The life of St. Paul

PRINCIPAL

W. R. TAYLOR

COLLECTION

THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL

for Bible Classes au&

private Students

EDITED BY

PRINCIPAL MARCUS DODS, D.D.

AND

REV. ALEXANDER WHYTE, D.D.

THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL

PROFESSOR JAMES STALKER, D.I).

THE

LIFE OF ST. PAUL

BY

PROF. JAMES STALKER, D.D., ABERDEEN

AUTHOR OF "THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST''

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CONTENTS.

PAGB

CHAP. I. —HIS PLACE IN HISTORY, ..... IO )

CHAP. II.— HIS UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR HIS WORK, l8

CHAP, III.— HIS CONVERSION, 34

CHAP. IV.— HIS GOSPEL, 44 J

CHAP. V. — THE WORK AWAITING THE WORKER, ... 56

CHAP. VI. — HIS MISSIONARY TRAVELS, ..... 64

CHAP. VII.— HIS WRITINGS AND HIS CHARACTER, ... 86

CHAP. VIII. — PICTURE OF A PAULINE CHURCH, ... 98

CHAP. IX.— HIS GREAT CONTROVERSY, . , , 108 • -

CHAP. X. — THE END, I2O

HINTS TO TEACHERS AND QUESTIONS FOR PUPILS, . . 137

CHAPTER I.

HIS PI ACE IN HISTORY.

Paragraphs 1-12.

I, 2. The Man needed by the Time.
3, 4. A Type of Christian Character.
5-8. The Thinker of Christianity.
9-12. The Missionary of the Gentilei.

CHAPTER I.

HIS PLACE IN HISTORY.

1. THERE are some men whose lives it is impossible to study
without receiving the impression that they were expressly sent
into the world to do a work required by the juncture of history
on which they fell. The story of the Reformation, for example,
cannot be read by a devout mind without wonder at the provi-
dence by which such great men as Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and
Knox were simultaneously raised up in different parts of Europe
to break the yoke of the papacy and republish the gospel of
grace. When the Evangelical Revival, after blessing England,
was about to break into Scotland and end the dreary reign of
Moderatism, there was raised up in Thomas Chalmers a mind of
such capacity as completely to absorb the new movement into
itself, and of such sympathy and influence as to diffuse it to every
corner of his native land.

2. This impression is produced by no life more than by that of
the Apostle Paul. He was given to Christianity when it was in

\j its most rudimentary beginnings. It was not indeed feeble, nor
can any mortal man be spoken of as indispensable to it ; for it
contained within itself the vigour of a divine and immortal exist-
ence, which could not but have unfolded itself in the course of
time. But, if we recognise that God makes use of means which
commend themselves even to our eyes as suited to the ends He
has in view, then we must say that the Christian movement at
the moment when Paul appeared upon the stage, was in the utmost

12 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

need of a man of extraordinary endowments, who, becoming
possessed with its genius, should incorporate it with the general
history of the world ; and in Paul it found the' man it needed.

/ 3. Christianity obtained in Paul an incomparable Type of
Christian Character. It already indeed possessed the perfect
model of human character in the person of its Founder. But He
was not as other men, because from the beginning He had nol
sinful imperfection to struggle with ; and Christianity still required!
to show what it could make of imperfect human nature. Paul i/
supplied the opportunity of exhibiting this. He was naturally of

I immense mental stature and force. He would have been a
remarkable man even if he had never become a Christian. The
other apostles would have lived and died in the obscurity of
Galilee if they had not been lifted into prominence by the Chris-
tian movement ; but the name of Saul of Tarsus would have been
remembered still in some character or other even if Christianity
had never existed. Christianity got the opportunity in him of
showing the world the whole force that was in it. Paul was aware
of this himself, though he expressed it with perfect modesty, when
he said, " For this cause I obtained mercy, that in me as chief
might Jesus Christ show forth all His long - suffering for an
ensample of them who should hereafter believe on Him to ever-
lasting life."

4. His conversion proved the power of Christianity to overcome
^/the strongest prejudices and to stamp its own type on a large
nature by a revolution both instantaneous and permanent. Paul's
N/was a personality so strong and original that no other man could
have been less expected to sink himself in another ; but, from the
moment when he came into contact with Christ, he was so over-
mastered with His influence that he never afterwards had any
other desire than to be the mere echo and reflection of Him to
the world. [_But, if Christianity showed its strength in making so
complete a conquest of Paul, it showed its worth no less in the
kind of man it made of him when he had given himself up to its

HIS PLACE IN HISTORY. , 13

influence. It satisfied the needs of a peculiarly hungry nature,
and never to the close of his life did he betray the slightest sense
that this satisfaction was abating. His constitution was originally
compounded of fine materials, but the spirit of Christ passing
into them raised them to a pitch of excellence altogether unique.
Nor was it ever doubtful either to himself or to others that it was
the influence of Christ which made him what he was. The truest
motto for his life would be his own saying, " I live, yet not I, but
Christ liveth in me." Indeed, so perfectly was Christ formed in
him, that we can now study Christ's character in his, and beginners
may perhaps learn even more of Christ from studying Paul's life
than from studying Christ's own. In Christ Himself there was a
blending and softening of all the excellences which makes His
greatness elude the glance of the beginner, just as the very perfec-
tion of Raphael's painting makes it disappointing to an untrained
eye ; whereas in Paul a few of the greatest elements of Christian
character were exhibited with a decisiveness which no one can
mistake, just as the most prominent characteristics of the painting
of Rubens can be appreciated by every spectator.

v 5. Christianity obtained in Paul, secondly, a Great Thinker.
This it specially needed at the moment Christ had departed
from the world, and those whom He had left to represent Him
were unlettered fishermen and, for the most part, men of no intel-
lectual mark. In one sense this fact reflects a peculiar glory on
Christianity, for it shows that it did not owe its place as one of
the great influences of the world to the abilities of its human
representatives : not by might nor by power, but by the Spirit of
God was Christianity established in the earth. Yet, as we look
back now, we can clearly see how essential it was that an apostle
of a different stamp and training should arise.

6. £h£ist had manifested forth the glory of the Father once for

all and completed His atoning work. But this was not enough.

