ST. PAUL AND HIS MODERN STUDENTS.

The Life and Epistles of St. Paul. By the Rev. W. J. Conybeare, M.A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; and the Rev. J. S. Howson, M.A., Principal of the Collegiate Institution, Liverpool. 2 vols. 4to. Longmans. 1852.

The Epistles of St. Paul to the Corinthians: with Critical Notes and Dissertations. By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, M.A., Canon of Canterbury, late Fellow and Tutor of University College, Oxford, &c. 2 vols. 8vo. Murray. 1855.

The Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans: with Critical Notes and Dissertations. By Benjamin Jowett, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford. 2 vols. 8vo. Murray. 1855.

These treatises, bearing on their title-pages the names of our two ecclesiastical Universities, give happy signs of a new era in English theology. They show how effectually we have escaped from the morbid religious phenomena represented by Simeon at Cambridge, and the counter-irritants applied by John Henry Newman at Oxford; and come as the returning breath of nature to those who have witnessed the fevers of "Evangelical" conversion or the consumptive asceticism of "Anglican" piety. On looking back, from the position now attained, it seems wonderful that we could ever, with St. Paul's writings in our hands, have been betrayed into either of these opposite extravagances: for anything more absolutely foreign to his breadth and universality than the Genevan dogma, or more at variance with his free spirituality than the sacramental system, it is impossible to conceive. But it is the peculiar fate of sacred writings, that the last thing elicited from them is their own real meaning. The very greatness of their authority puts the reader's faculties into a false attitude; creates an eagerness,—an inflexible intensity,—that defeats its own end; and, in particular, gives undue ascendency to the uppermost want and feeling that may be craving satisfaction. Hence the tendency of Scriptural interpretation to proceed by action and reaction; an easy ethical Arminianism being succeeded by a severe Calvinism, and the reliance on individual grace giving way before the advance of sacerdotal and Church ideas. When the opposite errors have spent themselves, the requisite repose of mind will be recovered for reading just the thought that lies upon the page: here and there an eye will be found, neither strained with pre-occupying visions, not scared by sceptic shadows, but clear for the apprehension of reality, as God has shaped it for our perception. At length we have reached this crisis of promise; and critics are found who, instead of interrogating St. Paul on all sorts of modern questions, listen to him on his own; and draw from him, not a fancied verdict on the sixteenth century, but a faithful picture of the first.

And for this historical purpose, the writings of the great Gentile Apostle are of paramount value, and justly occupy the inquirer's first researches. The most considerable of them are of unimpeachable authenticity. They are the very earliest Christian writings we possess. They are the productions of a man more clearly known to us than any of the first missionaries of the Gospel. They are letters: abounding in disclosures of personal feelings, of biographical incident, of changing moods of thought, of outward and inward conflict. They are addressed to young communities, scattered over a vast area, and composed of differing elements; and exhibit the whole fermentation of their new life, the scruples, the heart-burnings, the noble inspirations, the grievous factions, of the Apostolic age. The Gospels and the Book of Acts treat no doubt of a prior period, but proceed from a posterior, of whose state of mind, whose retrospective theories concerning the ministry of Christ, it is of primary importance to the criticism of the Evangelists that we should be informed; and on these points the Pauline Epistles are the indispensable groundwork of all our knowledge or conjecture. In them we catch the Christian doctrine and tradition at an earlier stage than any other canonical book represents throughout. Although the narratives of the New Testament doubtless abound in material drawn faithfully from a more primitive time, they are certainly not free from the touch and tincture of the post-Pauline age. How powerful an instrument the Apostle's letters may become for either confirming or checking the historical records, may be readily conceived by every reader of Paley's "Horæ Paulinæ." In fine, if it be a just principle, in historical criticism, to proceed from the more known to the less known,—to begin from a date that yields contemporary documents, and work thence into the subjacent and superjacent strata of events,—the elucidation of Christian antiquity must take its commencement from the Epistles of St. Paul.

Except in its general similarity of subject, the first of the three works mentioned at the head of this article admits of no comparison with the other two. It is rather an illustrated guide-book to the Apostle's world of place and time, than a personal introduction to himself. The authors are highly accomplished and scholarly men, and could not fail, in dealing with an historical theme, to bring together and group with conscientious skill a vast store of archæological and topographical detail; to weigh chronological difficulties with patient care; to translate with philological precision, and due aim at accuracy of text. They have accordingly produced a truly interesting and instructive book: so instructive, indeed, that by far the greater part of its information would, probably, have been quite new to St. Paul himself. His life seems to us to be injudiciously overlaid with what is wholly foreign to it, and for the sake of picturesque effect to be set upon a stage quite invisible to him. He was not "Principal of a Collegiate Institution," accustomed to examine boys in Attic or Latian geography; was not familiar with Thucydides or Grote; was indifferent to the Amphictyonic Council; and, in the vicinity of Salamis and Marathon, probably read the past no more than a Brahmin would in travelling over Edgehill or Marston Moor. The world of each man must be measured from his own spiritual centre, and will take in much less in one direction, much more in another, than is spread beneath his eye. He cannot be reached by geographical approaches. You may determine the elements of his orbit, and yet miss him after all. It is an illusory process to paint the ancient world as it would look to an Hellenic gentleman then, or a university scholar now; and then think how St. Paul would feel in passing through it to convert it. The indirect influence of this kind of conception seems to us apparent both in Mr. Conybeare's translation and Mr. Howson's narrative and descriptions. The outward scene and conditions of the Apostle's career are elaborately displayed; but more with the modern academic than with the old Hebrew tone of coloring; and the English version, scrupulous and delicate as it is, has, to our taste, a general flavor quite different from the original Greek. Unconsciously entangled in the classifications and symbols of the Protestant theology, the authors are detained outside the real genius and feeling of the Apostle.

Of a far higher order are the other two works,—produced, we infer from their numerous correspondences of both form and substance, not without concert between the authors. Indeed, the same explanation of the merits of Lachmann's text (printed without translation by Mr. Stanley, and with the adapted authorized version by Mr. Jowett) is made to serve for both. So clearly and compendiously is this explanation drawn, that, in the next edition of Lachmann, Mr. Jowett's introduction might usefully be annexed to the great critic's rather tangled and awkward preface. Of the superior fidelity of this recension, we think no habitual reader of the Greek Scriptures can reasonably doubt; and the recognition of its authority fulfils a prior condition of all scientific theology. The text being chosen on grounds purely critical, the notes are written in a spirit purely exegetical; they aim, simply and with rare self-abnegation, to bring out, by every happy change of light and turn of reflective sympathy, the great Apostle's real thought and feeling. How very far this faithful historic purpose in itself raises the interpreter above the crowd of erudite and commenting divines, can scarcely be understood till it has formed a new generation, and fixed itself as a distinct intellectual type. It is not, however, an affair of mere will and disposition; but, like most of the higher exercises of veracity, comes into operation only as the last result of mental tact and affluence. With the most honest intentions towards St. Paul, a critic without psychological insight and dialectic pliancy, without power of melting down his modern abstractions and redistributing them in the moulds of the old realistic thought,—a critic without entrance into the passionate depths of human nature,—a critic pre-occupied by Catholic or Protestant assumptions, and untrained to imagine the questions and interests of the first age,—cannot surrender himself to the natural impression of the Apostle's language. The disciple and the master are, in such case, at cross-purposes with one another; the questions put are not the questions answered; the interlocutors do not really meet, but wind in a maze about each other's loci, not to end till the unconscious interpreter has set his fantasies within the shadow of inspiration. No such blind chase is possible to our authors. They have achieved the conditions of fidelity; and bring to a task, in which the truthful and sagacious spirit of Locke had already fixed the standard high, the ampler resources of modern learning, and more practised habit of historic combination. In the distribution of their work, the difference of natural genius between the two authors has perhaps been consulted, and is, at all events, distinctly expressed. Mr. Stanley's aptitude for reproducing the image of the past, his apprehensive sympathy with the concrete and individual elements of the world, fitly engage themselves with the composite forms of Corinthian society, and the most personal, various, and objective of the Apostle's letters. For the more speculative Epistles to the Galatians and the Romans, there was need of Mr. Jowett's philosophical depth and subtilty. The strictness with which he restrains these seductive gifts to the proper business of the interpreter, is not less admirable than their occasional happy application. Instead of being employed to force upon the Apostle a logical precision foreign to his habit, they are chiefly engaged in detecting and wiping out false niceties of distinction drawn by later theology, and throwing back each doctrinal statement into its original degree of indeterminateness. It is not in the notes,—which are wholly occupied in recovering St. Paul's own thought,—but in the interposed disquisitions, which avowedly deal with the theology of to-day, that a certain breadth and balance of statement, and delicate ease in manœuvring the forms and antitheses of abstract thought, and fine appreciation of human experience, make us feel the double presence of metaphysical power and historical tact. The author, accordingly, appears to us, not only to have seized the great Apostle's attitude of mind more happily than any preceding English critic, but also to have separated the essence from the accidents of the Pauline Christianity, and disengaged its divine elements for transfusion into the organism of our immediate life. Mr. Stanley appears to have more difficulty in unreservedly adhering to the purely historical view, and clerically flutters, without clear occasion, on the outskirts of "edification";—the critic in his notes, the preacher in his paraphrase; conceding in act more readily than in name, and apologizing for finding human ingredients in the Apostles and their doctrines, as if it were he, and not God, that would have them there. This tendency to blur the lines which he himself draws between the temporary and the permanent in the Scriptures with which he deals, is the only fault we can find with Mr. Stanley; whose associate, clinging less to the past, in effect preserves more for the present. To learn the external scene of the Apostle's career, we would refer our readers to Messrs. Conybeare and Howson; to appreciate his moral surroundings, and the problems it presented, especially on the ethnic side, they may take Mr. Stanley as their guide; but for insight into the Apostle himself, and outlook on the world as it seemed to him, they must resort to Mr. Jowett.

