy, while regarding this earth as the centre
of the universe, looked upon the centre as having no
resemblance to the circumference, the matter would
wear a very different aspect. I should say that in
this case the Copernican system of astronomy, sup
plemented by the gravitation theory of Newton, was
an infinitely higher aid to religious belief. Although
in this modern system the earth is no longer the
centre of the universe, the universe has itself become
analogous to the earth; one common law binds the
highest and the lowest, and, what is more important, <
binds the highest to the lowest. There may be a
measureless distance between the earth on which I
stand and the central point of the universal system,
but through that distance there stretches one and
the same law connecting the phenomena of my life

226 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
with the phenomena which prevail at the centre.
There is, in short, in the universe of our modern
thought an established line of communication be
tween the system of nature at its apex and the
system of nature at its base, and by the existence
of that line of communication the apex and the base
are proved to be, in their nature, one.
Now, in the later Judaism, the system contem
plated in the outer world was precisely the reverse
of this. It is true that there as elsewhere the earth
was viewed as the centre of the universe, and that
to this extent man had an advantage in realising the
presence of a providential care. But then, there
was a great gulf fixed between the centre and the
apex — between man and God. I do not speak of a
gulf of spacial distance; that conception is unavoid
able in any view of nature which reaches the stan
dard of intelligence. But the difference between
God and man in the developed stage of Jewish theol
ogy was practically a difference not simply of degree
but of kind. If the God of that theology had been
merely the first in a series of intelligences, however
vast in its gradations that series might be, there
would still have always existed a line of communi
cation between the extremest parts of the universe.
But the God of Jewish theology was not the first of
a series; He was a life separated from all the rest
of a series. He not only was without a rival but
without a second. It was His essence to be alone,
His nature to be incommunicable. In the concep
tion of the Jew, God would have ceased to be God
if He had dwelt in any other light than a light

Paul and the Universe. 227
which was inaccessible. The fulness of His glory
consisted expressly in His inaccessibility, lay pre
cisely in the fact that no man could see His face and
live. And the reason why, the Jew attributed to the
Creator this isolation from the creature was his con
tempt of creature life. The whole creation was in a
state of suffering and it was in a state of suffering
because it was in a state of sin.1 To the mind of
the Jew, suffering was inseparable from sin. He
did not, indeed, regard it as outside the Divine gov
ernment, but it was within that government only as
a form of penal infliction. To attribute, therefore, a
participation in suffering to God was in his view
blasphemous; it was tantamount to denying the
Divine majesty. It was imperative that the associa
tions of Divinity and sorrow should be kept for ever
apart, lest the purity of the Infinite garment should
be sullied by contact with corruption. Accordingly,
to the mind of the Jew, God was a Being who dwelt
alone. It was in the interest of His holiness rather
than in the interest of His greatness that he assigned
Him this solitude. He felt that, if creature-life was
a life of suffering, and if a life of suffering was the
fruit of sin, there could be no direct intercourse be
tween the creature and the Creator; there must be
fixed an eternal and impassable chasm between the
Divine life at the apex of the universe and the most
saintly human life that inhabited the centre.
The question was, How was this chasm to be filled?
However much God was alone in His nature, He was
*h the Jew perpetually present in His action on the"
1 Of. Bom. viii. 20, and sequel.

228 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
affairs of men. If on the one hand it was impera
tive to preserve the conception of His unspotted
holiness, it was on the other no less necessary to
keep undimmed the impression of His theocratic
power. How was God at one and the same moment
to be a Presence dwelling alone in the solitude of His
own perfections, and a Power active and operative
in the affairs of human life? Such was the problem
which presented itself to the mind of the later Jud
aism — the filling of that vast chasm which the infin
itude of the Divine holiness had seemed to interpose
between the centre and the summit of the universe
of being.
And the later Judaism made an effort to solve
that problem. It proposed to fill up the chasm be
tween man at the centre and God at the apex by
means of a hierarchy of celestial intelligences, a lad
der of intermediate beings descending in order of
their perfection from the highest archangel to the
lowliest of those ministering spirits who inhabited
the region immediately above the human. On the
steps of this vast descent came the messages both
from above and from below, the announcement of
the will of God to man and the announcement of
the needs of man to God. On these steps rose the
prayers of the human to the Divine, on these de
scended the answers of the Divine to the human.
There was no direct communication, there was no
immediate communion, but there was established
what seemed to be an equivalent for the want of
these — a gradation of finite intelligences ever reach
ing nearer the ultimate goal.

Paul and the Universe. 229
I say " what seemed to be," for in reality the fill
ing of the chasm was only in appearance. There
was no real gradation established between the life
of the Creator and the life of the creature. The
distance between the apex and the centre of the uni
verse was not bridged by one hair's-breadth. It was
easy to stretch in fancy a stair of communication
between the intelligence nearest to man and the
intelligence nearest to the Divine; but when the
latter point was reached the chasm remained infinite
still. Between the Divine and the intelligence
nearest to the Divine there was as great a sphere
of separation as existed before the attempt was made
to fill it. Man in his earthly centrality remained
as much divorced from God in His solitary perfec
tion as he had been without the intervention of
celestial spirits, and the intervention of these celes
tial spirits, useless as it was to bridge the gulf,
became simply a cumbrous appendage to the re-
pognised objects of theological thought.
Now, Paul was a child of the later Judaism, and
shared in all the intensity of its problems. He
came into the world at a time when his countrymen
had made a full trial of the intervention of celestial
spirits. Paul himself had shared in that belief of
his nation and had found it wanting. I believe he
found it wanting even before he became a Christian,
and that a sense of its want was one of the factors
which impelled him towards Christianity. But
there is no doubt at all that after he became a
Christian the belief in these celestial mediators was
one of the greatest hindrances to his religious com-

230 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
munion. One has only to read his later epistles in
order to see how much his mind was troubled by
the thought of "principalities and powers" inter
vening between himself and his God; they had been
originally a source of strength, but they were now
an element of weakness. Even so early as in his
epistle to the Romans we find him exclaiming, "I
am persuaded, that neither angels, nor principali
ties, nor powers, shall be able to separate us from
the love of God. " One wonders at first sight why
such things should separate from the love of God.
We are tempted originally to suppose that Paul is
speaking of wicked spirits, of the emissaries of
Satan. Yet, in truth, it is not so. He is speaking
of those very celestial intelligences who by the pre
vious generation had been regarded as the revealers
of the Divine will, the messengers from God to man
and the ambassadors from man to God. Just in
proportion as Christianity has widened and deep
ened his sense of the Divine nature, the soul of the
apostle feels fretted by the intervention of lesser
natures between himself and the Divine. It is an
impulse of protestantism that impels him. It is the
struggle of his personality to be in contact with the
apex of the universe, the craving of his nature to be
at one with the Infinite Essence of all things. He
feels that the belief in principalities and powers is
practically the belief in a prison-house. In the old
days, when his God was an isolated unit, he had
welcomed them as imaginary steps up the steep
ascent which divided him from the summit of crea
tion. But now that he had believed in Christ they

Paul and the Universe. 231
were simply hindrances, impediments, barriers, mid
dle walls of partition between his eyes and the
light of heaven. Instead of being the steps on
which he could rise, they were the stones on which
he must stumble, the obstacles which blocked his
way in running the race which was set before him;
and he felt irresistibly that, until he had cleared
them out of his path, he was in the presence of an
element which might separate him from the love of
God. But as Paul enters on the period of his captivity
his language on this subject becomes much more
triumphant. When he wrote to the Romans his
triumph was still in the future, something which he
expected in the light of faith. But when he wrote
to the Ephesians and Colossians the victory was no
longer a matter of faith but of sight; the principal
ities and powers of the heavenly places were already
vanquished. They were vanquished by being super
seded, by having their province taken away through
the service rendered by a Higher Life. Christ had
conquered them by passing beyond them, and he
had passed beyond them by stooping beneath them.
They had been devised to meet a supposed emer
gency which was not a real emergency. The Divine
Life had been thought incapable of uniting with the
sufferings of the human life because the union with
such suffering implied a union with sin. But now
the Divine Life itself had solved the enigma; it had
united itself even with sin. It had come down not
only through the intervening chasm between itself
and the celestial spirits, but through all that subse-

232 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
quent region which the celestial spirits had been
supposed to traverse. It had founded a new ideal
of empire, an ideal in which greatness ceased to be
identified with unapproachableness, and became
synonymous with its opposite. It had established a
new order of dominion, a dominion in which to be
king of the universe was to be the head of a body,
and therefore the servant of all its members. It
had revealed a new type of majesty, a type in which
the essence of regal glory was not to be a solitary
unit deriving its distinction from its distinctiveness,
but to be the burden-bearer of all life, the supporter
of all weakness, the recipient of all sorrow. The
universe of Paul had passed through a transforma
tion analogous to that which his own life had passed
through. It had been transformed like himself
from a Jewish into a Christian existence, from a life
whose glory was isolation into a life whose joy was
fellowship. It had broken down its middle wall of
partition between its centre and its apex, and had dis
played to the eye of the beholder aline of uninterrupt
ed communion between the highest and the lowest.
It would not be difficult from the epistles of the
captivity to give many illustrations of this sense of
emancipation with which Paul beheld the disappear
ance of the celestial mediators; but we shall content
ourselves with one. Speaking of Christ as having
by death and resurrection united the extremes of
universal being, Paul says, "Having put off from
Himself the principalities and the powers, He made
a show of them openly, triumphing over them."1
1 1 Col. u. 15.

Paul and the Universe. 23S
What are these principalities and powers which
Christ is said to have abolished? Are they that
hierarchy of angelic spirits who are called the min
isters to the heirs of salvation? Are they that com
pany of malign intelligences that are supposed to
constitute the army of the Prince of the air? They
are neither. They are not actual existences but ex
istences in the imagination. The imagination was
all along the sphere of their action and the source of
their hurtfulness. Their evil lay in the fact that
they did not represent the universe as it really was,
but the universe as it was not. They were the at
tempt to supply a non-existent emergency, a diffi
culty that was only seeming. They were devised to
fill up a chasm in the universe which existed only
in fancy. They were intended to connect the centre
with the apex, in ignorance of the fact that the
centre was connected with the apex already. They
owed their being to the supposition that the Divine
Life was bound to be a life of solitude, whereas of all
lives it was bound to be the least alone. Christi
anity had broken the illusion. It had revealed the
paradox that the greatest is of necessity the least,
that the height of imperialism is the depth of service.
Paul's is a protest against the dividing of the uni
verse, — a protest against the later Judaism, against
the earlier Gnosticism, against all of every creed and
soil who, by the interposition of principalities and
powers, had denied the uniting bond which connects
the highest with the lowest. He did for the first
century what the man of modern science has done
for the nineteenth — proclaimed the unity of nature

234 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
and the binding of all things under a common law.
The only difference between the man of modern
science and the founder of Christian theology is this,
that while the one finds his principle of unity in be
lieving in a force which he cannot define, the other
has discovered it by taking one additional step — by
assigning to that force the attribute of personality
and calling it by the name of Love.