/It was necessary that the meaning of His appearance should be

explained to the world. Who was He who had been here ? what

14 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

precisely was it He had done ? To these questions the original
apostles could give brief popular answers ; but none of them had
theintellectual reach or the educational training necessary to put
the answers into a form to satisfy the intellect of the world..
Happily it is not essential to salvation to be able to answer such
questions with scientific accuracy. There are tens of thousands
who know and believe that Jesus was the Son of God and died to
take away sin, and, trusting to Him as their Saviour, are purified
by faith, but who could not explain these statements at any length
without falling into mistakes in almost every sentence. Yet, if
Christianity was to make an intellectual as well as a moral con-
quest of the world, it was necessary for the Church to have
accurately explained to her the full glory of her Lord and the
meaning of His saving work. Of course Jesus had Himself had
in His mind a comprehension both of what He was and of
what He was doing which was luminous as the sun. But it
was one of the most pathetic aspects of His earthly ministry that
He could not tell all His mind to His followers. They were not
able to bear it ; they were too rude and limited to take it in. He
had to carry His deepest thoughts out of the world with Him
unuttered, trusting with a sublime faith that the Holy Ghost would
lead His Church to grasp them in the course of its subsequent
development. Even what He did utter was very imperfectly
understood. There was one mind, it is true, in the original apos-
tolic circle of the finest quality and capable of soaring into the
rarest altitudes of speculation. The words of Christ sank into the
mind of John, and, after lying there for half a century, grew up
into the wonderful forms we inherit in his Gospel and Epistles.
But even the mind of John was not equal to the exigency of the
Church ; it was too fine, mystical, unusual. His thoughts to this
day remain the property only of the few finest minds. There was
needed a thinker of broader and more massive make to sketch
the first outlines of Christian doctrine ; and he was found in
Paul.
7. Paul was a born thinker. His mind was of majestic breadth

HIS PLACE IN HISTORY. 1$

and force. It was restlessly busy, never able to leave any
object with which it had to deal until it had pursued it back
to its remotest causes and forward into all its consequences. It
was not enough for him to know that Christ was the Son of God ;
he had to unfold this statement into its elements and under-
stand precisely what it meant. It was not enough for him to
believe that Christ died for sin ; he had to go further and inquire
why it was necessary that He should do so and how His death
took sin away. But not only had he from nature this speculative
gift ; his talent was trained by education. The other apostles
were unlettered men ; but he enjoyed the fullest scholastic
advantages of the period. In the rabbinical school he learned
how to arrange and state and defend his ideas. We have the
issue of all this in his Epistles, which contain the best explanation
of Christianity possessed by the world. The right way to look at
them is to regard them as the continuation of Christ's own
teaching. They contain the thoughts which Christ carried away
from the earth with him unuttered. Of course Jesus would have
uttered them differently and far better. Pauls thoughts have
everywhere the colouring of his own mental peculiarities. But
the substance of them is what Christ's must have been if He had
Himself given them expression.

8. There was one great subject especially which Christ had
to leave unexplained — His own death. He could not explain it
before it had taken place. This became the leading topic of
Paul's thinking — to show why it was needed and what were its
blessed results. But indeed there was no aspect of the appear-
ance of Christ into which his restlessly inquiring mind did not
penetrate. His thirteen Epistles, when arranged in chronological
order, show that his mind was constantly getting deeper and
deeper into the subject. The progress of his thinking was deter-
mined partly by the natural progress of his own experience in the
knowledge of Christ, for he always wrote straight out of his own
experience ; and partly by the various forms of error which he
had at successive periods to encounter, and which became a

16 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

providential means of stimulating and developing his apprehen-
sion of the truth, just as ever since in the Christian Church the
rise of error has been the means of calling forth the clearest
statements of doctrine. The ruling impulse, however, of his
thinking, as of his life, was ever Christ, and it was his lifelong
devotion to this exhaustless theme that made him the Thinker of
Christianity.

9. Christianity obtained in Paul, thirdly, the Missionary of the
Gentiles. It is rare to find the highest speculative power united
with great practical activity ; but they were united in him. He
was not only the Church's greatest thinker, but the very foremost
worker she has ever possessed. We have been considering the
speculative task which was awaiting him when he joined the
Christian community ; but there was a no less stupendous
practical task awaiting him too. This was the evangelization of
the Gentile world.

10. One of the great objects of the appearance of Christ was to
break down the wall of separation between Jew and Gentile and
make the blessings of salvation the property of all men, without
distinction of race or language.^ But He was not Himself per-
mitted to carry this change into practical realisation. It was one
of the strange limitations of His earthly life that he was sent
only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It can easily be
imagined how congenial a task it would have been to His
intensely human heart to carry the gospel beyond the limits of
Palestine and make it known to nation after nation ; and — if it
be not too bold to say so — this would certainly have been His
chosen career had He been spared. But He was cut off in the
midst of His days and had to leave this task to His followers.

1 1. Before the appearance of Paul on the scene, the execution
I/of this task had been begun. Jewish prejudice had been partially

broken down, the universal character of Christianity had been in
some measure realised, and Peter had admitted the first Gentiles
into the Church by baptism. But none of the original apostles

HIS PLACE IN HISTORY. 17

was equal to the emergency. None of them was large-minded
enough to grasp the idea of the perfect equality of Jew and
Gentile, and apply it without flinching in all its practical conse-
quences ; and none of them had the combination of gifts necessary
to attempt the conversion of the Gentile world on a large scale.
They were Galilean fishermen, fit enough to teach and preach
within the bounds of their native Palestine. But beyond Palestine
lay the great world of Greece and Rome — the world of vast
populations, of power and culture, of pleasure and business. It
needed a man of unlimited versatility, of education, of immense
human sympathy and breadth, to go out there with the gospel
message — a man who could not only be a Jew to the Jews, but a
Greek to the Greeks, a Roman to the Romans, a barbarian to the
barbarians — a man who could encounter not only rabbis in their
synagogues, but proud magistrates in their courts and philo-
sophers in the haunts of learning — a man who could face travel
by land and by sea, who could exhibit presence of mind in every
variety of circumstances, and would be cowed by no difficulties.
No man of this size belonged to the original apostolic circle ; but
Christianity needed such an one, and he was found in Paul.

12. Originally attached more strictly than any of the other
apostles to the peculiarities and prejudices of Jewish exclusiveness,
he cut his way out of the jungle of these prepossessions, accepted
the equality of all men in Christ, and applied this principle relent-
lessly in all its issues. He gave his heart to the Gentile mission,
and the history of his life is the history of how true he was to his
vocation. There was never such singleness of eye and wholeness
of heart. There was never such superhuman and untiring energy.
There was never such an accumulation of difficulties victoriously
met and of sufferings cheerfully borne for any cause. In him
Jesus Christ went forth to evangelize the world, making use of
his hands and feet, his tongue and brain and heart, for doing
the work which in His own bodily presence He had not been
permitted by the limits of His mission to accomplish.

CHAPTER II.
HIS UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR HIS WORK.

Paragraphs 13-36.

14-16. DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH.

His Love of Cities.
17, 18. HOME.
19-26. EDUCATION.