The Pauline Epistles are interesting, apart from all assumption of inspired authority, because the elements are seen fermenting there of the greatest known revolution both in the history of the world and in the spiritual consciousness of individual man. Judaism was the narrowest (that is, the most special) of religions; Christianity, the most human and comprehensive. Within a few years, the latter was evolved out of the former; taking all its intensity and durability, without resort to any of its limitations. This marvellous expansion of the national into the universal was not achieved without a process and a conflict. Divine though the work was, it had to be wrought upon men, and through men, whose character, interests, convictions, habits, and institutions furnished the data conditioning the problem, and whose remodelled affections and will supplied the instruments for its solution. The laws of human nature, therefore, and the action of human events, necessarily enter into the study of this great revolution; and it cannot be detained out of the hands of the historian by any exclusive rights of the divine. When we endeavor to trace the successive steps of faith from Mount Zion to the Vatican, many parts of the progress appear to have left but scanty vestige. We know the beginning, in the doctrine of the Hebrew Messiah; we know the end, in the recognition of a Saviour of the world. We know the intermediate fact,—that Judaism did not surrender its own without a struggle, or readily give away the keys of its enclosure just when it was passing from a prison of affliction into a palace of "the kingdom." But within this general fact lies a world of mysterious detail,—nay, almost the whole life of the early Church. Who began the open breach between Messiah and the Law? how, and to what extent, did the parties divide? what was their relative magnitude at different times and in different places? and by what process was the difference terminated, and the two extremes—Marcion on the one hand and the Ebionites on the other—removed outside as heretics? The Christianity of the third century is so little like the doctrine of Matthew's Gospel as to perplex our sense of identity. No one can bring the two into direct comparison, without feeling how much must have happened to shape the earlier into the form of the later. Could we trace the flow and estimate the sources of this change, the most wonderful of the world's experiences would be resolved. The continuity, however, of visible causation is often broken; there are everywhere many missing links in the chain, and a chasm extending through a large part of the second century. But a generation earlier we meet with materials of the richest value in the Epistles of St. Paul; and by their aid the general direction may be found by which thought and events must have advanced. Otherwise, the change would seem as violent and inconceivable as a convulsion that should mingle the Jordan and the Tiber.

No doubt, the germ of the Gospel's universality is to be found in the personal characteristics of its Author,—in the whole spirit of his life, and the direct tendency of his teachings. He who found in the love of God and love of man the very springs of eternal life; who measured good and evil, not by the act, but by the affection whence they come; who placed his ideal for man in likeness to the perfection of God,—had already proclaimed a religion transcending all local limits. Nay, if he opposed the "true worship" to the services at Gerizim and Jerusalem, and could wish the Temple away, that obstructed his direct dealing with the human soul and suppressed the inner shrine "not made with hands," he must even have placed himself in an attitude of open alienation towards the ritual of his people. At the same time, his words seem to have left not unfrequently an opposite impression. He comes, "not to destroy the Law and the prophets, but to fulfil" them; "not a jot or a tittle is to fail." His most spiritual truths and sentiments, instead of being announced as novelties grounding themselves on his personal authority, are drawn out of the old Hebrew Scriptures; and even the life beyond death he finds lurking in patriarchal idioms and phrases heard at the burning bush. His intensest polemic against the sacerdotal party goes on within the limits of the system which they represent and yet corrupt; and his bitterest reproach against them is that there is no reverence for it in their hearts, since they hugely violate and trivially obey it. Far from ever launching out against law as law, or setting up faith as a rival principle excluding it, he extends precept to the last heights of religion, enjoins the divinest affections, as if there also obedience was possible, and duty and volition had their place. It was not in a nature holy and harmonious as his,—type of heavenly peace rather than of earthly conflict,—that the schism would be exhibited between Will and Love; where both are at their height, there is no rent between them. Nor was there need, in that meek, reverential soul, to break with the past, in order to find a sanctity for the present, and leave an inspiration for the future. Some things, once given for the hardness of men's hearts, might be dropped, and fall behind; but God had ever lived, and left the trace of his perfectness upon the elder times as on the newest manifestations of the hour. There was enough in the Law, if only its fruitful seeds were warmed into life, to furnish forth the Gospel. And so Christ presents himself as the disciple of Moses, and in the Sermon on the Mount does but open out the tables of Sinai. It was not, therefore, without honest ground that his immediate disciples could defend him from the charge of being unfaithful to the religion of his native land. And yet the instinct of the priests and rabbis told them truly that he and they could not co-exist, that his doctrine reduced their work to naught, and that, whencesoever he might draw it, there was no doubt whither he must carry it. The "witnesses" were not altogether "false" which they brought to show his inner hostility to the altar ceremonial; and perhaps his enemies, with apprehension sharpened by fear, more correctly interpreted his tendency in this direction than his followers, entangled in the cloud of a Judaic love. It was quite natural that the real antithesis between the Law and the Gospel should thus be first felt by his antagonists, whilst as yet it slept undeveloped in the minds of his followers and in the habitual expression of his own thought; and that its earliest proclamation should be their act, their defiance, the cross on Calvary!