CHAPTER XII.
PAUL AND THE FAMILY.
A man's theory of the universe is the key-note to
his estimate of family relations. Whatever he has
conceived to be the order of universal life becomes
to him the pattern and model after which he would
like to frame the circle of his own home. It was
impossible that Paul could have passed through the
development indicated in the previous chapter with
out experiencing an essential change in his attitude
towards everyday life. It was inevitable that the
new view which Christianity had given him of the
universe should transform his old view of the family
and the home. We have seen that his Christian
conception of the universe had been a direct revolt
from his Jewish conception; I now go on to show
that his Christian conception of the family was also
a direct revolt from that conception of the family
which was entertained by his nation.
The highest ideal of the Jewish mind was king-
hood. It was an ideal which had its beginning in
the sphere of religion; it did not ascend from earth
to heaven but it descended from heaven to earth.
The Jew's first admiration of kinghood was derived

236 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
from the contemplation of the universe. He looked
upon the face of nature and beheld there the impress
of power. The objects which excited his wonder,
the objects which stimulated his inspiration, were
the physical forces which manifest themselves in
dynamical strength. His very first conception of
Divine action in the universe was the conception of
a rushing mighty wind moving on the face of the
waters,1 and bearing down all opposition to its will.
From this time forth the attribute which, above all
others, he beheld in Deity was power. When he
thought of God he thought of Him as, beyond every
thing else, a king. If he placed Him in solitary
majesty, he did so in vindication of His kinghood.
He wanted to think of Him as the Absolute Ruler,
and, to assist that thought, he refused to allow Him
any second in command; he placed Him apart from
all other intelligences that he might express the
fact of His regal independence. The watchword of
his whole theological system was "the kingdom
of God."
Now this was the thought which in the history of
the Jewish nation was brought down from heaven to
earth. It was impossible it should exist in the ah
without in time descending to the plain, impossible
it should be an article of theology without becom
ing also an article of social morals. That ideal of
empire which the Jew saw in the heavens he began
ere long to see on the earth. It was inevitable that
he should fashion the things on the plain after the
pattern of the things on the mount. Accordingly, it
i Gen. 1. 2.

Paul and the Family. 237
is not long before we find him transferring his ideas
of Divine sovereignty into the sphere of everyday
life. The central sphere of his everyday life was
the home circle. It was here, therefore, that the
Jew first transplanted that ideal of imperialism
which he had found in the outward universe. The
Old Testament tells us in so many words that the
Hebrew's ideal of the home circle was modelled after
the pattern of what he had seen in physical nature.
Abraham stands below the stars and is impressed
with their vastness and their innumerableness, and
the vision suggests to him the possibility of founding
a family which should represent in its numbers and
its ramifications this exhaustless spectacle of the
heavens. "So shall thy seed be," is the ideal of
family life which floats before his mind — an ideal
whose essence is imperialism and whose glory is the
acquisition of power. From the days'of Abraham
onward, the home circle becomes to the Jew the
central image of that sovereignty which he had seen
mirrored in the heavens. Forbidden to make any
graven image of the Divine power, he substituted
one which was not graven. He took the family as
the representative in miniature of that form of
empire which he had figured in the universe. The
two ideas for which the family lived were multipli
cation and ramification. The life of the individual
had little personal significance; it was but a tribu
tary to the family life. The very thought of per
sonal immortality was held in abeyance. The im- ,
mortality which was flashed before the eyes of the
individual soul was the perpetuated life of the nation

238 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
through the growth and expansion of the family life.
Hence the agency which above all others was recog
nised and valued was marriage. I do not know of
any incident of the Old Testament more significant
than the story of Jephthah's daughter. That a
father should sacrifice the life of his child in obedi
ence to a religious vow is itself startling enough,
but we are more startled still to be told that the
main source of the lamentation was the fact of the
maiden's virginity. Yet the picture is true to the
life of the nation. The individual existed only for
the sake of the matrimonial tie, and the matrimonial
tie existed only for the sake of posterity. That one
should become a thousand, that the unit should ex
pand into the multitude, was the object for which
every life was born and the goal to which every life
aspired. And the result was one of the greatest disasters
which can befall any nation — the depression and
degradation of womanhood. I say depression and
degradation, because there is evidence that the sphit
of the Hebrew race was originally turned in an
opposite direction. The earlier books of the Old
Testament give ample indication that the original
ideal of womanhood was higher than the subsequent
ideal. The paradisiac state was figured as a state
in which the sexes were of equal dignity, in which
the woman was bone of the man's bone and flesh of
the man's flesh. The first years of the people's
history exhibit an occasional respect for woman
which can only be accounted for as the survival of
an earlier culture. Sarah triumphs in the house of

Paul and the Family. 239
Abraham; Rebekah is unrivalled in the house of
Isaac; Rachel and Leah, notwithstanding the broken
monogamy, preserve the home features in the house
of Jacob; Miriam sings in the desert, and Deborah
leads the van on the other side of Jordan. Yet, all
the time, the cloud is deepening, and the cloud is the
worship of physical power. As the hope of empire
draws nearer, as the tribe begins to expand into a
nation and the nation begins to realise its definite
destiny, the utilitarian value of marriage extinguishes
its sacramental value, and woman, just in proportion
as she absorbs attention in the sphere of numerical
development, becomes a nonentity and a cipher in
every other sphere.
By-and-by the national dream is broken. There
comes a period of great depression in which the glory
of the kingdom passes away and the hope of numeri
cal greatness perishes; it is the age of the captivity.
Yet, just as the old hope expires, a new hope appears.
As Judea loses the prospect of reaching imperial
greatness through the multiplication of her people
she receives the prospect of becoming great through
the appearance of a single man. The expectation that
from the lineage of David there should arise a great
political ruler to restore the fortunes of Israel did
not begin with the captivity; but the captivity made
it to every man a possible object of ambition to be
come the parent of such a king. As long as the line
of David was visibly distinguishable from other lines
that ambition was limited to royalty. But when
the storm came that laid the nation low, it tore off
the branches of the Davidic tree and scattered them

240 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
far and wide. It made them indistinguishable from
the branches of other trees; it levelled them with
the life of the common dust. And by that very act
it widened theh influence. Hitherto, the hope of
being an ancestor of the political Messiah could only
be shared by the royal house; but, when the branches
of the royal house became untraceable, that hope
became possible to all. Who could tell at what
moment he might be brought into family relation
ship with the root of Jesse? Who could tell what
matrimonial connection might in an instant unite him
with that tree of national life from which prophets
had predicted that the mighty branch should come?
And so, at the very moment when the fortunes of
Israel were most depressed, nay, by the very reason
of their extreme depression, the utilitarian value of
the marriage state acquired a new significance and
a fresh power. I cannot say that, so far as the
domestic altar was concerned, the new attractive
force was one whit more salutary than the old. In
the new, as in the old, the woman was simply a piece
of mechanism set up to work out a political end.
She was merely an instrument of state machinery
designed to achieve a purpose external to her own
destiny. She was an agency to accelerate the com
ing of a kingdom which, when it did come, would be
foreign to her mission and alien to her capacity —
a kingdom whose force was physical, whose strength
was corporeal, whose aim was drastic, and whose
method was crushing. She was appointed to spin
a web by whose completion she must die.
I have dwelt at some length on this feature of

Paul and the Family. 241
Jewish home life because it may help to explain a
matter in Paul's Christian attitude on which there
has been frequent misapprehension. When Paul
embraced Christianity he passed out of sympathy
with the family life of his nation. His departure,
indeed, from the national ideal of the family is the
earliest moral feature of his separation from Judaism.
No one can read the seventh chapter of 1st Cor
inthians without being impressed with the fact that
his attitude towards marriage was at that time, to
say the least, non-sympathetic. The most he could
say in its advocacy was to regard it as a shield
against possible evils which might arise in its ab
sence. But there has been considerable misconcep
tion as to the motive of Paul's coldness in this
matter. For one thing, it has been frequently
averred that his want of sympathy for the marriage
state originated in his general depreciation of woman
hood. A more ungrounded assertion is not to be
conceived. One of the most distinctive elements in
Paul's Christian experience was the recognition of
the claims of woman; in nothing is he more sharply
distinguished from his Jewish countrymen. Even
those passages in which he seems to depreciate
are dictated by a precisely opposite motive — the
desire to conserve for woman that distinctive and
peculiar sphere of which Jewish politics had de
prived her. When he deprecates the notion that
a woman should teach in the public assemblies,1 he
does so on the ground that teaching in the public
assemblies is not her sphere but inimical to her
i 1 Cor. xiv. 34, 35.

242 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
sphere. The sphere which he desires to conserve
for her, or rather to create for her, is ministration.
He looks upon it as her true province, nay, as her
true power, to be a helper rather than an originator.
The origination of action belongs in his view to the
man; the reception and transmission of action is the
gift of the woman. What else than this does he
mean when he says, "For this cause ought the
woman to have power on her head because of the
angels"?1 The power on the head is of course a
veil; but the very expression lifts the symbol into
a thought. That which to the man would be a
covering is to the woman declared to be a power.
Her capacity of stooping to the will of others, her
susceptibility of bending to the needs of those around
her, if it separates her sharply from the man, is said
to ally her with a greater than the man — the angel.
To Paul, as to the writer of the epistle to the He
brews, the name of angel is synonymous with that of
ministering spirit. In linking the mission of the
woman with the mission of the angel he is paying
her the highest of all compliments, and he is paying
her the compliment in that very direction in which
she had been contemned. Her veil is declared to be
her power. The ministrant element which Judaism
had suppressed is to be made by Christianity her
glory. Christianity is to Paul above all things a
feminine strength. Its masculine features are re
cognised as mutable and perishable: prophecies were
to fail, tongues were to cease, knowledge was to
vanish away; but the strength that seeketh not her
i 1 Cor. xi. 10.