19. Roman Citizenship ; 20. Tent-making; 21, 22. Know-
ledge of Greek Literature; 23-26. Rabbinical
Training. Gamaliel. Knowledge of Old Testa-
ment.
27-30. MORAL AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT.

28. The Law ; 29, 30. Departure from and return to

Jerusalem.

31-33. State of the Christian Church. Stephen.
34-36. THE PERSECUTOR.

CHAPTER II.

HIS UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR HIS WORK.

13. PERSONS whose conversion takes place after they are grown
up are wont to look back upon the period of their life which has
preceded this event with sorrow and shame, and to wish that an
obliterating hand might blot the record of it out of existence.
St Paul felt this sentiment strongly ; to the end of his days he
was haunted by the spectres of his lost years, and was wont to say
that he was the least of all the apostles, who was not worthy to
be called an apostle, because he had persecuted the Church of
God. But these sombre sentiments are only partially justifiable.
God's purposes are very deep, and even in those who know Him
not He may be sowing seeds which will only ripen and bear their
fruit long after their godless career is over. Paul would never
have been the man he became or have done the work he did, if
he had not in the years preceding his conversion gone through a
course of preparation designed to fit him for his subsequent
career. He knew not what he was being prepared for ; his own
intentions about his future were different from God's ; but there
is a divinity which shapes our ends, and it was making him a
polished shaft for God's quiver, though he knew it not

14. The date of Paul's birth is not exactly known, but it can be
settled with a closeness of approximation which is sufficient for
practical purposes. When in the year 33 A.D. those who stoned
Stephen laid down their clothes at Paul's feet, he was " a young

19

20 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

man." This term has, indeed, in Greek as much latitude as in
English, and may indicate any age from something under twenty
to something over thirty. In this case it probably touched the
latter rather than the former limit ; for there is reason to believe
that at this time, or very soon after, he was a member of the
Sanhedrim — an office which no one could hold who was under
thirty years of age ; and the commission he received from the
Sanhedrim immediately afterwards to persecute the Christians
would scarcely have been entrusted to a very young man. About
thirty years after playing this sad part in Stephen's murder, in
the year 62 A.D., he was lying in a prison in Rome awaiting sen-
tence of death for the same cause for which Stephen had suffered,
and, writing one of the last of his Epistles, that to Philemon,
he called himself an old man. This term also is one of great
latitude, and a man who had gone through so many hardships
might well be old before his time ; yet he could scarcely
have taken the name of " Paul the aged " before sixty years of
age. These calculations lead us to the conclusion that _Jie
was born about the same time as Jesus. When the boy Jesus
was playing in the street of Nazareth, the boy Paul was play-
ing in the streets of his native town, away on the other side
of the ridges of Lebanon. They seemed likely to have totally
diverse careers. Yet by the mysterious arrangement of Provi-
dence these two lives, like streams flowing from opposite
watersheds, were one day, as river and tributary, to mingle
together.

15. The place of his birth was Tarsus, the capital of the pro-
vince of Cilicia, in the south-east of Asia Minor. It stood a few
miles from the coast, in the midst of a fertile plain, and was built
upon both banks of the river Cydnus, which descended to it from
the neighbouring Taurus mountains, on whose snowy peaks the
inhabitants of the town were wont, in the summer evenings, to
watch from the flat roofs of their houses the glow of the sunset.
Not far above the town the river poured over the rocks in a vast
cataract, but below this it became navigable, and within the town

HIS UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR HIS WORK. 21

its banks were lined with wharves, on which was piled the mer-
chandise of many countries, while sailors and merchants, dressed
in the costumes and speaking the languages of different races,
were constantly to be seen in the streets. The town enjoyed an
extensive trade in timber, with which the province abounded, and
in the long fine hair of the goats kept in thousands on the neigh-
bouring mountains, which was made into a coarse kind of cloth
and manufactured into various articles, among which tents, such
as Paul was afterwards employed in sewing, formed an extensive
article of merchandise all along the shores of the Mediterranean.
Tarsus was also the centre of a large transport trade ; for behind
the town a famous pass, called the Cilician Gates, led up through
the mountains to the central countries of Asia Minor ; and Tarsus
was the depot to which the products of these countries were
brought down to be distributed over the East and the West. The
inhabitants of the city were numerous and wealthy. The majority
of them were native Cilicians, but the wealthiest merchants were
Greeks. The province was under the sway of the Romans, the
signs of whose sovereignty could not be absent from the capital,
although Tarsus itself enjoyed the privilege of self-government.
The number and variety of the inhabitants were still further
increased by the fact that, like our own Glasgow, .Tarsus was not
only a c^n^jDfjc^mjrierce, but also a seat of learning. It was
one of the three principal university cities of the period, the other
two being Athens and Alexandria ; and it was said to surpass its
rivals in intellectual eminence. Students from many countries
were seen in its streets, a sight which could not but awaken
thoughts in youthful minds about the value and the aims of
learning.

1 6. Who does not see how fit a place this was for the Apostle
of the Gentiles to be born in? As he grew up, he was being n
unawares prepared to encounter men of every class and race, to I
sympathize with human nature in all its varieties, and to look
with tolerance upon the most diverse habits and customs. In -i
after life he was always a lover of cities. Whereas his Master

22 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

avoided Jerusalem and loved to teach on the mountain-side or
the shore of the lake, Paul was constantly moving from one great
city to another. Antioch, Ephesus, Athens, Corinth, Rome, the
capitals of the ancient world, were the scenes of his activity. The
words of Jesus are redolent of the country, and teem with pictures
of its still beauty or homely toil — the lilies of the field, the sheep
following the shepherd, the sower in the furrow, the fishermen
drawing their nets. But the language of Paul is impregnated
with the atmosphere of the city and alive with the tramp and
hurry of the streets. His imagery is borrowed from scenes of
human energy and monuments of cultivated life — the soldier in
full armour, the athlete in the arena, the building of houses and
temples, the triumphal procession of the victorious general. So
lasting are the associations of the boy in the life of the man.