This terrible challenge, fiercely protesting that the Law would hold no parley with the Gospel, the Apostles, however, refused to accept. They still denied their Lord's apostasy or their own; they had always been, and with his encouragement, the best of Jews: nor did they contemplate, so far, any change. The crucifixion was a Jewish mistake, meant for the nation's enemy, but alighting on its representative; a mistake, however, which God had counteracted by a glorious rescue, in the resurrection of the crucified. The mischief being thus undone, the day of Hebrew opportunity was resumed; the ministry of Jesus was not closed; he yet lived and preached to them as before;—no longer, indeed, in person till their better mind should re-assert itself, but by "faithful witnesses";—no longer too in tentative disguise, but now identified as Messiah by his exaltation above this world. Whatever conflicts of mind the disciples suffered in the mysterious period following the crucifixion, the operation of the resurrection and the Spirit was at first simply to reinstate them in their prior faith,—that the kingdom would soon be restored to Israel, and be brought in by no other than their Master, already waiting for the crisis in a higher world till God's hour should come. There is no evidence to show that, on the transference of their Lord's life from earth to heaven, they were carried into any greater comprehensiveness or spirituality of faith: their convictions were more intense, but held on in the same direction, being all included in one great theme,—the speedy coming of Messiah's kingdom and the end of the world. Nay, of so little consequence, in comparison with this general picture of expectation, was even the appearance in it of the person of Jesus as its central figure, that Apollos, more than twenty years afterwards, was making and baptizing converts, without having ever heard of any later prophet than John the Baptist; and these people are already recognized as "disciples," and then informed, as needful complement to their faith, that, besides the crisis being near, the person is appointed.[58] Here had evidently been, for some quarter of a century, two independent streams of Messianic faith, one from a rather earlier source than the other, but pursuing their own separate way, till thus partially confluent at Ephesus. And what is the relation between them? One of them baptizes into an impersonal and anonymous hope, the other into the same hope with the name attached. And when these two states of mind are set side by side, they are regarded as the same in their essence, and differing only in completeness. Nor is there anything in their mutual feeling to hinder their instant coalescence. This fact defines in the clearest way the position of the early Church; the ordinary Jew believed that Messiah would some time come, and bring in "the last days"; Apollos, that he would come erelong; the Christians, that already the person was indicated, and would prove to be Jesus of Nazareth. All three co-existed within the Hebrew pale, and the two last fall under the common category of "disciples."

It was impossible, however, that the contemplation of a Messiah risen and reserved in heaven should affect all the believers in a precisely similar manner. His personal attendants it would take up just where the crucifixion had let them down; would give new force to their previous impressions, new sacredness to their recollections, new significance to his words and example, new reluctance to venture where he had not led. The whole effect would be conservative, and tend to fix them, with an inspired rigor, within the limits of the Master's lot and life. Quite otherwise was it with the new disciples, who had no such restraining memories of the human Teacher. They began with Christ above, and were tied down by no concrete biographical images, no scruples of tender retrospect. They were free to ask themselves, "What meant this surprising way of revealing Messiah 'in heavenly places,' and letting his disguise first fall off in his escape from local relations? The scene from which he looked down,—was it the mere upper chamber of Judæa, or did it overarch the human world? Who could claim him, now that he was there? Was it for him to examine pedigrees to test 'the children of the kingdom'; or would he, as Son of David, even come emblazoned with his own?" The mere conception of an ascended and immortal being, assessor to the Lord of all, seemed to dwarf and shame all provincial restrictions, and sanction the distaste for binding forms and ceremonial exclusiveness. The withdrawal of Christ to a holier sphere accorded well with all that was most spiritual in his teachings and in himself; and could not fail to reflect a strong light back on this aspect of his life, and give a more significant emphasis to the tradition of his deepest words. In the mind of many a disciple this tendency would be favored by a weariness towards the outer worship of the temple, and a secret aspiration after purer and more intimate communion with God. Especially was the foreign Jew obliged to confess such a feeling to himself. The very speaking of Greek spoiled him for thinking as a Hebrew; for language is the channel of the soul, and according as the organism is open, the sap will flow. Accustomed to the simple piety of the Proseucha, where God was sought without priest or sacrifice, and adequately found in poetry, and prophecy, and prayer, the Hellenist acquired a tone of sentiment on which the material pomps and puerilities of Mount Moriah painfully jarred. Nor could he enclose himself contentedly, like the Palestine Jew, within the sacred boundary that admitted the most worthless son of Abraham, and shut the noblest Gentile out. Living in heathen cities, dealing with heathen men, touched at times with the sorrow or the goodness of heathen neighbors, his moral feeling fell into contradiction with his inherited exclusiveness, and inwardly demanded some other providential classification of mankind. Accordingly, it was the Hellenist Stephen who first saw, in the heavenly Christ, a principle of universal religion and a proclamation of spiritual worship. When accused of defaming Moses and the Law and the holy place, and setting up Jesus to supersede them, he boldly reflects on the stone Temple, rooted to one spot, as at variance with His nature who said, "Heaven is my throne, and earth my footstool," and points to the earlier tabernacle, movable from place to place, following the steps of wandering humanity, as truer emblem of a faith that takes every winding of history, and a God who goes where we go, and stays where we stay.[59] This noble doctrine doubtless expressed a feeling common among the foreign Jews of liberal culture and fervid piety; and when consecrated by Stephen's martyrdom, it would assume a distinctness unknown before, and become the admitted type of belief among the Christian Hellenists. That it was confined to them is evident from the partial effect of the persecution in which Stephen fell. His friends,—perhaps we may say his party,—hunted from house to house, fled from Jerusalem; but the Jewish Apostles remained where they were,[60] apparently unmenaced and undisturbed. The hostility of the city drew therefore a distinction between such Hebrew Christians as the twelve, and the freer "Grecians" who proclaimed a Spirit above the Temple and the Law. The former, constituting an inner sect of Judaism, might hold their ground unmolested; the latter were treated as apostates, and "scattered abroad." The essential, but hitherto dormant, antithesis between the Gospel and the Law, had thus burst into expression, and embodied itself in two sections of the Church that grew ever more distinct; the Hebrew party concentrated in Jerusalem, and remaining intensely national; the Hellenistic, spreading itself on the outskirts of Palestine, and erelong fixing its head-quarters at Antioch. Within this freer circle, first as persecutor, soon as disciple, appears Saul of Tarsus. So congenial are its tendencies and aspirations with his nature and his antecedent position, that his hostile attitude towards it might well strike him, on looking back, as a monstrous self-contradiction. A foreigner to Palestine, a "citizen of no mean city," familiar with a trade that bought from the shepherds of Mount Taurus, and sold to the Greek skippers of the Levant, he knew the human side of the Gentile world too well to rest in a narrow Judaism. We cannot imagine his fervid, free-moving mind, content to live within the enclosure of Rabbinical niceties, or able to find, in the materialism of the Temple rites, his ideal of true worship. With sympathies essentially cosmopolitan, he could scarcely fail to be disappointed, not to say repelled, by Jerusalem,—so different from the dream of his young romance. Some higher, fresher communion between earth and heaven, some wider monarchy for God than over a mere clan, would be to him natural objects of aspiration. Hence his first persecuting attitude towards the Christian Hellenists was permanently untenable; and as he went amongst them, words were sure to fall upon his ear, and holy looks to meet his eye, that would smite him with a kindred affection. Whether the death of Stephen left on his mind images which he could not banish, and commenced a reaction which no plunge into fresh violences could arrest, it is vain to conjecture. That it should be so, would be only human; for in the life of passion, triumph and humiliation are near neighbors, and often the last note in the song of exultation dies down into the plaint of compunction. Certain it is, that shortly afterwards it "pleased God to reveal his Son in him"; that, with the suddenness characteristic of impassioned natures, he came to himself, and found his proper work, "to which he had been set apart from his mother's womb"; and that his new convictions were of the very same type and tendency with Stephen's, and strongly discriminated from the Messianic doctrine of the twelve at Jerusalem. The incipient breach between Law and Gospel, latent in the Master, denied by the twelve, bursting forth among the Hellenists, finally realized and defined itself in Paul; whose intense impulses were too great for the custody of his will; whose soul had wings to fly, but not feet to plod; who felt himself the theatre of living powers not his own, and could find no peace till, by communion with the heavenly Son of God, he discovered a providential love universal as human life, and a way of reconciliation quick and open as human trust and reverence. It is easier to speak of the effects than of the nature of his conversion. His writings exhibit its results, but only vaguely allude to its occurrence, and never in terms at all resembling the recitals in the Book of Acts, or abating their discrepancies. Of these narratives (Acts ix. 1-9, xxii. 6-12, xxvi. 12-18) Mr. Jowett remarks, "There is no use in attempting any forced reconcilement." (I. 229.) On the one hand, "There is no fact in history more certain or undisputed than that, in some way or other, by an inward vision or revelation of the Lord, or by an outward miraculous appearance as he was going to Damascus, the Apostle was suddenly converted from being a persecutor to become a preacher of the Gospel." (I. 227.) On the other, "If we submit the narrative of the Acts to the ordinary rules of evidence, we shall scarcely find ourselves able to determine whether any outward fact was intended by it or not." This, however, is of the less moment, because it is evident from the language of the Epistle to the Galatians (Gal. i. 15, 16) that,—

"Whether the conversion of St. Paul was an outward or an inward fact, it was not principally the outward appearance in the heavens, but the inward effect, that the Apostle would have regarded. Compare Eph. iii. 3: 'How that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery (as I wrote afore in few words).'