Paul and the Family. 243
own, that suffereth long and is kind, that is not
easily provoked, that vaunteth not herself, that bear
eth, believeth, hopeth and endureth all things, this
was to be the permanent essence, the abiding power
of the new evangel.1
We cannot, then, account for Paul's neutral atti
tude towards the married state by any theory of his
depreciation of womanhood. We are bound to ra-
cognise the fact that his neutral attitude exists side
by side with a recognition of the claims of woman
which had not been made for centuries. There is
another ground to which we are unable to refer
Paul's coldness towards the matrimonial state. It
is sometimes said that he was influenced in this
direction by the belief that it was one of the things
which Christ's second coming would dissolve. Why,
then, on the same principle does he not advise the
discontinuance of the Lord's Supper? Nothing can
be more certain than that he regarded the Lord's
Supper as a provisional institution destined to pass
away. Why, then, does he not speak of this institu
tion in the form in which he speaks of marriage — as
something which may be conveniently disregarded by
those who have reached a larger light? He cer
tainly does not so speak of it. He looks upon it as
an ordinance which must last as long as the world
lasts, which can only end when the dawn has already
melted into the day. It is to be an institution
in whose observance there is to be no break, in
whose continuity there is to be no pause, in whose
solemnity there is to be no suspension, until the
i 1 Cor. xiii.

244 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
shadow shall dissolve into the substance and the
type shall be lost in its fulfilment, ' ' as often as
ye eat this bread, ye do show the Lord's death till
He comes." l What is that difference between these
two cases which has necessitated on the part of the
apostle such opposite modes of treatment?
In the answer to this question lies the solution of
the whole problem. And the answer is not far to
seek. The Lord's Supper, fleeting as it was conceived
to be, was still in Paul's sight a sacrament; the ordi
nance of marriage, as Paul had hitherto known it,
was not a sacrament. Remember where he had
come from — from the camp of the Philistines. Re
member what in that camp the matrimonial tie had
been — a bond of purely utilitarian value connecting
human souls on the ground of expediency and unit
ing them for" purposes extraneous to the domestic
life. Remember, above all, that on the mind of the
apostle there had not yet broken the full sweep of
the sacramental light. He had not yet awakened to
the truth of Christ's secular priesthood. He had
not yet realised the fact that there was an outer as
well as an inner membership in the body of Christ,
and that He could not be the sacrificial head of the
Church without being the sacrificial head of the
world too. He was still waiting for that final reve
lation which only came to him in the Roman captiv
ity — the revelation that the secular sphere mirrored
everywhere the law of the sacred, and that the sym
bol of the Lord's Supper in the Church was reflected
on the waters of outward life. Secular and sacred
i 1 Oor. xl. 26.

Paul and the Family. 245
were as yet two spheres to him, and between heaven
and earth there ran a line of the sharpest separation.
Is it surprising that in this middle period of his
history — the period in which Divine grace stood out
in bold antithesis to the existing life of nature, he
should have looked with a feeling akin to coldness
upon an institution whose only recognised function
had hitherto been the perpetuation of that life?
But now the scene changes. We pass over a brief
period of five years, and we are ushered into a new
world of Paul's experience. The transition from
Corinth into Rome is to him more than the transi
tion from freedom into bondage; it is the passage
from partialness into fulness of view. His vision Of
Divine truth at Corinth had partaken somewhat of
the manner of Greece. Just as the Greek beheld the
Divine influence only where he beheld the human
beauty, so Paul in the Corinthian stage of his history
had recognised the sacramental headship only where
he saw the union of the ecclesiastical members. But
when Paul reached Rome he began to see after the
manner of Rome. The kingdom of God to him took
that form which the kingdom of Caesar assumed to
the Latin race — the form of a membership which
was connected with all other memberships. As the
image of the heavenly sunshine glitters in the earth
ly stream, even so in the institutions of the Roman
empire did Paul behold a possible reflection of the
sacrificial priesthood of Christ. I say, " a possible
reflection." The institutions of that empire were
very far from exhibiting actually any such spectacle.
Nevertheless, the moment that to the eye of Paul the

246 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
world of time revealed itself as the possible mirror
of eternity, the world of time in his eyes became
sanctified, glorified. Its possibility became to him
its only reality. Its present reality was a fiction, an
illusion, a dream. That for which it lived was its
golden future, and in the light of that future its
value was to be measured. To Paul in the Roman
dungeon the secular world shone with an ideal light.
What the citizens of the empire beheld merely as a
coin bearing the superscription of Caesar was reflected
to his gaze with the stamp and impress of the Son of
man. Instead of contemplating, as in days of yore,
the dissolution of its life, he began to contemplate
the Christianising of its life. Every form, every
institution, became in his sight consecrated to a
coming baptism — a baptism in which the member
ship of the Lord's Supper was to become the type
and symbol after whose pattern all other member
ships were to be modelled, and in whose sacred
likeness all secular things were to appear.
Amongst those secular things which Paul saw
transfigured in the light of Christ, stood in the fore
most rank the relations of the family circle. Next
to the big universe of nature came to his sight the
little world of home. We have seen in the previous
chapter how, in the thought of Christ's secular head
ship the universe of nature was transformed; we are
now to see how in the same thought the idea of
marriage became transfigured. That it did pass
through such a transfiguration it seems to me im
possible to deny. Let any man read the seventh
chapter of 1st Corinthians, and turn afterwards to

Paul and the Family. 247
the later epistles, he will, I am convinced, be im
pressed with the thought that in relation to the ordi
nance of marriage he is in a different atmosphere.
It is not merely that in these later epistles the
apostle has ceased to warn mankind of matrimonial
dangers; this would be simply an argument from
silence, which is the most inconclusive of all argu
ments. But the point which impresses me in these
epistles is not so much the change in adverse criticism
as the change in the mode of commendation. He
had all along maintained the lawfulness of the matri
monial state; he had in certain cases asserted its ex
pediency. But at the stage of the Roman captivity
marriage has become to him not only in some cases
expedient, but in every case sacramental. Its nega
tive merit has been exchanged for a positive glory.
It had all along the virtue of a shield to ward off
greater dangers; it is now invested with a virtue
on its own account. It has become in Paul's sight
the shadow and the type on earth of that which he
regarded as the central fact of heaven— the union
between the Christ of love and the Church which He
had purchased with His blood.
Take in illustration that passage which has become
typical of the Pauline view of marriage and authori
tative as the rule of Christian observance — Ephesians
v. 22 and sequel. When we read the opening words,
"Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands,
as unto the Lord," our first impression is that we
are only listening to one of the many assertions by
which Eastern despotism proclaims the authority of
the male over the female. But, as we read on, our

248 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
view is entirely altered. We find that the meaning
given to the word submission is no longer Eastern
nor even Roman. When we are told that the hus
band is the head of the wife, " even as Christ is the
head of the Church and the saviour of the body," we
are confronted not by an intensification but by a
limitation of marital authority. Remember what to
Paul the headship of Christ is; it is in the most
literal sense the saving of the body. It is a reign no
doubt over the members, but it is not a reign after
the analogy of kinghood. It is in its deepest essence
a priesthood of suffering. It is a mastership over
the members which is reached by taking theh pains,
a pre-eminence which is achieved by accepting the
lowest room. It is this and nothing else than this
that Paul recognises as the ideal type of marital
authority. He offers it to the Gentile world as the
extreme opposite of Eastern despotism. Preserving
in words the ancient relation, it is yet in reality the
reversal of that relation. As long as the husband
was the king, the life of the wife was subservient to
his own; but when he became the head, his own life
became subservient. That this is Paul's view, it
is from the passage before us impossible to doubt.
"Husbands, love your wives," he says, "even as
Christ also loved the Church, and gave Himself for it."
For almost the first time in the history of the world
the man in the matrimonial contract stands forth as
the sacrificial party — sacrificial by reason of his man
hood, subservient on account of his headship. He is
to the members of the household what Christ is to
the members of the Church — the centre of all the

Paul and the Family. 249
nerves and therefore the bearer of all the pain. I
say, "almost for the first time," for here again Paul
preserves his conservatism even amidst his progress;
he claims to have a foothold in the past. As he had
reached his conception of faith by going back beyond
Judaism, he reaches his conception of marriage by
going back beyond Hebraism. His eye rests on the
picture of that primeval paradise where the nuptial
torch of sacrifice was originally carried by the male,
where it was not the woman that left father and
mother to cleave unto the man, but the man who
left father and mother to cleave unto his wife.1 He
feels that if woman was to be exalted, emancipated,
delivered from her life of bondage, it could only be
by transforming the ideal of the husband into her
own likeness, by making manhood itself a feminine
power, by transferring to the function of empire that
thought of ministration which had hitherto been
regarded as the badge of the slave.
And truly Paul was right; the facts of the future
have confirmed and justified his view. The history
of modern times as distinguished from ancient times
is the history of domestic life as distinguished from
merely national life. The greatest gift of Christi
anity to the social fabric is the development of the
idea of home. Here, for the first time, the life of
the family stands forth without reference to political
institutions, and for its own sake alone. Here, for
the first time, the refinements and amenities of the
domestic altar are cultivated for no utilitarian object,
but simply for appreciation of their own beauty and
I Eph. v. 31.

250 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
joy.1 Every step of this development is contempo
raneous with the steps of that progress by which the
woman rises in the social scale. Just in proportion
as she becomes an authority in the family circle does
the family circle itself become a centre of national
life. The Roman empire did not pass away until it
had taken the initiative in transferring the education
of the child from the hands of the father into the
hands of the mother. The process was long and
devious but it has been worth the pains; it has
imposed upon the Western world that influence of
female culture which the Zenana Mission seeks to
impose upon the East. Yet, if we ask what has
been the ultimate source of this refinement in the
idea of home, we shall be obliged to confess that the
amelioration of woman herself has been rather an
effect than a cause. We shall be compelled to recog
nise the fact that the change has its root in a more
radical movement still — a movement which trans
formed not the female but the male, and which
exerted its earliest influence rather on the husband
than on the wife. We shall find that Paul has
himself struck the key-note of the new evangel by
placing the Christianised glory of marriage in the
transformation effected on the very idea of empire.
In recognising the truth that in the new regime the
husband is head of the wife, "as Christ is head of
the Church," he has put his hand upon the real
source of that refining influence which has pro
duced the elevation of woman and created the
1 Even the fifth commandment is based upon a political ground,
and Is besides one-sided; contrast the reciprocal relation in Col.
ill. 20, 21.

Paul and the Family. 251
atmosphere of home. He has directed attention to
the fact that Christianity has planted a feminine
influence in the family circle mainly because it is
itself a feminine power, has changed the position of
the woman by altering the character of the man.
He has revealed as the ultimate ground of this mod
ern development that change in the idea of dominion
which has substituted the head of a body for the
king of a state and has identified the rod of empire
with the badge of service. In proclaiming Christ
as the idea of imperial as well as of ecclesiastical
power he has himself been the pioneer of that civili
sation which is essentially modern and distinctively
Christian.