17. Paul had a certain pride in the place of his birth, as he
showed by boasting on one occasion that he was a citizen of no
mean city. Hejiad a heart formed by nature to feel the wannest
glow of patriotism. Yet it was not for Cilicia and Tarsus that
this fire burned. He was an alien in the land of his birth. His
father was one of those numerous Jews who were scattered in
that age over the cities of the Gentile world, engaged in trade
and commerce. They had left the Holy Land, but they did not
forget it. They never coalesced with the populations among
which they dwelt, but, in dress, food, religion, and many other
particulars, remained a peculiar people. As a rule, indeed, they
were less rigid in their religious views and more tolerant of foreign
customs than those Jews who remained in Palestine. But Paul's
father was not one who had given way to laxity. He belonged to
the straitest sect of his religion. It is probable that he had not
left Palestine long before his son's birth, for Paul calls himself a
Hebrew of the Hebrews — a name which seems to have belonged
only to the Palestinian Jews and to those whose connection
with Palestine had continued very close. Of his mother we
hear absolutely nothing, but everything seems to indicate that

HIS UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR HIS WORK. 23

the home in which he was brought up was one of those out of
which nearly all eminent religious teachers have sprung — a home
of piety, of character, perhaps of somewhat stern principle, and of
strong attachment to the peculiarities of a religious people. He
was imbued with its spirit. Although he could not but receive
innumerable and imperishable impressions from the city he was
born in, the land and the city of his heart were Palestine ajid
Jerusalem ; and the heroes of his young imagination were not
Curtius and Horatius, Hercules and Achilles, but Abraham and
Joseph, Moses and David and Ezra. As he looked back on the
past, it was not over the confused annals of Cilicia that he cast
his eyes, but he gazed up the clear stream of Jewish history to its
sources in Ur of the Chaldees ; and, when he thought of the future,
the vision which rose on him was the kingdom of the Messiah
enthroned in Jerusalem and ruling the nations with a rod of
iron.

1 8. The feeling of belonging to a spiritual aristocracy, elevated
above the majority of those among whom he lived, would be
deepened in him by what he saw of the religion of the surrounding
population. Tarsus was the centre of a species of Baal-worship
of an imposing but unspeakably degrading character, and at cer-
tain seasons of the year it was the scene of festivals, which were
frequented by the whole population of the neighbouring regions,
and were accompanied with orgies of a degree of moral abomin-
ableness happily beyond the reach even of our imaginations. Of
course a boy could not see the depths of this mystery of iniquity
but he could see enough to make him turn from idolatry with the
scorn peculiar to his nation, and to make him regard the little
synagogue where his family worshipped the Holy One of Israel
as far more glorious than the gorgeous temples of the heathen ;
and perhaps to these early experiences we may trace back in
some degree those convictions of the depths to which human
nature can fall and its need of an omnipotent redeeming force
which afterwards formed so fundamental a part of his theology
and gave such a stimulus to his work.

24 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

19. The time at length arrived for deciding what occupation
the boy was to follow — a momentous crisis in every life ; and in
this case much was involved in the decision. ' Perhaps the most
natural career for him would have been that of a merchant ; for
his father was engaged in trade, the busy city offered splendid
prizes to mercantile ambition, and the boy's own energy would
have guaranteed success. Besides, his father had an advantage
to give him specially useful to a merchant : though a Jew, he was
a Roman citizen, and this right would have given his son protec-
tion, into whatever part of the Roman world he might have had
occasion to travel. How the father got this right we cannot tell ;
it might be bought, or won by distinguished service to the state,
or acquired in several other ways ; at all events his son was free-
born. It was a valuable privilege, and one which was to prove of
great use to Paul, though not in the way in which his father
might have been expected to desire him to make use of it But
it was decided that he was not to be a merchant. The
decision may have been due to his father's strong religious
views, or his mother's pious ambition, or his own predilections ;
but it was resolved that he should go to college and become, a
rabbi — that is, a minister, a teacher and a lawyer all in one. It
was a wise decision in view of the boy's spirit and capabilities,
and it turned out to be of infinite moment for the future of
mankind.

20. But although he thus escaped the chances which seemed
likely to drift him into a secular calling, yet, before going away
to prepare for the sacred profession, he was to get some insight
into business life ; for it was a rule among the Jews that every
boy, whatever might be the profession he was to fol.low, should
learn a trade, as a resource in time of need. This was a rule
with wisdom in it ; for it gave the young employment at an age
when too much leisure is dangerous, and acquainted the wealthy
and the learned in some degree with the feelings of those who
have to earn their bread with the sweat of their brow. Thfijjcade
which he was put to was the commonest one in Tarsus — the^

HIS UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR HIS WORK. 25

making of tents from the goat's-hair cloth for which the district
was celebrated. Little did he or his father think, when he began
to handle the disagreeable material, of what importance this
handicraft was to be to him in subsequent years : it became the
means of his support during his missionary journeys, and, at a
time when it was essential that the propagators of Christianity
should be above the suspicion of selfish motives, enabled him to
maintain himself in a position of noble independence./

21. It is a question natural to ask, whether, before leaving
home to go and get his training as a rabbi, Paul attended the
University of Tarsus. Did he drink at the wells of wisdom which
flow from Mount Helicon before he went to sit by those which
spring from Mount Zion ? From the fact that he makes two or
three quotations from the Greek poets it has been inferred that
he was acquainted with the whole literature of Greece. But, on
the other hand, it has been pointed out that his quotations are
brief and commonplace, such as any man who spoke Greek would
pick up and use occasionally ; and_the_style jm^j[p^abujarj_o£
his Epistles are not those of the models of Greek literature, but
of the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures,
which .was then-in universal useamong the Jews of the Dispersion.
Probably his father would have considered it sinful to allow his
son to attend a heathen university. Yet it is not likely that he
grew up in a great seat of learning without receiving any influence
from the academic tone of the place. His speech at Athens
shows that he_jgas able, when he chose, to wield a style much
more stately than that of his writings, and so keen a mind was
not likely to remain in total ignorance- of. the great monuments of
the language which he spoke.

22. There were other impressions too which the learned Tarsus
probably made upon him : its university was famous for those
petty disputes and rivalries which sometimes ruffle the calm of
academical retreats ; and it is possible that the murmur of these,
with which the air was often filled, may have given the first
impulse to that scorn for the tricks of the rhetorician and the

26 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

windy disputations of the sophist which forms so marked a
feature in some of his writings. The glances of young eyes are
clear and sure, and even as a boy he may have perceived how
small may be the souls of men and how mean their lives, when
their mouths are filled with the finest phraseology.

23. The college for the education of Jewish rabbis was in Jeru-
salem, and thither Paul was sent about the age_of thirteen. His
arrival in the Holy City may have happened in the same year in
which Jesus, at the age of twelve, first visited it, and the over-
powering emotions of the boy from Nazareth at the first sight of
the capital of his race may be taken as an index of the unrecorded
experience of the boy from Tarsus. To every Jewish child of a
religious disposition Jerusalem was the centre of all things ; the
footsteps of prophets and kings echoed in the streets ; memories
sacred and sublime clung to its walls and buildings ; and it
shone in the glamour of illimitable hopes.