"It has been often remarked, that miracles are not appealed to singly in Scripture as evidences of religion, in the same way that they have been used by modern writers. Especially does this remark apply to the conversion of St. Paul. Not a hint is found in his writings, that he regarded 'the heavenly vision' as an objective evidence of Christianity. The evidence to him was the sudden change of heart; what he terms, in the case of his converts, the reception of the Spirit; what he had known, and what he felt; the fact that one instant he was a persecutor, and the second a preacher of the Gospel. The last inquiry that he would have thought of making, would be that of modern theologians: 'How, without some outward sign, he could be assured of the reality of what he had seen and heard.' No outward sign could, as such, have convinced the mind of a man who fell to the ground amazed, unless it were certain that his companions had seen the light and heard the voice. Nor unless they had distinctly been partakers of the supernatural vision could he ever have been satisfied that what they saw was anything but a meteor, or lightning, or that the voice they heard was more than the sound of thunder. No evidence of theirs would have been an answer to the language of some of the rationalist divines: 'St. Paul was overtaken by a storm of thunder and lightning in the neighborhood of Damascus.' Such difficulties are insuperable; at best we can only raise probabilities in answer to them, based on the general tone of the narrative in Acts ix. But we may remember that the belief in some outward fact was not the essential point in St. Paul's faith, and therefore we need not make it the essential point in our own.

"It is not upon the testimony of any single person, even were it far more distinct than in the present instance, we can venture to peril the truth of the Christian religion. Weak defences of comparatively unimportant points, undermine more than they support. He who has the Spirit of Christ and his Apostles, has the witness in himself; he who leads the life of Paul, has already set his seal that his words are true. Were the other view supported by the most irrefragable historical evidence,—had the sign in the clouds been beheld by whole multitudes of Jews and Gentiles, believers and unbelievers,—it is to the internal aspect of the event we should be more inclined to turn, both as the more religious one, and the one which more closely links the Apostle with ourselves."—Vol. I. p. 230.

With the essentially inward character of this crisis, the substance of the revelation involved in it strikingly corresponds.

"It was spiritual rather than historical; a revelation of Christ in him, not external information brought to him. It was the ever-growing sense of union with Christ, imparted, not in one revelation, but many; not only by special revelation, but as the inward experience of a long life, from which his union in Christ with all mankind, and his mission to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles, were from the beginning inseparable; as a part of which the image of the meekness and gentleness of Christ formed itself in him, not without the remembrance that he had 'seen' Him who was now passed into the heavens."—Jowett, Vol. I. p. 216.

Since the Apostle "nowhere speaks of any special truths or doctrines as imparted to himself" (I. 72); since he never dwells on the life of Christ, the miracles, the parables, so that it is even doubtful what he knew of them; and since his whole appeal is either, (1.) to the witness of the Hebrew Scriptures, or (2.) to historical testimony, or (3.) to the assurance of the living Spirit,—it is evident that his conversion chiefly gave him that inward image of Christ crucified and risen, which attended him through all his years, and so lived in him as to take the place of his personality, and coalesce with his spiritual affections, and do the work of his will.

Of the Apostle's mode of thought when fresh from his conversion no memorial exists; his earliest extant writing being of a date fourteen or fifteen years later, and the report in the Book of Acts not being altogether reliable—as Mr. Jowett has shown[61]—for historical accuracy. But we learn from his own remarkable statement to the Galatians, that he kept aloof from the churches in Judæa, and was unknown to them by face; that it was three years before he entered Jerusalem, or saw an Apostle; that he then made acquaintance with Peter, and met James, but without its affecting his independent course, which ran through eleven years more ere it brought him to Jerusalem again; that his errand, on this second visit, was to take security against being thwarted by Jewish jealousies sanctioned at head-quarters; that from James, Cephas, and John—the "seeming pillars" of the Church—he learnt nothing that he cared to hear; that they, on the other hand, could not gainsay the independent rights of so fruitful an apostleship, and agreed with him not to cross his path, if he would leave them theirs. The emphasis with which, in this animated passage, St. Paul dwells on the separate sources of his own faith, and disowns any obligation to the prior Apostles, renders it certain that the biography, the discourses, the human personality of Jesus, were indifferent to him; and that with only the cross and the resurrection (contained as data in the vision of conversion) he could construct his scheme. The unmistakable sarcasm of the expressions, οι δοκουντες,—δοκουντες ειναι τι—οι δοκουντες στυλοι ειναι,—betrays a state of mind, in regard to the twelve, out of all sympathy with the grounds of their authority. And the necessity, in order to agreement, of marking out for each, not a separate geographical beat, but a distinct religious and ethnologic ground, shows that, with external mutual toleration, there is yet wanting the inner unity of an identic faith. Only in the absence of a common Gospel would each party have to take its own, and spare the other. Indeed, the difference was so fundamental as to involve everything that St. Paul then, and Christians now, would deem characteristic of their religion.