CHAPTER XIII.
PAUL AND SOCIAL GRADATIONS.
We have been tracing the development of Paul in
its descent, from heaven to earth. We have been
trying to mark those successive steps by which he
came down from the sacred into the secular. We
have seen that his beginning, unlike the beginning
of the other disciples, was in the heights of the upper
ah. We have seen that the course of his progress
was exactly the antithesis of theirs; that, instead of
rising from the ground to the skies, he had to descend
from the skies to the ground. We have endeavoured
to mark the stages of this progress from the solitudes
of the Arabian desert to the chains of the Roman
captivity. We have seen how Paul's interest in
secular life was first awakened by the conviction
that the leadership of Christ over the Church was
intended to be the symbol of all imperialism. We
have seen how in that thought the secular world
began to be transfigured to his sight. We have
marked how first of all it changed to him the aspect
of the universe and transformed his view of the
nature of Divine government. We have observed
next how his altered vision of the universe of nature
began to reflect itself in the little empire of the

Paul and Social Gradations. 253
family circle, how the redemption of the outer world
was followed by the redemption of home. One
sphere still remained — a sphere occupying a yet
lower grade, a sphere which, more than all others,
had mirrored the despotism of the old regime; I
mean the relation of master and servant. It was
inevitable that sooner or later Paul in the light of
Christianity should be called to face this problem.
The occurrence of a comparatively trivial circum
stance precipitated the encounter. Nearly at the
close of the first Roman captivity there befell a
chance, or a providence, which brought the apostle
of the Gentiles face to face with that great question
which has been ever since the burning question of
the social world — the reconciliation of man's ideal
dignity with his position of servitude in a scene
of toil.
Reading a little between the lines, .it does not
seem difficult to reconstruct the elements of the
story. The earliest converts to Christianity had
been generally made from the poorest class, but
there were some notable exceptions. Amongst
these was a wealthy citizen of Colossae named
Philemon. He had perhaps been brought under
Paul's influence during the apostle's residence at
Ephesus. At all events he was brought under his
influence and made by him a convert to the new
faith. Like the centurion in the Gospel, he was a
man of authority, having retainers or household
slaves to whom he said "go" and "come." He
seems, however, to have recognised even for them
a right of personal freedom in the highest sphere.

254 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Himself a convert to Christianity, he did not force
his retainers to become converts. He appears to
have felt that there was in the human soul, even in
the soul of a slave, a region which should be held
sacred to the liberty of the individual will. He
probably commanded his servants to be present at
the hours of worship when the apostle happened to
officiate in his house. He felt it to be his duty to
give his retainers an opportunity of choice between
the old faith and the new; but at this point he
suspended his authority and left the choice itself to
their own decision.
Amongst those household retainers was a youth
named Onesimus. He was in the position I have
indicated of naving had the alternative placed before
him between the setting and the rising sun. He
had listened to Paul's expositions of the new faith.
Intellectually and spiritually he was not convinced,
but personally he was attracted. There was some
thing about it which appealed specially and sooth
ingly to his own abject circumstances. That which
enlisted his attention was its negative side — the side
in which it stood forth as the opponent of man's
bondage. As he heard those words ol fire in which
the apostle poured forth his denunciations against
those who would trammel the rights of man, as he
listened to those exhortations in which he called
upon his auditors to stand fast in that liberty where
with Christ had made them free, as there fell upon his
ear those triumphant notes in which the new evangel
proclaimed that where the Sphit of God was there
was freedom, it seemed to him as if already the day

Paul and Social Gradations. 255
of his emancipation had dawned. The theory of
Christian liberty was as yet too subtle for John, but
the fact was patent and inspiring. Here was a re
ligion which asserted in the most unqualified terms
the equality of all men before God, which declared
in the most uncompromising accents that with Him
there was no respect of persons, which maintained
that in His sight all distinction was abolished be
tween Jew and Gentile, Greek and barbarian, free
man and slave. Is it surprising that such a message
should have sounded in his ears like strains of
sweetest music? Is it wonderful that these nega
tive notes of Christianity should have come to him
like the tinkling of fairy bells repeating ever the
one refrain, ' Come and be free '?
Time passed, and Paul departed for Jerusalem and
for Rome. But absence does not melt the influence
of that which once has had dominion over us. A
great modern writer has said that the love of the
heart for an object grows as much when it is separ
ated from that object as when it dwells in its pres
ence. So was it with Onesimus in his incipient
attraction towards Christianity. Long after the
voice ol the preacher was withdrawn, its echoes re
mained in his ear uttering the old refrain of freedom.
He had received for the first time a sense of the in
herent dignity of man, of the dignity which belonged
to-a human soul irrespective of caste or circumstances.
It did not occur to him that this very fact made it
impossible for caste or circumstances to derogate
from his dignity; that was a truth which he could
only learn when he had exchanged the negative for

256 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
the positive side of the Christian faith. Meantime
he was still a pagan in heart, with a pagan's ideal
of greatness. All that he had yet learned from Chris
tianity was his right as a man to the essential privi
lege of manhood. He did not yet know that the
essential privilege of manhood is not freedom but
service, and that freedom is only valuable as the
threshold to a voluntary service. And so, he chafed
at the chain of whose binding he had been hitherto
unconscious. That which was once tolerable to him
became intolerable. The actual grievances of his
position were exaggerated, imaginary grievances
were added, and real compensations were ignored.
The two ideas, of his own bondage and Christianity's
promised emancipation, took joint possession of his
heart and brain, until at last his place in the house
of Philemon became to him as unbearable as if he
had been the object of despotic tyranny.
One day, near the conclusion of Paul's first Roman
period, the apostle was surprised by an apparition in
the flesh of the slave Onesimus. He had fled from
his master Philemon, and he came to justify his ac
tion by throwing himself into the arms of Paul and
of the new religion. His meeting with the apostle
must have been private, because the secret which
he had to divulge would have been no secret in the
presence of a Roman soldier. This proves, even if
other evidence were not forthcoming,1 that the re
straint of Paul's first captivity had been latterly
much mitigated. Onesimus communicated to the
i No man who had not virtually been already acquitted would have
written Philemon 22.

Paul and Social Gradations. 257
apostle the fact of his flight from the house of Phile
mon. It never occurred to him, it would never have
occurred to any spectator, either Christian or pagan,
that Paul would have done anything else than ap
prove. The course taken by Onesimus appeared to
be simply a following out of that which lay within
the spirit of Christianity. Yet, to the astonishment
of the spectators in every age, Paul's feeling was
exactly the opposite. Instead of commending the
step of Onesimus as one in accordance with the
Christian spirit, he proceeds to reveal to Onesimus
that the Christian spirit in his case had pointed in
precisely the contrary direction. He shows him the
positive side of Christianity as a thing hitherto un
known to him, makes him an actual convert to the
new faith, and then sends him back to his master,
accompanied by one of the most courteous, high-
toned, and large-hearted letters which have ever been
addressed by man to man.
The question is, why? What is there in this trans
action that has surprised the spectator in every age?
It is not the feeling that Paul has done any wrong to
Onesimus. When we say that he sent him back we
merely describe the transaction as it appears to the
eye. Strictly speaking, Onesimus was not sent
back but went back. Nothing could be more volun
tary than his return to Philemon. All that Paul did
was to expel his old nature, to give him a new will.
The moment Onesimus became a Christian it became
impossible for him to see the matter in any other
light than that in which Paul saw it. This in truth
is the real mystery. We want to know why Paul

258 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
and Onesimus together did see the matter in this
light, why the fact of their Christianity impelled
them to make a concession to slavery. When Eng
land liberated her colonial slaves she liberated also
her colonial soil; if a slave thenceforth touched her
shores, he was by that act and in that instant free.
When Christianity proclaimed herself a land of free
dom we should have expected a similar result. We
should have thought that, if a man fled from the
bonds of slavery and threw himself for protection at
the feet of a Christian apostle, his act would have
been indorsed by that apostle as a preparation for
the new evangel, and a sign of that coming freedom
for which the human heart was longing.
We may be reminded that Paul was a Jew, and
that as such it was natural that he should cherish
the traditions of his country. But I must point out
that Paul had emerged from the traditions of his
country so far as they concerned the rights of man.
He had conceived for himself a theory of human
relations essentially different from that which had
been embraced by his nation. His spiritual ex
perience, as we have seen, had found its earliest
stage in a vision of the future, its earliest hope in a
second coming of the Son of man. Doubtless the
picture was to him at first like the picture of the
incipient creation in Genesis — without form and
vague. But as time grew he filled it up, and by-and-
by it became definite. When he had reached the
stageof" his Corinthian epistles there aheady floated
before his mind the image of a glorious republic
which should realise all the merits and eliminate all

Paul and Social Gradations, 259
the defects of the ancient Messianic kingdom. It
was a republic in which the idea of monarchy was to
grow out of the idea of communism, in which there
was to be a levelling down preparatory to a new
gradation. The preliminary and initial phase was
to be the abolition of present distinctions. There
was to be a breaking down of the privileges of sex,
of the privileges of race, of the privileges of caste, —
an abolition of the pre-eminence of the male over
the female, of the Jew over the Gentile, of the
citizen over the servant. r All men were to start
anew upon an equality, unfettered by the restric
tions of the past, and unretarded by the distinctions
of birth or station. Yet, this apparently commun
istic arrangement had its source in an opposite
interest. It was not designed to reduce men to one
level but to establish a new social grade. Paul
knew well that, if society were made a plain to-day,
it would be studded again with mountains to-morrow.
He knew well that, however equal men might be in
rights, they were and would always be very unequal
in merits. Accordingly, that state to which he looked
forward was not a democracy but an aristocracy;
only, it was an aristocracy in which the highest rank
was to be taken by the best man. "Do you not
know," he cries, "that the saints shall judge the
world? " ' The survival of the fittest is to him a
matter of course, and the fittest are here not the
physically strongest but the morally purest. God's
day of judgment is for him the time when every man
shall rise in his own order;3 when every man shall
» Gal. iii 28. ! 1 Cor. vi. 2. 8 1 Cor. xv. 23.

H60 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
take his place in the social fabric not according to
his birth, not according to his nation, not according to
his clan, but according to his deed. l Divine election
is to take the form of natural selection — a selection
in which a man is to come to the front or to fall back
into the rear irrespective altogether of whether he
be freeman or slave, Gentile or Jew, but simply and
entirely in proportion to the native strength that is
in him, and on the ground of that suitability to the
new environment which he has attained by the de
velopment of Christian experience.
It is true that for Paul all this was as yet in the
future. It was not only in the future but in a future
world. It had not occurred to him that the old and
not a new environment might be the scene of his
ideal government. In the Corinthian stage of his
experience this world as a world was to him simply
nil. It had not even reached the significance of
being preparatory to a better state of things; it
existed as yet to his mind merely as an obstacle to
the realisation of that state. The obstacle was one
which must -be removed by death. It had not yet
broken on his mind that it might be removed by
life — by the amelioration of the environment itself.
Accordingly, in this Corinthian stage we are not
surprised to find that he is by no means eager to
stand forth as a social reformer. He is willing to
let the institutions of the present world alone. He
tells the slave to be obedient to his master, to abide
in the situation wherein he is called, to regard with
indifference the fact of his bondage. But he tells
1 2 Cor. v. 10.