24. It chanced that at this time the college of Jerusalem was
presided over by one of the most noted teachers the Jews have
ever possessed. This was Gamaliel, at whose feet Paul tells us
he was brought up. He was called by his contemporaries the
Beauty of the Law, and is still remembered among the Jews as the
Great Rabbi. He was a man of lofty character and enlightened
mind, a Pharisee strongly attached to the traditions of the
fathers, yet not intolerant or hostile to Greek culture, as some of
the narrower Pharisees were. The influence of such a man on an
open mind like Paul's must have been very great ; and, although
for a time the pupil became an intolerant zealot, yet the master's
example may have had something to do with the conquest he
finally won over prejudice.

25. The course of instruction which a rabbi had to undergo was
lengthened and peculiar. It consisted entirely of the study of
the Scriptures and the comments of the sages and masters upon
them. The words of Scripture and the sayings of the wise were
committed to memory ; discussions were carried on about dis-

HIS UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR HIS WORK. 2/

puted points ; and by a rapid fire of questions, which the scholars
were allowed to put as well as the masters, the wits of the
students were sharpened and their views enlarged. The out-
standing qualities of Paul's intellect, which were conspicuous in
his subsequent life — his marvellous memory, the keenness of
his logic, the superabundance of his ideas, and his original way
of taking up every subject — first displayed themselves in this
school, and excited, we may well believe, the warm interest of
his teacher.

26. He himself learned much here which was of great moment
in his subsequent career. Although he was to be specially the
missionary of the Gentiles, he was also a great missionary to his
own people. In every city he visited where there were Jews he
made his first public appearance in the synagogue. There his
training as a rabbi secured him an opportunity of speaking, and
his familiarity with Jewish modes of thought and reasoning
enabled him to address his audiences in the way best fitted to
secure their attention. His knowledge of the Scriptures enabled
him to adduce proofs from an authority which his hearers
acknowledged to be supreme. Besides, he was destined to be
the great theologian of Christianity, and the principal writer of
the New Testament. Now the New grew out of the Old ; the
one is in all its parts the prophecy and the other the fulfilment.
But it required a mind saturated not only with Christianity, but
with the Old Testament, to bring this out ; and, at the age when
the memory is most retentive, Paul acquired such a knowledge of
the Old Testament that everything it contains was at his com-
mand : its phraseology became the language of his thinking ;
he literally writes in quotations, and he quotes from all parts
with equal facility— from the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms.
Thus was the warrior equipped with the armour and the weapons
of the Spirit before he knew in what cause he was to use them.

27. Meantime what was his moral and religious state? He
was learning to be a religious teacher ; was he himself religious?

28 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

Not all who are sent to college by their parents to prepare for the
sacred office are so, and in every city of the world the path of
youth is beset with temptations which may ruin life at its very
commencement. Some of the greatest teachers of the Church,
such as St. Augustine, have had to look back on half their life
blotted and scarred with vice or crime. No such fall defaced
Paul's early years. Whatever struggles with passion may have
raged in his own breast, his conduct was always pure. Jerusalem
was no very favourable place in that age for virtue. It was the
Jerusalem against whose external sanctity, but internal depravity,
our Lord a few years afterwards hurled such withering invec-
tives ; it was the very seat of hypocrisy, where an able youth
might easily have learned how to win the rewards of religion,
while escaping its burdens. But Paul was preserved amidst
these perils, and could afterwards claim that he had lived in
Jerusalem from the first in all good conscience.

28. He had brought with him from home the conviction,
which forms the basis of a religious life, that the one prize
which makes life worth living is the love and favour of God.
This conviction grew into a passionate longing as he advanced in
years, and he asked his teachers how the prize was to be won.
Their answer was ready — By the keeping of the law. It was a
terrible answer ; for the Law meant not only what we understand
by the term, but also the ceremonial law of Moses and the
thousand and one rules added to it by the Jewish teachers,
whose observance made life a kind of purgatory to a tender
conscience. But Paul was not the man to shrink from diffi-
culties. He had set his heart upon winning God's favour,
without which this life appeared to him a blank and eternity the
blackness of darkness ; and, if this was the way to the goal, he
was willing to tread it. Not only, however, were his personal
hopes involved in this, the hopes of his nation depended on it
too ; for it was the universal belief of his people that the Messiah
would only come to a nation keeping the law, and it was even
said that, if one man kept it perfectly for a single day, his merit

HIS UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR HIS WORK. 2Q

would bring to the earth the King for whom they were waiting.
Paul's rabbinical training, then, culminated in the desire to
win this prize of righteousness, and he left the halls of sacred
learning with this as the purpose of his life. The lonely student's
resolution was momentous for the world ; for he was first to
prove amidst secret agonies that this way of salvation was false,
and then to teach his discovery to mankind.

29. We cannot tell in what year Paul's education at the college
of Jerusalem was finished or where he went immediately after-
wards. The young rabbis, after completing their studies,
scattered in the same way as our own divinity students do, and
began practical work in different parts of the Jewish world.
He may have gone back to his native Cilicia and held office
in some synagogue there. At^alLevents, he was for some years
at a distance from Jerusalem and Palestine ; for these were the
very years in which fell the movement of John the Baptist and
the ministry of Jesus, and it is certain that Paul could not have
been in the vicinity without being involved in both of these
movements either as a friend or as a foe.

30. But before long he returned to Jerusalem. It was as
natural for the highest rabbinical talent to gravitate in those
times to Jerusalem as it is for the highest literary and commercial
talent to gravitate in our ;times to London. He arrived in the
capital of Judaism very soon after the death of Jesus ; and we
can easily imagine the representations of that event and of the
career thereby terminated which he would receive from his
Pharisaic friends. We have no reason to suppose that as yet he
had any doubts about his own religion. We gather, indeed,
from his writings that he had already passed through severe
mental conflicts. Although the conviction still stood fast in his
mind that the blessedness of life was attainable only in the favour
of God, yet his efforts to reach this coveted position by the
observance of the law had not satisfied him. On the contrary,
the more he strove to keep the law the more active became the

30 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

motions of sin within him ; his conscience was becoming more
oppressed with the sense of guilt, and the peace of a soul at rest
in God was a prize which eluded his grasp. Still he did not
question the teaching of the synagogue. To him as yet this was
of one piece with the history of the Old Testament, whence looked
down on him the figures of the saints and prophets, which were
a guarantee that the system they represented must be divine, and
behind which he saw the God of Israel revealing Himself in the
giving of the law. The reason why he had not attained to peace
and fellowship with God was, he believed, because he had not
struggled enough with the evil of his nature or honoured enough
the precepts of the law. Was there no service by which he could
make up for all deficiencies and win that grace at last in which
the great of old had stood ? This was the temper of mind in
which he returned to Jerusalem, and learned with astonishment
and indignation of the rise of a sect which believed that Jesus
who had been crucified was the Messiah of the Jewish people.