The question was this,—"How might a born Gentile become a Christian?"—"By becoming a Jew first, and then accepting Jesus as appointed to be the Jews' Messiah," was the answer at Jerusalem. "By believing in Jesus straightway," was the reply of Paul. With irresistible force he contended that, according to his opponents' view, the Gospel opened no door at all, and was simply nugatory. For it had always been possible for a Gentile to become a Jew; and if, without this step, faith in Christ was unavailing, the real efficacy must lie in what the Jew brought to Christ, not in what he received from him; so that it was hard to say what good there could be in passing on from Moses at all, or what essential difference between the unconverted and the converted Hebrew. And, in truth, they were not strongly contrasted in Jerusalem; and in habit, thought, and feeling, the twelve were probably much nearer to Gamaliel than to Paul. The altercation between Peter and Paul at Antioch is full of instruction on this point; proving, as it does, that the intensest form of ritual exclusiveness—the refusal to partake at table with the uncircumcised—was retained in the parent church, and enforced with jealous vigilance. In the Syrian capital the Gentile disciples were numerous, the Pauline comprehensiveness prevailed, and the intercourses of life were unhindered by ceremonial scruples. Peter, thrown amongst them on a visit, yields to the local impression, and, as long as he can do so unobserved, falls in with their free ways; feeling all the while, no doubt, like the Quaker from home tempted into a ball-dress or regimentals. Soon, however, the strict brethren at Jerusalem send to look after him or the Antiochians, and instantly his liberality is gone; he is the prim Jew again, and the Gentile dishes are all unclean. And who then are these new witnesses, that he should fear their report? They are deputies from James, "the brother of the Lord," who, on account of this affinity,[62] was the recognized head of the Judæan Christians; and of whose ascetic abstinences, and constant devotions on the temple pavement, till "his knees were become like the knees of a camel," Hegesippus preserved the tradition.[63] It was clear, therefore, that Peter's association with the Gentile Christians was exceptional,—a violation of his professed rule, and of the allowed usage of the Apostolic Church. To own brotherhood with the uncircumcised believer, was a forfeiture of character, probably an outrage on his own conscience, to the Christian Apostle! This was the result, among his first disciples, of nearly twenty years' belief of Christ in heaven. There could be no real sympathy between such an evangile and Paul's. It let him make converts, but would not acknowledge them when made. It could not resist the fact of his success, but treated his "children in the faith" as in a doubtful case, left to Heaven's "uncovenanted mercies," and needing to be put in a securer state, as soon as his back was turned, and teachers could be sent to complete the task. Hence the opposition that tracked the steps, and so much marred the work of the Apostle, wherever he went; and in repelling which he wrote his chief Epistles, and matured the form of his great theology. Mr. Jowett, whilst allowing that this opposition was systematic and persistent, and in some degree connived at by the twelve, is yet anxious to lay it mainly to the charge of their followers, and defines the relation of the two sections thus: "Separation, not opposition; antagonism of the followers rather than of the leaders; personal antipathy of the Judaizers to St. Paul, rather than of St. Paul to the twelve." (I. 326.) These are fine distinctions, and for this very reason likely, we fear, in the rough movement of human passions, to be more ideal than real. True, the feeling of a leader is ever apt to run into exaggeration among the followers; nor probably was Apostolic control over the mass of believers so complete as to exclude this danger. But the Epistle to the Galatians is written by one leader, and speaks of the others; and the impression it conveys is surely one of very decided antagonism, and that, too, not accidental, but depending on permanent differences of principle, which discussion did not smooth away, and which penetrated into the very organism of daily life. In the altercation with Peter, what was the point of Paul's rebuke? Did he simply censure his moral weakness and inconsistency? Not so, or he would have exhorted him to take whichever course he approved, and stick to it. Did he find fault with his exceptional act, of eating with the Gentile Christians? Not so, for he did the same himself. The thing he blamed was nothing less than the rule and usage by which Peter habitually lived, and which, it is declared, virtually made Christ of none effect. Here was a collision of irreconcilable principles, and every subsequent occasion of personal contact, under like conditions, would be as liable to produce it as the first. Nor have we, in fact, any reason to suppose a closer approximation at a later part of the Apostolic age. That Paul looked with any particular respect on the other Apostles, is surely not proved, as Mr. Jowett imagines, by his appeal (1 Cor. xv. 5) to their testimony respecting the fact of their Lord's resurrection, or by his claiming (1 Cor. ix. 5) to stand on a like footing of privilege with them.[64] To produce the spectators of an event as its proper witnesses, is no expression of feeling towards them at all; and to say, "Are the other Apostles to have the right of taking their wives with them at the cost of the Church, and may not I take or decline my mere personal maintenance as I think proper?" institutes a comparison in which it is difficult to discover any strong sentiment of "respect." Nor do the doctrinal agreements, of which, as well as of the personal relations of fellowship, our author makes the most, amount to any substantial concurrence, when we penetrate to the essence from the form. On both sides, says Mr. Jowett, the disciples were baptized into the same name. (I. 340.) Yes; but how different the object named as present to their thought; in the one case, the human life in its detail, with the resurrection as its crown; in the other, the cross of Christ that stands between them, and his life in heaven that passes beyond them! Both sections, it is again said, find their ground in the Old Testament. (I. 341.) True: but the one on Moses, the tables, and the holy place; the other, on Adam's nature, and the patriarchs' freedom, and the prophets' insight; the one, moreover, using the ground to intrench the Law for ever; the other, to drive the ploughshare over its ruins, and make it a fruitful field. Once more, it is said that on both sides there was a looking for "the day of the Lord," an expectation of Christ's return to end the world within that generation. (I. 341.) Assuredly, but with such differences in the vision, that, in the apocalyptic picture of the one, Paul is not among the Apostles, or his followers among the white-robed and crowned (Rev. xxi. 14, and ii. 2, 14, 20); while in that of the other, the advent will but perfect and perpetuate a union with Christ, already present to their consciousness, and open to all who live with him in the Spirit. In short, twenty years after the death of Christ, the two elements that were harmonized in him, but are ever apt to part in our imperfect minds, the ethical and the mystical, the historical and spiritual, ascetic concentration and outspreading trust, fell into determinate antithesis, realizing their conflict in the immediate question of Jew and Gentile, and finding their respective representatives in the twelve and St. Paul.

Whether, besides and beyond this general development of the Christian system, there was also a special development of doctrine into higher degrees of spirituality within the mind of St. Paul himself, is a question of less interest and more difficulty. Both Mr. Stanley and Mr. Jowett find traces of such a change in the modified sentiment of his later writings, and even make the Apostle himself depose to his own enlargement of view. We must confess that this speculation, though excluded by no antecedent improbability, appears to us less well supported than anything in these volumes. It is ingeniously presented and argued by Mr. Jowett in his introduction to the Thessalonian Epistles; and by means of it he explains the marked absence from these letters of St. Paul's usual topics and manner, and gets rid of the objection urged on this ground to their authenticity. Applied at the other end of the Apostle's career, the hypothesis accounts for the prominence, in the Epistles to the Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians, of certain conceptions, doubtfully traceable elsewhere, of the place of Christ in the hierarchy of the universe, and of his union with his disciples as his "body." The pastorals may be left out of consideration, as their mixed phenomena cannot be much used in the service of this theory. The broad facts are undoubted,—that the four great central Epistles (Galatians, Corinthians, Romans) must be taken as our foci of authority for the characteristics of St. Paul; that, in the earlier Thessalonians, these characteristics are overshadowed by the more Judaic doctrine of the "day of the Lord," and in the later Ephesians, &c., by the more Gnostic conception of a spiritual hierarchy and pleroma. But these facts are quite overworked when set to prove our author's thesis. In order to establish a process of personal development, they ought to exhibit certain natural links of psychological and moral succession, and not mere abrupt and unrelated contrasts of subject. To look for such organic indications in the sparse productions of the Apostle's pen, is to ask too much from a few incidental letters, bearing to his whole life the proportion of a dozen pages of random excerpts to a cyclopædia. If only the matters treated be different, the whole group of writings may very well express, in its several parts and aspects, one simultaneous state of mind. If the types of thought be such as could scarcely co-exist, the cause may be sought as reasonably in a plurality of authors as in a succession of beliefs in the same author; and only a most delicate combination of symptoms can rescue the problem from this indeterminate state of double solution. Nor ought we to forget, in weighing the probabilities, that the whole set of Epistles comprising the phenomena of difference were written within nine years; and that, ere the first of them was produced, St. Paul had been a convert fifteen years, and had reached the age of fifty. The earlier and longer of these periods is a more natural seat of mental change than the later and shorter; especially of a change not apparent so much in particular judgments and opinions, as in the whole complexion of spiritual feeling and idea.

But, we are assured, the Apostle directly testifies to his own progress in doctrine; and intimates (2 Cor. v. 16) that there was a time when he had "known Christ according to the flesh,"—had preached him "in a more Jewish and less spiritual manner,"—though "henceforth he would know him so no more." Mr. Stanley, explaining this much-disputed phrase, says:—

"Probably, he must be here alluding to those who laid stress on their having seen Christ in Palestine, or on their connection with him or with 'the brothers of the Lord' by actual descent; and if so, they were probably of the party 'of Christ.' But the words lead us to infer that something of this kind had once been his own state of mind, not only in the time before his conversion (which he would have condemned more strongly), but since. If so, it is (like Phil. iii. 13-15) a remarkable confession of former weakness and error, and of conscious progress in religious knowledge."—Vol. II. p. 106.

Did St. Paul then ever "lay stress on having seen Christ in Palestine"? or on actual blood-connection with him? or on "something of this kind"? To personal relations with Jesus in his ministry or family he had no pretensions; and the spirit with which he had always treated everything "of this kind," is so apparent from his narrative to the Galatians as to contradict Mr. Stanley's inference. Mr. Jowett gives the phrase a different turn. Finding (Gal. v. 11) the Apostle charged with at one time "preaching circumcision," he accepts this as synonymous with "knowing Christ according to the flesh" (i. 12). This, however, would imply that he was originally no "Apostle to the Gentiles," but insisted on mediate conversion into the Gospel through the law. Feeling the irreconcilable variance of such an hypothesis with the autobiographical notices in the Epistles, Mr. Jowett lowers his phraseology, and attributes to St. Paul's early teaching only such sentiments as "might be thought" to make him "a preacher of the circumcision." And so we lose ourselves again in "something of the kind." Yet at last, in the following passage, we find the critic's finger distinctly laid on the doctrine which he proposes to identify with the Apostle's "knowing Christ according to the flesh."