Paul and Social Gradations. 261
him at the same time the reason why. It is not
because slavery is a thing indifferent, bat because all
the institutions of time are things fleeting and trans
itory. ' ' The time is short, " he says ; "it remaineth
that they that buy be as though they possessed
not."1 He sees that there is a period rapidly ap
proaching in which, for each individual soul, the
distinction of bondman and freeman shall be seen to
have been an illusion and a dream. The dissolution
of the material chain to be effected by the hour of
death shall prove that the bondman's chain was but
one link in that great oppressive environment which
has so long circumscribed the liberties of all man
kind. Seeing, therefore, that one common emanci
pation awaits both the bond and the free, it is not
worth while for the bond to fret against their sepa
rate yoke; rather let them look upon it as only
another incentive to the universal longing for the
coming of that time when the fashion of this world
shall pass away.
All this is perfectly intelligible and clearly logical.
As long as a sharp line of separation exists between
this world and other worlds, the only possibility of
emancipation from present evils is that which lies
through the gates of death. If Paul had written his
epistle to Philemon at this stage, no one would have
been surprised that he counselled Onesimus to re
turn. But the epistle to Philemon was not written
at this stage; it was the production of a later day.
It came not from the Corinthian but from the
Ephesian and Colossian period. The transition
• 1 Oor. Vii. 29, 80.

262 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
from these periods was to Paul the transition into a
new world — we might almost say, into the present
world. When he stood in the streets of Rome there
seemed to strike a new hour in the clock of time 
the hour in which Christ for the first time became
King of the secular world. The head of the Christian
Church was recognised in a moment to be the head
of all principalities and powers. The sharp line of
separation which had divided this world from other
worlds melted into thin air, and that Divine govern
ment which had hitherto been viewed exclusively in
its heavenly relations was seen to exist for the sake
of the common earth. Slavery could no longer be
allowed to rest on the ground that the things of
time were indifferent. The things of time had ceased
to be indifferent; every secular object had become
susceptible of a sacramental relation. Not only had
Onesimus a right to freedom, but he had a right to
freedom as an inhabitant of the present world. It
was not merely something which he was entitled to
claim in the sphere of religion; he was entitled to
claim it in the sphere of human citizenship, to claim
it on the ground of being a man. Why, then, with
these changed premisses does Paul still retain the old
conclusion? If Onesimus has a right to be free, and
if freedom in the present world is no longer a thing
indifferent, why does he induce him to return into a
surmounted slavery? Why does he not exhort him
to claim with his Christian profession that right
which he regards as Christianity's inalienable privi
lege — the right of a free soul to follow the dictates
of its will?

Paul and Social Gradations. 263
It is because he feels that'the main distinction of
Christianity is the power to sacrifice its rights. He
feels that, although Christianity professes to be the
hfe of the world, that profession is not its peculiar
ity; it shares it with every religion under the sun.
Its peculiarity consists precisely in its power to lay
down its life, in its consent for the sake of the world
to take less than its due. Whenever Christ was
realised to be the head of all principalities and
powers Paul knew from that moment that the sacred
must bend to the secular. If the barren fig-tree was
to get a chance at all, it must meantime be preserved
even in its barrenness. The lofty ideal of Christian
ity must consent to pause, must postpone the realisa
tion of that which was the end of its being. Just as
the headship of Christ in the religious world found
its immediate manifestation in bearing with the
imperfections of the bodily members, so the head
ship of Christ in the secular world must find its
immediate manifestation in bearing with the im
perfections of existing things. It is in the light
of such a thought that one comes to understand that
strange conjunction of attributes by which a Chris
tian writer, almost contemporaneous with Paul's
epistle to Philemon, has ventured to describe the
nature of the new dominion as "the kingdom and
patience of Christ."1
Let us apply this principle to the case before us.
Christianity had a right to proclaim the freedom of
man as man. Nothing was simpler than to make
such a proclamation. Paul had only to connive at
i Bev. 1. 9.

264 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
the flight of Onesimus and to indorse the act by his
own imprimatur; it would have been a signal to the
whole slave population of the world that the watch
word of the new religion was emancipation from
servile bonds. What would have been the effect of
such a signal? Doubtless it would have instantane
ously added to the numerical strength of Christian
ity; the kingdom of heaven would immediately have
been taken by violence. And so would the king
doms of earth. It is impossible to conceive a more
perfect picture of anarchy than would have been
created by a sudden and successful insurrection of
the slave population. The numerical proportion of
the bound to the unbound in the Roman empire is a
matter of dispute, probably the bond outnumbered
the free. Figure anything approaching to such a
proportion, and then to the quantity add the qual
ity. Consider that the slave population represented
at its worst that state which we designate by the
name of Paganism — a name which embraces as its
leading characteristic the predominance of the sen
suous over the spiritual. It was paganism without
its restraints and without its refinements. What
would have been the effect of the emancipation of
these millions — the emancipation of an un-Chris-
tianised, unhumanised horde impelled by the fanati
cism of a new watchword, accomplished in a mo
ment of time and achieved by a stroke of violence?
Could it have had any other result than one — the
transformation of order into anarchy, the uprooting
of that line of civilisation on which Christianity it
self had begun to move?

Paul and Social Gradations. 265
That such a thought passed through Paul's mind
is perfectly manifest from the second epistle" to the
Thessalonians. So far back as that early writing we
find the mind of the apostle perturbed by the spec
tacle of incipient lawlessness in the Roman empire.
Beneath the calm surface he feels that there is brood
ing a storm. He is conscious that there are under
ground forces whose action is only restrained by the
powers at the summit, and which, if these powers
were removed, would sweep relentlessly over the
whole system of law and order. He is not thinking
simply of the slave population, but of the masses in
general. " Even now," he says, "the spirit of law
lessness works secretly, only, he that hindereth will
hinder until he be taken out of the way."1 "He
that hindereth " is clearly the Roman emperor. The
reference is meant to be complimentary. Caesar was
not Paul's hero, and the Roman government was not
Paul's ideal, but he felt that in relation to existing
evils both had a remedial mission to perform. He
felt that the iron hand of that imperial constitution,
however oppressive it might be in its intrinsic na
ture, was yet achieving a work which no other hand
could have achieved. It was keeping down from
the surface forces of the most fiery and insubordi
nate character, forces which had long been burning
underground and which only waited an opportunity
to make their eruption into the upper air. That
sooner or later they would obtain their object Paul
had no doubt; he felt that eventually the restraining
power of the empire would be taken out of the way.
i 2 Thess. 7.

266 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Yet it was to him no matter of congratulation. He
stood appalled before the picture which his own im
agination had created — the picture of a subterra
nean anarchy let loose by the removal of the world's
outer crust. And if Paul feared this even in those
days when he wrote to the Thessalonians — days of
ascetic reaction from the present order of things —
is it likely that he would have feared it less in that
period of reconciliation with the present when he
wrote the epistle to Philemon? Is it not patent
that the same dread of anarchy which had impelled
him in the past to deprecate the loosening of the
Roman hand, was now impelling him to deprecate
any sudden and violent liberation even from that
physical slavery which was contrary to the spirit of
the new religion?
It may be asked, Was not Onesimus after his con
version fit for freedom? Undoubtedly he was, and
probably a few hundreds besides. But it was just
here that in the view of Paul the Christian principle
manifested its most distinctive power. It was of
the essence of Christianity that one should die for
the people, that the few should give their life as a
ransom for the many. The headship of Christ was
itself based upon the idea of a membership in which
the pains of the whole body were concentrated in a
single organ. Could there be a grander occasion for
the illustration of this principle than that which had
now presented itself? Onesimus had set himself
free; he was fit for freedom, and in the sight of God
he had a right to freedom. But the vast majority
of his class were utterly unfit for such liberation.

Paul and Social Gradations. 267
What if they should do what Onesimus had done —
emancipate themselves by an act of rebellion?
And how was such a catastrophe to be averted?
Clearly by the sacrifice of Onesimus himself. If
his conversion to Christianity were real, his first
act as a Christian must be the renunciation of his
own right; he must forego his crown and take up
his ancient cross. The men of his own class were
unripe for the emancipation he had himself at
tained; let him resign this emancipation. Let him
offer himself as an oblation for his people. Let
him voluntarily go back into that depressed position
from which he had striven to be free. Let him de
liberately go down again into that valley of humilia
tion from which it had been the aspiration of his life
to be exalted. So would the valley itself become to
him the mountain, and, in the sacrifice of that right
to liberty which as a Christian he had the power to
claim, he would reach a higher exhibition of the dis
tinctive power of man.
I have tried to reproduce that state of mind which
probably dictated to Paul the singular course adopted
in the epistle to Philemon. I do not regard this
incident as simply a biographical episode in the
apostle's life. To me it is one of the most distinctly
marked stages in the development of his spiritual
experience. Nowhere in the course of Paul's history
has he hitherto displayed so much deference for the
secular institutions of the world. We stand here
upon that transition line which leads into the final
period of the apostle's life — a period which is at once
antithetical and complementary to the experience of

268 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
his earlier days. As we see before us the man of the
past and the man of the present — the man who wrote
the epistles to the Corinthians and the man who
wrote the epistle to Philemon, we feel that we have
passed to the opposite bank of the river. There is
no contradiction, there is no annulling of former
sentiments, yet there is a distinct development and
the occupation of a position from which the eye can
command a larger view. When he wrote his first
epistle to the Corinthians his mind was occupied
with the problem how much the secular ought to
yield to the sacred; when he wrote his epistle to-
Philemon his mind was engrossed with the question
how much the sacred ought to yield to the secular.
Both were legitimate problems, both questions were
answered in accordance with the Christian spirit,
but both were not asked at the same time. The one
was put in the days when Paul had just completed
his spiritual struggle; the other was suggested in
the days when the struggle had faded from his
memory and the calm of mellow autumn had come.
At the earlier stage he had been confronted by the
question whether in their secular feasts the disciples
of the new faith might eat the flesh which had been
offered to an idol; he had himself no doubt whatever
of the lawfulness, but he bowed before the common
Christian conscience. 1 Here, in the latter stage, he
bows before another tribunal — that of the common
heathen conscience. A runaway slave appeals to
him for freedom on the ground of that very religion
whose pioneer he professed to be. The right to
i 1 Cor. vUi. 18.