31. Christianity was as yet only two or three years old, and
was growing very quietly in Jerusalem. Although those who had
heard it preached at Pentecost had carried the news of it to their
homes in many quarters, its public representatives had not yet
left the city of its birth. At first the authorities had been inclined
to persecute it, and checked its teachers when they appeared in
public. But they had changed their minds and, acting under
the advice of Gamaliel, resolved to neglect it, believing that it
would die out, if let alone. The Christians, on the other hand,
gave as little offence as possible ; in the externals of religion they
continued to be strict Jews and zealous of the law, attending
the temple worship, observing the Jewish ceremonies and
respecting the ecclesiastical authorities. It was a kind of truce,
which allowed Christianity a little space for secret growth. In
their upper rooms the brethren met to break bread and pray to
their ascended Lord. It was the most beautiful spectacle. The
new faith had alighted among them like an angel, and was shedding

HIS UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR HIS WORK. 31

purity on their souls from its wings and breathing over their
humble gatherings the spirit of peace. Their love to each other
was unbounded ; they were filled with the inspiring sense of
discovery ; and, as often as they met, their invisible Lord was in
their midst. It was like heaven upon earth. Whilst Jerusalem
around them was going on in its ordinary course of worldliness
and ecclesiastical asperity, these few humble souls were felicitating
themselves with a secret which they knew to contain within it the
blessedness of mankind and the future of the world.

32. But the truce could not last, and these scenes of peace
were soon to be invaded with terror and bloodshed. Christianity
could not keep such a truce ; for there is in it a world-conquering
force which impels it at all risks to propagate itself, and the
fermentation of the new wine of gospel liberty was sure sooner or
later to burst the forms of the Jewish law. At length a man
arose in the Church in whom these aggressive tendencies
embodied themselves. This was Stephen, one of the seven
deacons who had been appointed to watch over the temporal
affairs of the Christian society. He was a man full of the Holy
Ghost and possessed of capabilities which the brevity of his
career only permitted to suggest, but not to develop themselves.
He went from synagogue to synagogue, preaching the Messiah-
ship of Jesus and announcing the advent of freedom from the
yoke of the law. Champions of Jewish orthodoxy encountered
him, but were not able to withstand his eloquence and holy zeal.
Foiled in argument, they grasped at other weapons, stirring up
the authorities and the populace to murderous fanaticism.

33. One of the synagogues in which these disputations took
place was that of the Cilicians, the countrymen of Paul. May
he have been a rabbi in this synagogue and one of Stephen's
opponents in argument ? At all events, when the argument of
logic was exchanged for that of violence, he was in the front.
When the witnesses who cast the first stones at Stephen were
stripping for their work, they laid down their garments at his
feet. There, on the margin of that wild scene, in the field of

32 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

judicial murder, we see his figure, standing a little apart and
sharply outlined against the mass of persecutors unknown to
fame — the pile of many-coloured robes at his feet, and his eyes
bent upon the holy martyr, who is kneeling in the article of death
and praying : " Lord, lay not this sin to their charge."

34. His zeal on this occasion brought Paul prominently under
the notice of the authorities. It probably procured him a seat in
the Sanhedrim, where we find him soon afterwards giving his
vote against the Christians. At all events, it led to his being
entrustfid-.with.tbe work of utterly uprooting Christianity, which
the authorities now resolved upon. He accepted their proposal ;
for he believed it to be God's work. He saw more clearly than
anyone else what was the drift of Christianity ; and it seemed to
him destined, if unchecked, to overturn all that he considered
most sacred. The repeal of the law was in his eyes the oblitera-
tion of the one way of salvation, and faith in a crucified Messiah
blasphemy against the divinest hope of Israel. Besides, he had
a deep personal interest in the task. Hitherto he had been
striving to please God, but always felt his services to come
short ; here was a chance of making up for all arrears by one
splendid act of service. This was the iron of agony in his soul
which gave edge and energy to his zeal In any case he was not
a man to do things by halves ; and he flung himself headlong
into his task.

35. Terrible were the scenes which ensued. He flew from
synagogue to synagogue, and from house to house, dragging
forth men and women, who were cast into prison and punished.
Some appear to have been put to death, and — darkest trait of all —
others were compelled to blaspheme the name of the Saviour.
The Church at Jerusalem was broken in pieces, and its members
who escaped the rage of the persecutor were scattered over the
neighbouring provinces and countries.

36. It may seem too venturesome to call this the last stage of
Paul's unconscious preparation for his apostolic career. But so
indeed it was. Injentering on the career of a persecutor he was

HIS UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR HIS WORK. 33

going on straight in the line of the creed in which he had been
brought up ; and this was its reduction to absurdity. Besides,
through the gracious working of Him whose highest glory it is
out of evil still to bring forth good, there sprang out of these sad
doings in the mind of Paul an intensity of humility, a willingness
to serve even the least of the brethren of those whom he had
abused, and a zeal to redeem lost time by the parsimonious use
of what was left, which became permanent spurs to action in his
subsequent career

CHAPTER III.
HIS CONVERSION.

Paragraphs 37-50.

37,38. Severity of the Persecution.

39-42. Kicking against the Goad.

43, 44. The Vision of Christ.

45-48. Effect of his Conversion on his Thinking

49, 50. Its Effect on his Destiny.

CHAPTER III.

HIS CONVERSION.

37. IT was the persecutor's hope utterly to exterminate Chris-
tianity. But little did he understand its genius. It thrives on
persecution. Prosperity has often been fatal to it, persecution
never. "They that were scattered abroad went everywhere
preaching the word." Hitherto the Church had been confined
within the walls of Jerusalem ; but now all over Judaea and
Samaria, and in distant Phoenicia and Syria, the beacon of the
gospel began in many a town and village to twinkle through the
darkness, and twos and threes met together in upper rooms to
impart to each other their joy in the Holy Ghost.

38. We can imagine with what rage the tidings of these out-
breaks of the fanaticism which he had hoped to stamp out would
fill the persecutor. But he was not the person to be balked, and
he resolved to hunt up the objects of his hatred even in their most
obscure and distant hiding-places. In one strange city after
another he accordingly appeared, armed with the apparatus of the
inquisitor to carry his sanguinary purpose out. Having heard
that Damascus, the capital of Syria, was one of the places where
the fugitives had taken refuge, and that they were carrying on
their propaganda among the numerous Jews of that city, he went
to the high priest, who had jurisdiction over the Jews outside as
well as inside Palestine, and got letters empowering him to seize
and bind and bring to Jerusalem all of the new way of thinking
whom he might find there.