"That such a change" (in the Apostle's teaching) "is capable of being traced, has been already intimated. Both Epistles to the Thessalonians, with the exception of a few practical precepts, are the expansion and repetition of a single thought,—'the coming of Christ.' It was the absorbing thought of the Apostle and his converts, quickened in both by the persecutions which they had suffered. Not that with this expectation of Christ's kingdom there mingled any vision of a temporal rule over the kingdoms of the earth. That was far from the Apostle. But there was that in it which fell short of the more perfect truth. It was not, 'The kingdom of God is within you'; but, 'Lo here, and lo there.' It was defined by time, and was to take place within the Apostle's own life. The images in which it clothed itself were traditional among the Jews; they were outward and visible, liable to the misconstruction of the enemies of the faith, and to the misapprehension of the first converts,—imperfectly, as the Apostle saw afterwards, conveying the inward and spiritual meaning. The kingdom which they described was not eternal and heavenly, but very near and present, ready to burst forth everywhere, and by its very nearness in point of time seeming to touch our actual human state. Afterwards the kingdom of God appeared to remove itself within, to withdraw into the unseen world. The earthen vessel must be broken first, the unbeliever unclothed that he might be clothed upon, that mortality may be swallowed up of life. He was no longer 'waiting for the Son from heaven'; but 'desirous to depart and be with Christ' (Phil. i. 23). Such is the change, not so much in the Apostle's belief as in his mode of conception; a change natural to the human mind itself, and above all to the Jewish mind; a change which, after it had taken place, left the vestiges of the prior state in the Montanism of the second century, which may not improperly be regarded as the spirit of the first century overliving itself. Old things had passed away, and, behold, all things became new. And yet the former things—the material vision of Christ's kingdom—have ever been prone to return; not only in the first and second century, but in every age of enthusiasm, men have been apt to walk by sight and not by faith. In the hour of trouble and perplexity, when darkness spreads itself over the earth, and Antichrist is already come, they have lifted up their eyes to the heavens, looking for the sign of the Son of man."—Vol. I. p. 10.

If to announce the coming of Christ is to "know him according to the flesh," St. Paul assuredly did not keep his resolve "henceforth to know him no more." For the expectation reappears, without any perceptible change, in his later Epistles; as in Rom. xiii. 11, 12: "Do this the rather, knowing the time,—that now is the time to awake out of sleep: for our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed: the night is far spent; the day is at hand";—and in Phil. iv. 5: "The Lord is at hand."[65] Moreover, it is utterly impossible that this element of his teaching could be adduced in proof of his "preaching circumcision." It had nothing to do with the question of Jew and Gentile; with the most opposite solutions of which it is equally compatible.

In truth, our author has here combined two passages, which throw no light on one another, and has extracted from each what neither is able to yield. The words (in Gal. v. 11) "if I still preach circumcision," do not really imply that the Apostle once did so preach; though in an accurate writer this sense might be insisted on. He is not thinking of his own former notions, but of other people's, continuing unaltered after they ought to have changed. There were persons who, in spite of the dispensation of the Spirit, still preached circumcision after its significance was gone. This did not Paul; but he was charged with doing so: and he says, "Well, if so, I am a Judaizer like you, and I cannot be also chargeable with teaching that the cross of Christ supersedes the Law." The true sense is, therefore, given by the rendering, "If I preach circumcision still,"—that is, as still necessary; and no tale is told of the Apostle's earlier teaching.

The other passage (2 Cor. v. 16) does undoubtedly refer to a former state of the writer's own mind, when he "recognized Christ according to the flesh." But he alludes, we apprehend, to the period when he was a "Hebrew of the Hebrews"; and had no conception as yet of a suffering, dying, and heavenly Christ;—when he was full of the thoughts still occupying the twelve, who did not take in the significance of the cross, but carried past it their old Messianic notions. "There may have been a time," he means to say, "when I thought only of a national, Israelitish, historical Messiah, bound by the law of his fathers, and binding to it. Had this been the true conception of him, then would it have been a matter of privilege and pride to be near his person, to stand in natural relations with him, and be mixed up with the incidents of his local career. But ever since I understood the cross, and saw that Messiah's life began in death, a far other truth has dawned upon me. When he gave up the ghost, all the accidents of his humanity—his lineage, his nationality, his earthly manifestation—were left behind and died away; and they must carry with them into extinction whatever feelings had collected round them,—family pride, Jewish exclusiveness, and the memories of personal companionship. From that moment, clear of earthly entanglements, Christ in the spirit draws to him a community of human spirits,—one with him in self-abnegation, dying to the earthly past; one with him in re-birth, living to heavenly union with God. Thus, if any one be in Christ, it amounts to a new creation; his old self has passed away; behold, all things have become new." The Apostle, therefore, sets up the death of Christ, as cutting off, for all disciples, the prior time from the subsequent; as flinging the former, with all the human conceptions that cling to it, into eclipse and annihilation, and beginning a new and luminous existence in the latter; as breaking the very identity of the believer, and delivering him from the thraldom of nature into the freedom of the Spirit. The cross had already done its work ere St. Paul became a disciple. He had never known his Lord but in the spirit; and the "Christ," whom he had "known according to the flesh," was the Jewish Messiah of his previous and unconverted conception. Mr. Stanley's objection, that the Apostle could hardly have spoken of his unconverted state without stronger condemnation, might perhaps hold, were the allusions to his fit of persecuting violence against the Church. But there was no occasion for self-reproach in describing the picture of a national Messiah, on which, in common with his countrymen, he had permitted his imagination to dwell.[66]

Neither, then, from his own direct assertion, nor from comparison of his several writings, inter se, do we learn anything of the alleged development of the Apostle's doctrine. There is no element in it, that, from inability to co-exist with the rest, requires to be assigned to a date of its own. The breach with Judaism, especially, we conceive to have been complete from the first, and unsusceptible of degrees; nay, to have been the initial principle of his conversion, the secretly prepared condition or tendency of mind that rendered him accessible to the Divine call, and open to sudden change in the direction of his character. When first released from the formulas of a Jewish Christology, and communing in spirit with a heavenly and universal Lord, his mind would doubtless be met by a multitude of new problems, and would work freely towards their resolution, with the quickening consciousness of new light streaming in, and a grander landscape of Providence opening before him. The very intensity of this inward action, however,—the thirst it sustains for its own completion,—forbids us to attribute to it a life-long duration; ere fifteen years were passed, its force would be spent by having realized its work, and attained the equilibrium of a holy peace. Whatever subsequent changes occurred would be of a different nature, enforced by the turn of the world's affairs; a mere remoulding or reproportioning of inward faiths, in adaptation to the altered pressures of the hour. Of such modifications, such retreat towards the background of once favorite ideas, and advance of dim suggestions into strong light, there are doubtless examples in St. Paul. The expectation of Christ's speedy coming to close the world's affairs, and realize "the kingdom," could not but dominate at first, and pale every other interest and belief by the terror and glory of its light. But there is a limit beyond which the strain of longing cannot be sustained; as it subsides, the present and actual recovers power, and pushes its problems forward, and gains once more the eye that had looked beyond them. And so, after a while, spring up questions of Christian order that will not bear to be put off;—how to live in a world that, however near its doom, entangles the disciple still in a web of difficult relations; how to touch the skirt of its idolatries, and not be tainted; how to behave to wife and child in this last generation of human affairs; how to seal up the passions that ought to die within the saints, but were not dead; how to prevent the gifts of the Spirit from overbalancing themselves, on the heights of a dizzied mind, into outrages on nature; how to preserve to the woman and the slave, in their exulting reaction from degraded life, the sense of modest reverence, and the appreciation of faithful service. Day by day questions of this kind insisted on attention, and brought out a fresh type of sentiments proper for their determination, and offering to view a new side of the Christian thought and life. Nor, again, could many years elapse, before the Jew and Gentile difficulty changed its whole aspect, and expanded, from a petty scruple compromised at Jerusalem, into a world-wide theology, regulative of all future history. When it became evident that it was no question about a small sprinkling of ethnic converts,—mere hangers-on of Hebrew families and synagogues; when the delay of Messiah, and the energy of Paul, gave occasion for thousands to pour in; when it seemed imminent that Palestine should be outvoted and overpowered by the growth of the foreign Gospel, the alarm of the Judaic Christians became great. They tracked Paul's steps; their emissaries were everywhere; their arguments and doctrine became more constricted, and his more wide and free; and as the clouds visibly lowered over Israel, touching him as well as them with gloom, all the more did he see the sunshine flood the lands beyond; and his national trust assumed this form,—that, maybe, the outlying heavenly light may creep back as the dark hour passes, and again set the shadows moving on the hills it has so long glorified. The Apostle died before the question settled itself by the mere force of the facts,—by the utter breaking up of the Jewish nation, and the inpouring Gentile numbers. Others waited to be driven into catholicity by events; it is his glory to have surrendered himself to the inspiration that implanted in him its principle from the first. He lived, however, to see a mighty growth, though not the final fruit; and the grand scale on which he conducts the controversy, in his Epistle to the Romans, by converging reasonings fetched from afar out of history, and aloft out of the perfections of God, and deep out of human nature, shows how his thought expands with the exigencies of experience, and advances to fill the whole greatness of his opportunities.