Paul and Social Gradations. 269
freedom was confessed and undoubted, but the needs
of the Gentile world demanded that it should be
postponed; Paul yielded to the Gentile need and in
spired the runaway to return.
Here is a change of standpoint, not amounting,
indeed, to any alteration in principle, yet distinctly
exhibiting the fact that Paul had passed over to
another side of the truth. How are we to explain
the transition? How can we better explain it than
by a recognition of that order of development
through which the apostle's life was gradually un
folded? It was not that, as time advanced and as
the shadows of age deepened on his path, the ardour
of his early fire grew paler; it was rather that his
early fire took hold on new objects and extended the
range of its ardour. The secular had become to him
itself the sacred. The middle wall of partition which
so long had divided the kingdom of Christ from the
kingdoms of the world had in his sight been broken
down, and Christ was recognised not merely as the
head of a redeemed humanity but as the head of
principalities and powers still heathen. The Gentile
world, unknown to itself, had to Paul become a
theocracy — a government which, with all its imper
fections, was ministering to the ends of the universe.
As such, its every institution was by him viewed
with reverence — a reverence not unlike to that which
he still cherished for the mission of the Jewish law;
and even the tare of slavery he would not suffer to
be plucked with violence, lest haply in gathering up
the tare men should root out also the wheat with it.

CHAPTER XIV.
THE COMPLETED JOURNEY.
I have said that the epistle to Philemon forms the
transition line into Paul's final period. That period
embraces what are called the pastoral epistles — those
to Timothy and Titus. The figure of the apostle
which has been long hid from view within the walls
of the prison-house suddenly and for a brief space
emerges once more into the light, and resumes its
missionary journeys. It is but a temporary return
of the working day, and is followed ere long by a re-
closing of the prison wall to be opened only by the
hand of death. But, momentary as is the apparition,
it is long enough to give us a glimpse of the man.
What does that glimpse reveal? Is it the same
Paul on whom our eyes rested previous to the first
Roman captivity? We have seen the sun before it
entered into the cloud; we have lost sight of it for
a few hours, and now, almost on the borders of even
ing, it comes once more into view. Is the sun on
the borders of evening the same as that which en
tered into the cloud? To drop the metaphor, is the
Paul who writes the epistles to Timothy and Titus
identical with the Paul who wrote the epistles to
Galatia and Corinth?

The Completed Journey. 271
Let us imagine for a moment that all the writings
of Paul had been lost with the exception of the
epistle to the Galatians and the ..three pastoral
epistles. Let us suppose that when his figure was
hid from the eye his voice also had been hid from the
ear, and that during the whole time of his Roman
captivity there had disappeared all record of his
thoughts and actions. Let us conceive, therefore,
that when he emerged from his captivity his friends
had no other standard by which to compare him
than the memory of those old days when they had
seen him brandishing the sword against the false
Judaisers; what would have been the conclusion to
which they must have come? Would it not have
been the great sense of contrast which was presented
between the Paul of the present and the Paul of the
past ? Undoubtedly. For no man can read the
pastoral epistles over against the epistle to the Gal
atians without perceiving that he is in the presence
of a man in many respects changed. If one were
asked to describe the main feature of the change, he
would perhaps best express it by saying that in the
pastoral epistles the warfare was out of him. In the
Galatian letter he is brandishing the sword. We
there catch the figure of one who is consciously in
the heat of battle, who sees only two sides of the
question, and is persuaded that, on the adoption of
one or the other, life or death depends. Rut in the
pastoral letters there is no longer a trace of battle.
The sword has been put up into its scabbard. The
fiery accents of the soldier have been replaced by
the calm words of the old man, breathing at every

272 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
turn "Peace, peace." There is everywhere the de
precation of strife, everywhere the effort to find a
common ground between the two sides of the ques
tion. Looking on this picture and on that, and see
ing no intermediate picture, one would naturally be
tempted to ask whether the glow of Christian enthu
siasm had not itself subsided, and whether the dim
inution of early fire did not owe its origin to the ces
sation of early zeal.
Such, I say, might have been our impression, had
we possessed no intermediate record between the
Galatian and the pastoral epistles. But we do pos
sess such a record, and this makes all the difference.
We have a series of letters intervening between the
days of the fiery soldier and the days of the peace
ful old man, and these do not only intervene between
them — they connect them. They show us that the
change in the demeanour of Paul is the result not of
a diminished but of an expanded energy. They re
veal to us the fact that the production of this change
has been itself the very plan of development on
which his life was all along designed to move. They
tell us that the plan of this development was the
descent of a mountain. When he wrote the epistle
to the Galatians he was at the top of the mountain;
when he wrote the pastoral epistles he was at the
foot; his intermediate life was the passage between
the extremes. The top of the mountain was the
heavenly side. His spiritual history had begun with
the vision of the resurrection Christ; the glory of
the world to come had extinguished for a time the
sense of this world's possible glory. It was the age

The Completed Journey. 273
in which the life of the spirit was naturally and very
properly suspicious of all interference on the part of
the flesh, suspicious even of the influence of those
things which on the surface seemed to be indifferent.
Yet clearly it was impossible, undesirable, that such
isolation should be maintained. If Christianity was
to be a life for the world, it must be a life in the
world; it must conquer the mountain not by keeping
at the top of it but by traversing its slopes. It was
inevitable that, if Paul was to be a complete man,
he must be able to take his stand on what now to
him was the opposite side of the question. Ac
cordingly, we expect to find, and we do find, that
the course of his subsequent development is the his
tory of a descending process, in which he is ever
stepping further down from heaven to earth, and
ever drawing nearer to the appropriation of that
secular field which had originally been the barrier to
the advance of the spiritual life.
The pastoral epistles are confessedly the comple
tion of this descent. In the letter which he wrote
during his second captivity, he takes a retrospect of
his whole career, and as the result of the final view
he declares that he had reached that point of per
fected ripeness which had been the object of his
journey.1' "I have fought a good fight, I have fin
ished my course, I have kept the faith," are the
words in which he sums up the history of his spirit
ual experience. And certainly, if the order of Paul's
development has been such as we have described,
these pastoral epistles furnish for his life a consis-
i 3 Tim. iv. 6, 7.

274 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
tent and appropriate close. If the progress of his
pilgrimage has been a descent from the sacred to
the secular, the climax of that progress has assured
ly been reached here. Nowhere has the spirit of
Paul entered so thoroughly and so pronouncedly into
the sphere of secularism. If the first part of his life
was the period in which he was called to defend the
spirit against the encroachments of the flesh, it
might almost be said that this closing period was
the time in which he was called to defend the flesh
against the encroachments of the spirit. Standing
at the foot of the mountain, he stands on the basis
of pure humanity and recognises the essential
sacredness of what once to him had been merely
mundane. The key-note of his life in this period
is struck in the suggestive words ' ' the man Christ
Jesus."1 Very singular is it that Paul's final gaze
on Christ should have been distinctively and pre
eminently the gaze on His humanity. In the for
mer days his eyes had centred chiefly on that which
was Divine; he had begun with the vision of the
Christ of resurrection and for a time he could look
on nothing but the resurrection light. Yet his
ripest hour was to be that in which his eyes were
to be transfixed by the vision of the man. The
sight which came to him latest was the sight which
had come to the other disciples earliest — the full
revelation of the human Jesus, the completed view
of the Christ of Nazareth. Therefore it is that in
his final utterances he emphasises in the Messiah,
above all things, the man. The resurrection light
l 1 Tim. u. e.

The Completed Journey. 275
fades into the background and the image of human
nature in its perfect form appears. And, because
the image of human nature appears, humanity itself,
and for its own sake, becomes the object of his solici
tude. Religion takes a wider sweep; the temple ex
pands to embrace the outer courts of the sanctuary.
The interests of man as man rise to the surface.
Secular life receives a value of its own, and Divine
grace, which in former days was limited to the pre
paration for a world to come, is found to have its im
mediate mission in the purifying of the present age.1
It seems to me that, viewed from this standpoint,
the pastoral epistles embrace two great ideas. The
first is the recognition of the truth that the Church
of Christ must be an incorporative body — a body
whose essential bond of union shall be purity of life,
and which, where that essential bond exists, shall
consent to tolerate minor differences. The second is
the recognition of the truth that the purity of the
life itself ought to be allowed a wider sphere of
operation, that it should not be narrowed down to
the observance of a few ceremonies or the perform
ance of a few religious duties, but should be per
mitted to range at will over the whole length and
breadth of human nature. These, as it appears to
me, are the distinctive features of these epistles so
far'as they bear on the subject of Paul's develop
ment, and I shall proceed as briefly as possible to
exhibit each of them in turn.
And first. If I were asked to characterise the
pastoral letters as distinguished from the other
i Titus Ii. 11, 12.

276 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
letters of St. Paul, I should call them the broad-
church epistles. It is here that distinctively and
peculiarly the sphit of the apostle broadens into the
recognition of a life which is capable of subsisting
beneath theological differences. One of the most
remarkable instances of this is afforded in the latest
of all the epistles.1 Heresies had been springing
up within the Church of Ephesus. Two leaders of
advanced thought had appeared — Hymenaeus and
Philetus. With the special form of theh heterodoxy
we have here nothing to do; speaking generally,
they may be described as in a very mild way the
forerunners of the mythical theory of Strauss, the
anticipators of that school which seeks to transform
the fact into the idea. Naturally, the enunciation
of such novel views had created a great commotion.
Reading between the lines, it is not difficult to see
that the orthodox party in the Church was clamour
ing for the expulsion of the heretics, and that the
apostle was besieged with solicitations to have the
sentence of excommunication pronounced. How
does Paul act under these circumstances? Does he
enjoin his delegate, Timothy, to appease the ecclesi
astical clamour by giving immediate effect to the
prayers of the faithful? Not at all; he tenders him
very different advice. He says, ' The foundation of
Christian membership is not theological but moral,
God Almighty alone can tell to what extent this
mental aberration has its root in a perversion of the
heart; man must be content to wait till the fruit
shall reveal the character of the tree: "The founda-
1 2 Tim. ii. 17-20.