M

36 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

39. As we see him start on this journey, which was to be so
momentous, we naturally ask what was the state of his mind ?
His was a noble nature and a tender heart ; but the work he was
engaged in might be supposed to be congenial only to the most
brutal of mankind. Had his mind, then, been visited with no
compunctions ? Apparently not. We are told that, as he was
ranging through strange cities in pursuit of his victims, he was
exceedingly mad against them j and, as he was setting out to
Damascus, he was still breathing out threatenings and slaughter.
He was sheltered against doubt by his reverence for the objects
which the heresy imperilled ; and, if he had to outrage his natural
feelings in the bloody work, was not his merit all the greater ?

40. But on this journey doubt at last invaded his mind. It
was a long journey of over a hundred and sixty miles ; with
the slow means of locomotion then available, it would occupy
at least six days ; and a considerable portion of it lay across
a desert, where there was nothing to distract the mind from
its own reflections. In this enforced leisure doubts arose.
What else can be meant by the word with which the Lord
saluted him : " It is hard for thee to kick against the goad " ?
The figure of speech is borrowed from a custom of Eastern
countries : the ox-driver wields a long pole, at the end of
which is fixed a piece of sharpened iron, with which he urges
the animal to go on or stand still or change its course ; and, if it
is refractory, it kicks against the goad, injuring and infuriating
itself with the wounds it receives. This is a vivid picture of
a man wounded and tortured by compunctions of conscience.
There was something in him rebelling against the course of
inhumanity on which he was embarked and suggesting that he
was fighting against God.

41. It is not difficult to conceive whence these doubts arose.
He was the scholar of Gamaliel, the advocate of humanity and
tolerance, who had counselled the Sanhedrim to leave the
Christians alone. He was himself too young yet to have
hardened his heart to all the disagreeables of such ghastly work.

HIS CONVERSION. 37

Highly strung as was his religious zeal, nature could not but speak
out at last But probably his compunctions were chiefly awakened
by the character and behaviour of the Christians. He had heard
the noble defence of Stephen and seen his face in the council-
chamber shining like that of an angel. He had seen him kneeling
on the field of execution and praying for his murderers. Doubt-
less, in the course of the persecution he had witnessed many
similar scenes. Did these people look like enemies of God ? As
he entered their homes to drag them forth to prison, he got
glimpses of their social life. Could such spectacles of purity and
love be products of the powers of darkness ? Did not the serenity
with which his victims went to meet their fate look like the very
peace which he had long been sighing for in vain? Their
arguments, too, must have told on a mind like his. He had
heard Stephen proving from the Scriptures that it behoved the
Messiah to suffer ; and the general tenor of the earliest Christian
apologetic assures us that many of the accused must on their
trial have appealed to passages like the fifty-third of Isaiah,
where a career is predicted for the Messiah startlingly like that
of Jesus of Nazareth. He heard incidents of Christ's life from
their lips which betokened a personage very different from the
picture sketched for him by his Pharisaic informants : and the
sayings of their Master which the Christians quoted did not
sound like the utterances of the fanatic he conceived Jesus to
have been.

42. Such may have been some of the reflections which agitated
the traveller as he moved onward, sunk in gloomy thought
But might not these be mere suggestions of temptation — the
morbid fancies of a wearied mind, or the whispers of a wicked
spirit attempting to draw him off from the service of Heaven ?
The sight of Damascus, shining out like a gem in the heart of
the desert, restored him to himself. There, in the company of
sympathetic rabbis and in the excitement of effort, he would
dispel from his mind these fancies bred of solitude. So onward
he pressed, and the sun of noonday, from which all but the most

3& THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL,

impatient travellers in the East take refuge in a long siesta,
looked down upon him still urging forward his course toward the
city gate.

43. The news of Saul's coming had arrived at Damascus before
him ; and the little flock of Christ was praying that, if it were
possible, the progress of the wolf, who was on his way to spoil
the fold, might be arrested. Nearer and nearer, however, he
drew ; he had reached the last stage of his journey ; and at the
sight of the place which contained his victims his appetite grew
keener for the prey. But the Good Shepherd had heard the
cries of the trembling flock and went forth to face the wolf on
their behalf. Suddenly at midday, as Paul and his company
were riding forward beneath the blaze of the Syrian sun, a light
which dimmed even that fierce glare shone round about them, a
shock vibrated through the atmosphere, and in a moment they
found themselves prostrate upon the ground. The rest was for
Paul alone ; a voice sounded in his ears, " Saul, Saul, why
persecutest thou Me?" and, as he looked up and asked the
radiant Figure that had spoken, "Who art Thou, Lord?" the
answer was, " I am Jesus, whom thou art persecuting."

44. The language in which he ever afterwards spoke of this
event forbids us to think that it was a mere vision of Jesus he
saw. He ranks it as the last of the appearances of the risen
Saviour to His disciples, and places it on the same level as the
appearances to Peter, to James, to the eleven, and to the five
hundred. It was, in fact, Christ Jesus in the vesture of His glori-
fied humanity, who for once had left the spot, wherever it may be
in the spaces of the universe, where now he sits on His media-
torial throne, in order to show Himself to this elect disciple ; and
the light which outshone the sun was no other than the glory in
which His humanity is there enveloped. An incidental evidence
of this was supplied in the words which were addressed to Paul.
They were spoken in the Hebrew, or rather the Aramaic tongue
— the same language in which Jesus had been wont to address

HIS CONVERSION. 39

the multitudes by the Lake and converse with His disciples in
the desert solitudes ; and, as in the days of His flesh He was
wont to open His mouth in parables, so now He clothed His
rebuke in a striking metaphor : " It is hard for thee to kick
against the goad."

45. It would be impossible to exaggerate what took place in
the mind of Paul in this single instant. It is but a clumsy way
we have of dividing time by the revolution of the clock into
minutes and hours, days and years, as if each portion so measured
were of the same size as another of equal length. This may suit
well enough for the common ends of life, but there are finer
measurements for which it is quite misleading. The real size of
any space of time is to be measured by the amount it contains of
the soul's experience ; no one hour is exactly equal to another,
and there are single hours which are larger than months. So
measured, this one moment of Paul's life was perhaps larger than
all his previous years. The glare of revelation was so intense
that it might well have scorched the eye of reason or burnt out
life itself, as the external light dazzled the eyes of his body into
blindness. When his companions recovered themselves and
turned to their leader, they discovered that he had lost his sight,
and they had to take him by the hand and lead him into the city.
What a change was there 1 Instead of the proud Pharisee riding
through the streets with the pomp of an inquisitor, a stricken
man, trembling, groping, clinging to the hand of his guide, arrives
at the house of entertainment amidst the consternation of those
who receive him, and, getting hastily to a room where he can ask
them to leave him alone, sinks down there in the darkness.