There can be no doubt that the earliest Apostolic Christianity consisted mainly in the faith of Christ's coming again, "to-day, or to-morrow, or the third day." This event, with its effect on the living, was the one only point, Mr. Stanley conceives, on which St. Paul, in his great chapter on the Resurrection, professed to have a distinct revelation:—

"On one point only he professes to have a distinct revelation, and that not with regard to the dead, but to the living. So firmly was the first generation of Christians possessed of the belief that they should live to see the second coming, that it is here assumed as a matter of course; and their fate, as near and immediate, is used to illustrate the darker and more mysterious subject of the fate of those already dead. That vision of 'the last man,' which now seems so remote as to live only in poetic fiction, was to the Apostle an awful reality; but it is brought forward only to express the certainty that, even here, a change must take place, the greatest that imagination can conceive."—Vol. I. p. 398.

That this belief, where held at all, should be paramount and absorbing, follows from its very nature. Accordingly, St. Paul, as Mr. Jowett remarks, makes even the essence of the Gospel to consist in it:—

"It appears remarkable, that St. Paul should make the essence of the Gospel consist, not in the belief in Christ, or in taking up the cross of Christ, but in the hope of his coming again. Such, however, was the faith of the Thessalonian Church; such is the tone and spirit of the Epistle. Neither in the Apostolic times, nor in our own, can we reduce all to the same type. One aspect of the Gospel is more outward, another more inward; one seems to connect with the life of Christ, another with his death; one with his birth into the world, another with his coming again. If we will not insist on determining the times and the seasons, or on knowing the manner how, all these different ways may lead us within the veil. The faith of modern times embraces many parts and truths; yet we allow men, according to their individual character, to dwell on this truth or that, as more peculiarly appropriate to their nature. The faith of the early Church was simpler and more progressive, pausing in the same way on a particular truth, which the circumstances of the world or the Church brought before them."—Vol. I. p. 46.

Only it is not on "a particular truth," but on a particular error, that the "pause" of faith was here made;—an error found or implied, as our author observes, "in almost every book of the New Testament; in the discourses of our Lord himself, as well as in the Acts of the Apostles; in the Epistles of St. Paul, no less than in the Book of the Revelation." Mr. Jowett does not evade the difficulty. In an admirable essay on this special subject, he frankly states the facts, traces their influence on the early Church, accepts them as among the limits which human conditions impose on Divine revelation, and shows from them, how, even in God's highest teachings, he leaves much truth to be drawn forth from time and experience.

"It is a subject," he says, "from which the interpreter of Scripture would gladly turn aside. For it seems as if he were compelled to say at the outset, 'that St. Paul was mistaken, and that in support of his mistake he could appeal to the words of Christ himself.' Nothing can be plainer than the meaning of those words, and yet they seem to be contradicted by the very fact, that, after eighteen centuries, the world is as it was. In the words which are attributed, in the Epistle of St. Peter, to the unbelievers of that day, we might truly say that, since the fathers have fallen asleep, all things remain the same from the beginning. Not only do 'all things remain the same,' but the very belief itself (in the sense in which it was held by the first Christians) has been ready to vanish away."—Vol. I. p. 96.

It is the infirmity of human nature—an infirmity irremovable by inspiration—to translate eternal truth into forms of time, to throw color into the invisible till it can be seen, and look into any given infinity till finite shapes appear within it, and it is felt as infinite no more. The soul tries, as it were, every apparent path, from spiritual apprehension to scientific knowledge, from deep insight to clear foresight, from perception of what God is to vaticination of what he does; and abides alone with the Holy Presence, that will not tell His counsels, but is ever there himself. From the world of Divine reality into that of transient phenomena, there is no bridge found as yet; and only He, whose footsteps need no ground, can pass across. We know somewhat on both sides; but the chasm between vindicates its perpetuity against all invasion. Vision for faith; prevision for science:—this seems to be the inviolable allotment of gifts by the Father of lights. And whoever overlooks this rule, and, inspired with discernment of what absolutely is, ventures to pronounce what relatively will be, embodies his truth in a form whence it must again be disengaged. The deepest spiritual insight is ineffectual to teach past history; it is equally so to teach future history. The moment you lose sight of this fact, and expect the sons of God to predict for you, you confound inspiration with divination, and will pay the double penalty of missing the truth they have, and being disappointed at that which they have not. It is not always much otherwise with themselves; the light which they are, they do not see; and that which shapes itself before them, and becomes the object of their minds, is but the shadow of human things, deepened and sharpened, perhaps also misplaced, by the preternatural intensity. By its very inwardness and closeness to the soul's centre, God's Spirit may express itself chiefly in the unconscious attitudes and manifestations of the mind; especially as it is these that often leave the most ineffaceable impressions of character upon others, and may, therefore, be the vehicle of a more life-giving power than any purposed teaching or more conscious authority. The disappointment of an avowed prediction, or the error of an elaborated doctrine, no more affects the Divine inspiration at the heart of Christianity, than the miscalculations and failure of the Crusades disprove their Providential function in the historical education of mankind. Mr. Jowett takes up the question from another side, and shows how the faith in a future life, though not directly given, necessarily disengaged itself in the end from the expectation of the coming of Christ.

"We naturally ask, why a future life, as distinct from this, was not made a part of the first preaching of the Gospel?—why, in other words, the faith of the first Christians did not exactly coincide with our own? There are many ways in which the answer to this question may be expressed. The philosopher will say, that the difference in the mode of thought of that age and our own rendered it impossible, humanly speaking, that the veil of sense should be altogether removed. The theologian will admit that Providence does not teach men that which they can teach themselves. While there are lessons which it immediately communicates, there is much which it leaves to be drawn forth by time and events. Experience may often enlarge faith; it may also correct it. No one can doubt that the faith and practice of the early Church, respecting the admission of the Gentiles, were greatly altered by the fact that the Gentiles themselves flocked in; 'the kingdom of heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by force.' In like manner, the faith respecting the coming of Christ was modified by the continuance of the world itself. Common sense suggests that those who were in the first ecstasy of conversion, and those who after the lapse of years saw the world unchanged and the fabric of the Church on earth rising around them, could not regard the day of the Lord with the same feeling. While to the one it seemed near and present, at any moment ready to burst forth, to the other it was a long way off, separated by time, and as it were by place, a world beyond the stars, yet, strangely enough, also having its dwelling in the heart of man, as it were the atmosphere in which he lived, the mental world by which he was surrounded. Not at once, but gradually, did the cloud clear up, and the one mode of faith take the place of the other. Apart from the prophets, though then beyond them, springing up in a new and living way in the soul of man, corrected by long experience, as the 'fathers one by one fell asleep,' as the hopes of the Jewish race declined, as ecstatic gifts ceased, as a regular hierarchy was established in the Church, the belief in the coming of Christ was transformed from being outward to becoming inward, from being national to becoming individual and universal,—from being Jewish to becoming Christian."—Vol. I. p. 99.