The Completed Journey. 277
tion of God standeth sure, having this seal, the Lord
knoweth them that are His. And, let every one that
nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity."
Meantime, the Church of Christ, just by reason of
its vastness, should be free from all exclusiveness:
" In a great house there are not only vessels of gold
and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and
some to honour and some to dishonour." A house
whose position is not established may insist on
admitting nothing which is not golden, or, at the
very least, silver; but an institution which has made
its mark can afford to let in the wood and earth also.
The Church should be distinguished from the world
not by its narrowness but by its power of incorpora
tion. It should have a place not merely for the
vessels of honour but for the vessels of dishonour
too — a place for those commonplace minds which
have been unable as yet to rise into the full recogni
tion of truth, and whose duties must meantime be lim
ited to the hewing of wood and the drawing of water. '
Such is the broadly tolerant expression of religious
thought with which Paul closes his apostolical
career, and it runs like a thread of gold through all
the -"pastoral letters. If a man wishes to call himself
by the name of Christ, Paul will give him that name;
he will allow the epithet of Christian to be borne by
any one who claims it. Whether that claim be well
or ill founded he will leave to be determined by
another tribunal, but he insists that this tribunal
shall be the life and not the presbytery. He will
not have the character of the tree prejudged by the
seeming frailty of his branches: to speak without

278 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
metaphor, he will not have a man expelled from
Church membership by the apparent incongruity of
his creed with interpretations previously given. He
will wait for the future to tell whether the professing
Christian be a real Christian; by his fruits shall he
be known. If his subsequent life be a departure
from iniquity, Paul shall decide that his foundation
was sure; if his subsequent life shall belie his pro
fession, Paul shall decide that his profession was but
a name. Meantime, Paul shall believe for him the
best, shall assume the existence of the coming fruit,
shall hope all things. He tells Timothy in the very
opening of his episcopal charge that the Alpha and
the Omega of that charge is charity.1 He tells him,
and he tells the world, that the end of all his develop
ment, the completion of all his ripeness, has been
the perfected revelation of Christ's long-suffering
patience.2 As the night draws on, the brightest
gem in the Messiah's crown has become to him its
attribute most human. In the morning his eye had
rested on the power of the Lord from heaven; in the
evening his gaze is fixed on that restraint of power
which constitutes the glory of the man Christ Jesus.
And yet, we are far from having exhausted the
breadth of that humanitarian sympathy which makes
the light of Paul's evening time. He has been telling
Timothy to be very slow in expelling from the
membership of Christ; he reminds him that in one
sense, in a very deep sense, such expulsion is im
possible. We have seen how in the first Roman
captivity the mind of the apostle had been stirred by
' 1 Tim. 1. 6. 11 Tim. i. 16.

The Completed Journey. 279
the thought that there was an outer as well as an
inner membership in the body of Christ, that He
was not only the head of those who circled around
the communion-table but the head of all principali
ties and powers. Here, in these' final letters, the
same thought asserts itself, but with a far more pro
nounced emphasis and in a far more definite form.
With a boldness which is almost startling in its
directness and its unqualifiedness Paul declares of
Christ that He "is the Saviour of all men, specially
of those that believe." x The statement is not acci
dental nor isolated. In his charge to Titus, in a
passage already referred to, he declares in similar
terms that there is a Divine grace which ' ' has ap
peared unto all men " — a grace which has revealed
itself to the world as a world, and the burden of
whose teaching is the observance of those duties
common to the day and hour. Can any one fail to
perceive in such language the presence in Paul's
mind of the thought that Christianity has exerted
an influence even over those who have not accepted
it? He looks abroad upon the world of his day;
it is still for the most part a pagan world. But it
is no longer the paganism of yesterday. It has not
yet received the light, but it has caught the heat.
The spirit of the new religion is in the air, and with
a subtle influence it has begun to work Underground.
The atmosphere of the Caesars has been impregnated
with the atmosphere of the Messiah. Unconsciously
to themselves, men have turned the corner and are
moving on a higher plane. The spirit of the new
i 1 Tim. iv. 10.

280 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
faith has run in advance of the faith itself. Christi
anity has penetrated into the secular institutions of
the empire and imparted to them a fresh glow. Just
as the sense of life in the individual precedes the
exercise of vision, so in the pagan world the feeling
of a new vitality had come in advance of the power
to perceive its cause; like John the Baptist in the
wilderness, it had gone forth as the forerunner to
prepare the way of the Lord.
This was what Paul saw in his old age. He was
inclined to say of Christianity what the Psalmist
had said of God, " Whither can I flee from Thy pres
ence." He felt that, however much a man might
be expelled from the inner membership of Christ, it
was no longer possible to put him beyond the range
of Christ's outer influence. The outer influence of
Christ had become Roman, and therefore potentially
it had become universal. It had impregnated the
breath of the world. It had come into contact with
institutions which had been reared for the support
of paganism, and it was exerting already a power
even over lives which professed to oppose it. It was
a view of this fact which prompted Paul to say that
Christ was in one sense the Saviour of all men. He
had received gifts even for the rebellious, and the
outer court of the tabernacle had caught a glow from
the fire of the inner sanctuary. It may be, I think
it highly probable, that the eye of the apostle saw
the vision nearer than it was in reality. Old man
as he was, he had, like the dying Moses, the spirit
of youth in him, and the spirit of youth always
sees the end aheady at the door. Doubtless to the

The Completed Journey. 281
imagination of Paul the process of Christian civilisa
tion was accelerated, doubtless he expected it to be
more rapid than it actually proved. The value of
his utterance is not the statement of a historical
fact but the revelation of a moral charity. As a
Jew, he had been able to see only two sides of the
question — to be or not to be; as a Christian, with
ever-increasing intensity there had come to him the
perception of a third and middle way — the stage
of becoming. He stood in old age on the bank of
the river, and between him and the other shore he
watched the waters roll. He saw as yet no inter
vening bridge of doctrine by which the two banks
could be united. But he felt that light could cross
the river independently of any bridge, and that the
men on the other side could be united by a common
life even while they were separated by a diverse
doctrine. Therefore it was that he stretched forth
a hand of fellowship into the outer court. He had
realised the fact that the new light which had risen
must sooner or later exert an elevating influence
even over those forms which had been constructed
in the night, and in the view of this prospect he
was not afraid already to say of Christ, " He is the
Saviour of all men."
I come now to the second of those characteristics
which seem to me to mark the pastoral epistles.
The first was the recognition of the truth that the
Christian life is more than the Christian system; the
second consists in a broader view of the Christian
life itself. Not only is the influence of Christianity
seen extending to the outer court, but within its

282 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
own inner court there is observed a process of
enlargement. Nowhere is Judaism so thoroughly
transcended as in these last letters, nowhere does
the type of Christian practice so completely outrun
the type of Old Testament morality. Judaism had
sought to make men virtuous by putting a label
upon the different acts of life, by writing on this
' ' good " and on that ' ' bad. " Into the centre of this
morality Paul sends a thunderbolt. He declares
that it is impossible to reach morality by means of a
label, that the same act may be good to-day and bad
to-morrow, that the motive of the life alone deter
mines the worth or worthlessness of what we do. He
declares that, if a man be a Christian, he can tear
down the labels of prohibition, can claim the right,
without trespassing, to tread in every field, — "unto
the pure all things are pure."1 It is no longer a
question of what we shall do or where we shall go,
but of why we shall do and how we shall go. The
act is to be determined by its motive, and according
to its motive its label is to be. The Church and the
world are no longer to be separated by a line which
is geographical; the geographical lines are to be
obliterated, and the spiritual boundary is alone to
rule. The man who in the secular world manifests
the Christian principle, is to be recognised as per
forming a deed of sacred service. Every moral act
is to be esteemed a religious act, every honest day a
Sabbath-day, every place of duty a place of worship,
every work for man a work for God.
Accordingly, it will not surprise us to find that in
i Titus 1. 15.

The Completed Journey. 283
these pastoral epistles Paul's first spirit of asceticism
is almost extinct. It is no longer the same man who
stood in the deserts of Arabia and sought to realise
the presence of God alone. It is a man who has ex
changed the desert for the city, and who has replaced
the cares of the individual soul with the cares of the
struggling multitude. As we read these letters of
his old age we are impressed at every turn by the
sharp point of the contrast. In the solitudes of
Arabia he had seen none but God; in the streets of
licentious Corinth he had separated himself from the
world; in the heart of metropolitan Rome he appro
priates the world as his own. It is true that he
had told the Colossians to set theh affections upon
heavenly as distinguished from earthly things; but
he had told them before this that the larger measure
of the things which they had attributed to the earth
were really the things of heaven, that Christ was the
head of all principalities and powers. Here, in these
latest letters, almost the last trace of asceticism dis
appears, and the world is at once possessed and sanc
tified in the words, ' ' Every creature of God is good,
and nothing to be refused. " x Here, in nearly every
sentence, the reader is confronted by the opposite
side of that problem which had dominated his earlier
days; it is no longer the defence of the spirit against
the encroachments of the flesh, but the vindication
of the flesh against the intolerance of the spirit. In
Arabia, by his own admission, he had " conferred not
with flesh and blood "; in Corinth he had borne this
testimony to his spiritual need, "I keep my body
i 1 Tim. iv. 4.

284 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
under"; in the latest stage of all he declares that
such a need has been removed and that the power
of asceticism has yielded to a higher power, ' ' the
exercise of bodily restraint is of little advantage; 1
but godliness is profitable for all things, having pro
mise of the life which now is, and of that which is
to come." He wants a religion which shall beautify
not only the prospect of heaven but the objects of
earth, which shall invest with glory not merely the
thought of a world to come but the common life of
every day and hour. He feels that such a religion
must not be one which perpetually forbids, which
ever says ' ' thou shalt not. " It must be a positive
and not a negative principle, an impelling and not a
restraining force, a power which moves the world
not by the mere abstinence of the body but mainly
and pre-eminently by the joy of the soul.
But perhaps the sharpest point of contrast be
tween Paul's earlier and later experience is to be
found in his attitude towards marriage. As we have
said, his attitude towards marriage was at no time
antagonistic; yet his feeling regarding it exhibits a
progress from negative toleration to positive favour.
He tells the Corinthians that marriage, although not
unlawful, is yet a state of fleshly tribulation from
which man and woman would do well to be free.
He tells the Ephesians that marriage, when once
contracted, is a sacramental state in which the living .
sacrifice of the great Head of the Church is repeated
and mirrored in the world. He tells Timothy that
for the life of a young woman marriage is in his
i This is the real meaning of 1 Tim. iv. 8.

The Completed Journey. 285
opinion the most desirable goal,1 and that the man
who makes it a subject of prohibition is to be
esteemed a heretic and a schismatic.2 In all this
there is contrast but no contradiction. The first
voice is different from the last, but each is a true
voice and beautiful in its time. The voices are not
addressed to the same world. The first voice was
addressed to the world which preceded the second
advent; the second was spoken to an age in which
the second advent had begun to dawn. When Paul
came to Rome he felt that his coming was the be
ginning of Christ's coming. He felt that a new hour
had struck in the history of mankind, and that he
himself was designed at once to inaugurate and pro
claim it. In bringing Christianity into the metro
polis of the world he was really bringing Christ into
the world, and to bring Christ into the world was to
make all things new. The commands which served
for an age outside the gospel influence were no longer
applicable to a generation which had been touched
by the sacred fire. It was one thing to contemplate
the life of common day while yet the headship of
Christ was seen only in its relation to a body of be
lievers; it was another thing to contemplate it when
He appeared as the head of all principalities and
powers. In the first instance the life of common
day was a life which had no significance and no
glory; it was not worth preserving; it simply stood
in the way. But when Christ appeared as the head
even of this commonplace secular world, it received
to the eye of Paul an immeasurable value. It was
i 1 Tim. V. 14. 2 1 Tim. iv. 3.