With the Apostle Paul, however, the "coming of Christ" occupies the place of our "future life"; the living mass of disciples, waiting till then for the "redemption of their bodies," fill the foreground and largest space in the scene; the rising of the dead is the subsidiary fact, needful to the completeness of the gift of life in Christ. On this crisis, supposed to be so near, his eye was exclusively fixed whenever he spoke of the Christian's "salvation"; and could he have been told that no such crisis would come, that, for fifty generations, the present order of the world would vindicate its stability, we cannot imagine what shape his faith would have assumed; whether he would have made light of all these centuries, said that with the Eternal "a thousand years are but as one day," and still opposed to one another the αιων ουτος and the αιων μελλων; or whether he would have found that the distinction was evanescent, and the kingdom of God was to be not sent hither, but to be created here; or how, in either case, he would have represented to himself the state of the innumerable dead. These are questions which did not arise for him; and it were vain to conjecture his solution. He is engaged with other problems;—all, indeed, having reference to that never doubted crisis, and arising out of its manifold relations, yet so treated by him as to detach them unawares from their origin, and give them a permanent place in the religious consciousness of men. Who were to be the subjects of that salvation? How were they qualified? By what act of God's, and what temper of their own, to reach the blessing? What present assurance had they of this approaching good? It is in dealing with these questions that St. Paul darts from his objective theology into the deepest recesses of human experience, and fetches into expression spiritual truths that transcend their incidental occasion, and will remain valid while there is a soul in man.

In the Apostle's habit of thought there is a certain antique realism which renders many of his doctrines and reasonings almost unpresentable before a modern imagination. With our sharp notions of personality, of the entire insulation of each mind as an individual entity, of the antithesis of inner self to the outer everything, we are quite out of St. Paul's latitude, and shall be perpetually taking for figures and personification what had a literal earnestness for him. The universe is with him full of Agents that for us are only Attributes,—the theatre of certain real principles (i. e. principles having existence independent of us), that carry out their tendencies and history among themselves, and upon and through individual men, as organs or media of their activity. Thus, Sin is neither the mere voluntary unfaithfulness of the transgressor, nor the person of the tempter; but both of these; and that not apart from one another or alternately, but blended together under the conception of a universal element of evil, having its objective focus in Satan and its subjective manifestation in man. In like manner its opposite, Righteousness (Justification), is not exclusively human rectitude, or the Divine justice, or quasi-goodness substituted for genuine; but less ethical than the first, less forensic than the last, and more ontological than either; that element, we may say, in the essence of God which sets man at one with Him, and is the common ground of their harmonious relation. Around these two contrasted principles, others, equally conceived as real elements, and misunderstood as mere attributes or phenomena, group themselves on either side. With the former is Death,—the pair being gemini, not simply joined by decree of God in time, but inseparable in rerum natura, co-ordinates by physical necessity; and Flesh, the material or medium that furnishes the endowments of sense, and instinct, and the natural will, and affords to Sin its seat and hold upon us; and Law, the discriminating light that parts the mixture of good and evil, and, on entering into us, brings the slumbering evil into the conscious state, and so makes it sin relatively to us, and simultaneously shows us the good without adding to the force for producing it. With the latter—Righteousness—are enjoined Life, the positive opposite of Death, and, like it, a function of the moral as well as the natural constitution, the immortal energy inherent in sinless being; and Spirit, the absolute essence of God, present as the vivifying source of whatever transcends nature,—a faint susceptibility, felt only to be overmastered, in the sons of Adam,—a conquering power, coalescing with the personality itself, in Christ and his disciples,—and a spontaneous flow of higher life seizing on converted men as organs of its charismata; and Faith,—the opposite of Law,—the passing out of ourselves to embrace unseen relations, to make conscious appropriation of the Spirit, and thus enter into union with Christ and God. Even this most subjective of all the great principles of the Apostle's theology, is more than a mere private and personal act. As common to all the disciples,—the simultaneous gaze that connects them as a whole with Christ,—its single threads pass out and become a converging web. As something other than the act (of obedience) which men were under bond to render, it is a new institute of God, and, relatively to them, reads itself off as Grace. As opposed to Law, in which there is a delivery of the Divine will into men, it involves a drawing by Divine love of an affection out of men. And under all these aspects it acquires something of that indeterminate character, subjective and objective at once, which the associated elements possess in a much higher degree. The same mode of thought is traceable in another form. The Apostle exhibits the providential scheme of the human race by distributing them into two successive gentes,—the earthy or natural, the heavenly or spiritual; and lays down all the predicates of each direct from the personal history of their respective heads, Adam and Christ. Whatever is true of the founder is considered as known of the followers; the phenomena of his being spread themselves inclusively to theirs. He is regarded, not simply as a representative individual, while they are the represented individuals; but as a type of being within which they are contained, and which in its history and vicissitudes carries them hither and thither. Condemnation and redemption take place by Kinds, and fall on particular persons in virtue of their partaking of these kinds. Settle the attributes of the species, as found in its archetype, and you know what to say of individuals. It is not difficult to understand this way of thinking so long as the Apostle applies it, as a naturalist might, to the Adamic gens; and argues, that, being made of earthy materials (χοικοι), and having the focus of personality in σαρξ, with no adequate counterpoise of πνευμα, it is the seat of sin and death. But it is less easy to follow the Apostle's meaning when he similarly identifies Christians with Christ, and transfers, or rather extends, to them all the great characteristics of his existence. They are crucified to the world. They are "all dead" with him; they are "buried with him" in baptism; they are "risen with him"; their "life is hid with him in God." And while this is true of living disciples, he is no less "the first-fruits of them that sleep"; his resurrection is but the first pulsation of an act that next proceeds to theirs, and then completes the transformation of the living. All this is meant for more than rhetorical analogy. With Christ, and in Christ, took place a re-constitution of humanity. Of the new man, he was the ideal and archetype; inverting the proportions of σαρξ and πνευμα, and having his essence and personality in the latter, so as to render sin an unrealized possibility and death a transitory accident. The spirit in him which evinced its life-giving power in raising him from the dead, is no more limited to his individuality, than flesh and blood were the attributes of Adam only. It spreads to the whole family of souls, springing up into his kindred; it flows into them as they look up to him in faith, and are reborn to him; it repeats in them the fruits it produced in him,—the sacrifice of self,—the dying away of passion and pride,—the heavenly love that darts upon the wing whither the bleeding feet of conscience fail to climb,—together with many "a gift less excellent," of healing and of tongues. The consciousness of this new heart, set free with Divine affections, is immediate evidence of their union with Christ, of the Real Presence of his Spirit within them, of their substantive incorporation into his essence, and therefore of a restored harmony and even oneness with God. To what extent the Apostle conceived that this transformation of nature, by partnership in the properties of the heavenly Christ, might be carried in the living disciple, it is not possible to say. It amounted to "a new creation"; and among the "old things" that had already "passed away," he probably included more than the moral habits and feelings of the unconverted state; and conceived that the same spirit by which these died out was purifying also the bodily organism of the believer, and leavening it with antiseptic preparation for its final investiture with immortality. That last "change," like the resurrection itself, is not regarded as an external miracle, suddenly forced on an uncongenial material by mere Almightiness; but as the last and crowning stage of an internal development, whose principle had long been active,—the emergence from all entanglement with "flesh and blood" of that spiritual element which in Jesus "could not be holden of death," and which, dwelling in his disciples, already deadened and damped the vitality of the σαρξ, and would at last quicken the σωμα with imperishable life. Thus it is that "Christ" is not to St. Paul an historical individual, but a generic nature,—the archetype of a spiritual species, sharing his attributes and repeating his experience.