286 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
to him no longer the old world; it was aheady the
scene of the second advent. So far from existing in
order to vanish, it had in it an element of perma
nence. It was not only worth preserving, but its
preservation was the main duty of man. All that
ministered to its continuance became henceforth an
object of interest. The marriage tie, the family re
lation, the social intercourse of man with man, the
progress of civilisation, the diffusion of knowledge,
the spread of commerce, the interchange of brother
hood from land to land, became in the light of the
broader revelation the opening of so many gates for
the advance of the kingdom of God.
In this new regime, what made the marriage tie to
Paul specially sacred was a desire to preserve in
violate the sanctity of home. He desired to preserve
that sanctity inviolate not only against the attacks
of wickedness, but mainly in these epistles against
the encroachments of what used to be deemed the
only goodness. The sun of fortune had begun to
rise on Christianity. The very fact that recently
it had been honoured by a state persecution, showed
that it was no longer an object of mere contempt.
It was beginning to make itself felt as a worldly
influence — as a factor which must be reckoned with
in estimating the strength of the empire. If, for
those inside its pale, this growing importance was
in one sense an advantage, it was in another sense
fraught with danger. The fear in former days was
that the allurements of the world might seduce the
Christian from the service of the Church; the fear
in Paul's mind at this later time was that the attrac-

The Completed Journey. 287
tions of the Church might draw away the Christian
from the legitimate service of the world. He was
afraid that the increasing popularity of this new
mode of life might lead its votaries to sink the
citizen in the devotee, to neglect the common cares
and duties of the hour for the uncommon cares and
duties of the inner sanctuary. It was a sense of
this danger which prompted Paul in his old age
to stand forth as the protector of the fireside, the
guardian of the domestic altar. If in the spring
time he had seen the world chiefly in its aspects
antagonistic to religion, he amply redeemed himself
in the autumn of his days. He came forth as the
champion of a secular religiousness, of a service of
God which might be given within the walls of an
ordinary dwelling. Every note of his latest writings
is pervaded by this spirit of secular guardianship —
this desire to preserve for its own sake the life of
the family and the household. There were hun
dreds of young men who thought it incumbent
on them to desert their domestic duties for the
duties of the missionary; Paul says, "If any widow
have children or nephews, let them learn first to
show piety at home, and to requite their parents. " *
There were men who sacrificed the comforts of the
family to the claims of Christian liberality; Paul
says, ' ' If any provide not for his own, and specially
for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith,
and is worse than an infidel." 2 There were domestic
servants who, on the ground of their Christian pro
fession, laid claim to a social equality with their
1 1 Tim. v. 4. si Tim. v. 8.

288 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
masters, assumed that the republicanism in the sight
of God abolished all distinctions in the grades of
man; Paul says, ' ' They that have believing mas
ters, let them not despise them, because they are
brethren; but rather do them service, because they
are faithful and beloved." '
Such is the tenor of these pastoral epistles. They
are a defence of the secular against the encroach
ments of the sacred — a vindication of the essential
sanctity of the natural rights of man. I cannot but
remark how, when viewed in this light, these epistles
acquire an entirely new significance. It has been
no uncommon thing from a literary point of view
to speak of them with disparagement. Even those
who have accepted their genuineness have been
willing to concede that they indicate a drooping in
the apostle's wing. They tell us that there is a
marked contrast between the sublime fire which
flashes from the apostle's eye in the letter to Galatia,
and the homely touch of the hand which is laid on
the heads of Timothy and Titus. And so, doubtless,
there is; but I would rather call it home-like than
homely. In the reading of these later epistles we
feel that we are no longer breathing mountain-air;
yet, if we read them aright, we shall find that we
have exchanged the mountain-air for the atmosphere
of a more useful environment. We have left the
dizzy heights of speculation where the mind dwelt
on those transcendental problems in which the spirit
of man contemplates his relation to eternity. But
if in abandoning these heights we have lost some-
' 1 Tim. vi. 2.

The Completed Journey. 289
thing in elevation, we have gained something in
breadth. We have descended into a plain which is
- more prosaic, but which is at the same time more
human. The pastoral epistles are home-like simply
because their subject is home. If they exhibit a
drooping of the wing, it is because they have dis
covered a region lying beneath the ordinary flight
of religion. They have discovered that there belongs
to Christianity a world which was once thought to
belong to Satan — the world of home-life, the world
of the family altar, the world of common secular
toil. It is not their greater poverty but their
superior riches which makes them prosaic; they
are legs filled with the transcendental because they
are more full of man.
I confess, indeed, that the order of Paul's experi
ence is here very different from the order of common
experience. In the lives of men in general the
objects of the outer world lose somewhat of their
magnitude as the shadows of old age deepen. Apart
altogether from religion, the tendency of advanc
ing years is to deprive the incidents of common
day of much of that absorbing interest which con
stituted theh dominion over the years of manhood.
But Paul's experience is entirely the reverse. He
is perfectly conscious, indeed, that the snows of age
are falling round him; he says so in the epistle to
Philemon. But the peculiarity of his case is that
the objects of life become interesting just in propor
tion to the deepening of the snow. The time of his
manhood had not been a time of much interest in
the present world. He had stood then upon Mount

290 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Nebo and gazed into the prospect of the promised
land; his eye was indeed undimmed, yet his nat
ural strength had been abated. The vision of the
heavenly Canaan had to some extent paralysed the
force of his human nature, and the sight of the
Delectable Mountains had dwarfed his view of the
plain. But here, standing in the twilight, the pic
ture is reversed. At the approach of night the forms
of this world's life for the first time fully and freely
emerge upon his gaze. The noonday of manhood
had suppressed them, the fire of youthful enthusiasm
had hid them ; but the shadows of old age revealed
them in all their possibility and power. The time
of Paul's declining earthly day is precisely the time
when the earth to him acquires its full significance;
in relation to this world the saying was in him
fulfilled, "at evening-time it shall be light."
And the explanation of all this we have seen. It
is no accident, no freak of history; it is in strict
consistency with the whole order of Paul's develop
ment. If the widening of his worldly views at the
approach of old age is a somewhat abnormal experi
ence, it is because his conversion to Christianity was
itself in its method abnormal. The other leaders of
the new religion began, as we have seen, at the base
of the triangle and gradually climbed up to its apex;
Paul began at the apex and gradually descended to
the base. The other leaders received Christianity
at first in its most human and worldly aspect; they
came to the Son of man for the sake of that earthly
bread which was broken by His hand. But Paul
received his first knowledge of Christ at the top of

The Completed Journey. 291
the triangle. He caught his earliest vision of Him
not as the Son of man but as the Son of God. His
eye rested at the beginning on no Galilean plains,
on no image of a human form. It rested on a form
which had freed itself from the limitations of human
ity, which had clothed itself in a superhuman garb.
He had begun with the Christ of resurrection; he
had started on the heights. It was inevitable that
any future development must be a progress down
ward. It was inevitable that just in proportion as
he descended from the height he must reach the
breadth of Christianity. The base of the triangle
which to his brother apostles was the starting-point
was to him the goal. Every stage of his journey
was necessarily a stage nearer to the human, nearer
to the world of common day. Throughout the
course of these pages we have been trying to trace
these steps of descent. We have been seeking to
indicate that process of gradual broadening which
marked the advance of his spiritual life from its
apex amid the mountains of Arabia to its base in
the heart of the great metropolis. We have endeav
oured to distinguish those successive stages of ex
perience by which he approached ever nearer to a
sympathy with man as man. And we have found
that with him the breadth has grown in proportion
to the descent. The moment furthest removed from
transcendentalism has been the moment most in
corporative of the world; the writings least full
of systematic theology have been the epistles
most filled with man. In Arabia he stood at the
highest summit of heavenly vision, but the deepest

292 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
ground of earthly sympathy was found only in
Rome. There we shall leave him — leave him amid those
shadows which brought to him his fullest, latest
light. The shades of night were gathering round
him; the walls of the prison-house had finally en
closed him; the infirmities of old age had begun to
tell on his physical frame. Yet neither the age nor
the captivity nor the final martyrdom constitutes
the fitting close of such a life as his; its fitting close
is its latest breadth of sympathy. It is here that
one comes to understand what has often been a
puzzle to historians — why the writer of the Acts,
after having brought Paul almost to the gates of
martyrdom, should have ended his narrative by
leaving him unharmed before the gates. The reason
lies in the writer's sense of the true situation. He
knew that the hour of Paul's tragedy was at the
same time the hour of his triumph, and the tragedy
to his mind was lost in the triumph. He knew that
Paul was never so great, never so powerful, never
so instrumental to the common-weal, as when he
stood amid the declining light and claimed the world
for Christ. It furnished to him that climax for his
book which he had contemplated from its very be
ginning. ' ' Ye shall be witnesses unto me both in
Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and
unto the uttermost part of the earth," l are the words
in which he expresses its prefatory plan. It is a
triangular plan; it follows the course of Christianity
from its narrowest point to its broadest base. Jeru
i Acts i. 8.

The Completed Journey. 293
salem, Judea, Samaria, the far-off parts of the West
where stood the great metropolis of the world, — these
were the gradations through which the earliest of
Church historians proposed to trace Christianity's
progress. Each stage was an expansion, each step
was a step nearer to man. He beheld the new
religion passing from its narrowest precincts within
the walls of Jerusalem into the wider atmosphere of
the surrounding Judaic district. He beheld it thence
overleaping the walls of orthodox Judaism itself and
entering into that region of Samaria which had been
long to the Jew a proscribed land. He beheld it,
lastly, transcending altogether the limits of Palestine
and penetrating with the footsteps of Paul into
the very heart of secular paganism. When he had
arrived at that climax he felt it time to lay down
his pen. He felt that when the apostle had reached
the interior of the great metropolis he had reached
the beginning of the end, had seen the inauguration
of Christianity's triumph; and that here, accordingly,
the curtain ought to fall.. We too may be content
in imitation of so illustrious an example to let the
vision of the triumph eclipse- the scene of the martyr
dom, and to leave the missionary of the Gentiles in
the field of his undying glory.

THE END.