46. But, though it was dark without, it was bright within. The
blindness had been sent for the purpose of secluding him from
outward distractions and enabling him to concentrate himself on
the objects presented to the inner eye. For the same reason he
neither ate nor drank for three days. He was too absorbed in
the thoughts which crowded on him thick and fast.

40 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

47. In these three days, it may be said with confidence, he got
at least a partial hold of all the truths he afterwards proclaimed
to the world ; for his whole theology is nothing but the explica-
tion of his own conversion. First of all, his whole previous life
fell down in fragments at his feet. It had been of one piece, and
wonderfully complete. It had appeared to himself to be a con-
sistent deduction from the highest revelation he knew and, in
spite of its imperfections, to lie in the line of the will of God.
But, instead of this, it had been rushing in diametrical opposition
against the will and revelation of God, and had now been brought
to a stop and broken in pieces by the collision. That which had
appeared to him the perfection of service and obedience had
involved his soul in the guilt of blasphemy and innocent blood.
Such had been the issue of seeking righteousness by the works of
the law. At the very moment when his righteousness seemed at
last to be turning to the whiteness so long desired, it was caught
in the blaze of this revelation and whirled away in shreds of
shrivelled blackness. It had been a mistake, then, from first to
last. Righteousness was not to be obtained by the law, but
only guilt and doom. This was the unmistakable conclusion,
and it became the one polejof Paul's theology.

48. But, while his theory of life thus fell in pieces with a crash
that might by itself have shaken his reason, in the same moment
an opposite experience befell him. Not in wrath and vengeance
did Jesus of Nazareth appear to him, as He might have been ex-
pected to appear to the deadly enemy of His cause. His first word
might have been a demand for retribution, and His first might
have been His last. But, instead of this, His face had been full
of divine benignity and His words full of considerateness for His
persecutor. |_ln the very moment when the divine strength cast
him down on the ground he felt himself encompassed by the
divine lovef\> This was the prize he had all his lifetime been
struggling for in vain, and now he grasped it in the very moment
in which he discovered that his struggles- had been fightings
against God ; he was lifted up from his fall in the arms of God's

HIS CONVERSION. 41

love ; he was reconciled and accepted for ever. As time went
on, he was more and more assured of this, (jn Christ he found
without effort of his own the peace and the moral strength he had
striven for in vainTJ And this became the other pole of his
theology — that righteousness and strength are found in Christ
without man's effort by mere trust in God's grace and acceptance
of 1 1 is gift. There were a hundred other things involved in
these two which it required time to work out ; but within these
two poles the system of Paul's thinking ever afterwards revolved.

49. The three dark days were not done before he knew one
thing more — that his life was to be devoted to the proclamation
of these discoveries. In any case this must have been. Paul
was a born propagandist and could not have become the
possessor of such revolutionary truth without spreading it.
Besides, he had a warm heart, that could be deeply moved with
gratitude ; and when Jesus, whom he had blasphemed and tried
to blot out of the memory of the world, treated him with such
divine benignity, giving him back his forfeited life and placing
him in that position which had always appeared to him the prize
of life, he could not but put himself at His service with all his
powers. He was an ardent patriot, and the hope of the Messiah
had long occupied for him the whole horizon of the future ; and,
when he knew that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah of his
people and the Saviour of the world, it followed as a matter of
course that he must spend his life in making this known.

50. But this destiny was also clearly announced to him from
the outside. Ananias, probably the leading man in the small
Christian community at Damascus, was informed, in a vision, of
the change which had happened to Paul, and sent to restore his
sight and admit him into the Christian Church by baptism.
Nothing could be more beautiful than the way in which this
servant of God approached the man who had come to the city to
take his life. As soon as he learned the state of the case, he
forgave and torgot all the crimes of his enemy and sprang to

42 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

clasp him in the arms of Christian love. Certain as may have
been the assurance which in the inner world of the mind Paul
had in those three days received of forgiveness, it must have
been to him a most welcome reassurance when, on opening his
eyes again upon the external world, he was met with no contra-
diction of the visions he had been looking on, but the first object
he saw was a human face bending over him with looks of
forgiveness and perfect love. He learned from Ananias the
future the Saviour had appointed him : he had been apprehended
by Christ in order to be a vessel to bear His name to Gentiles
and kings and to the children of Israel. He accepted the
mission with limitless devotion ; and from that hour to the
hour of his death he had but one ambition — to apprehend that
for which he had been apprehended of Christ Jesui

A 4 -7*

'

r

CHAPTER IV.
HIS GOSPEL.

Paragraphs 51-67.

51-53. Sojourn in Arabia.

54-58. FAILURE OF MAN'S RIGHTEOUSNESS.

56. Failure of the Gentiles.

57. Failure of the Jews.

58. The Fall the ultimate Cause of Failure.

59-65. THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD.

The new Adam. The New Man.

66, 67. Leading Peculiarities of the Pauline Gospel

CHAPTER IV.

HIS GOSPEL.

51. WHEN a man has been suddenly converted, as Paul was,
he is generally driven by a strong impulse to make known what
has happened to him. Such testimony is very impressive ; for
it is that of a soul which is receiving its first glimpses of the
realities of the unseen world, and there is a vividness about the
report it gives of them which produces an irresistible sense of
reality. Whether Paul yielded at once to this impulse or not
we cannot say with certainty. The language of the book of
Acts, where it is said that " straightway he preached Christ in
the synagogues," would lead us to suppose so. But we learn
from his own writings that there was another powerful impulse
influencing him at the same time ; and it is uncertain which of
the two he obeyed first. This other impulse was the wish to
retreat into solitude and think out the meaning and issues of
that which had befallen him. It cannot be wondered at that he
felt this to be a necessity. He had believed his former creed
intensely and staked everything on it ; to see it suddenly
shattered in pieces must have shaken him severely. The new
truth which had been flashed upon him was so far-reaching and
revolutionary that it could not be taken in at once in all its
bearings. Paul was a born thinker ; it was not enough for him
to experience anything ; he required to comprehend it and fit
it into the structure of his convictions. Immediately, therefore,
after his conversion he went away, he tells us, into Arabia.

46

46 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

He does not indeed say for what purpose he went ; but, as
there is no record of his preaching in that region and this
statement occurs in the midst of a vehement defence of the
originality of his Gospel, we may conclude with considerable
certainty that he went into retirement for the purpose of grasping
in thought the details and the bearings of the revelation he had
been put in possession of. In lonely contemplation he worked
them out ; and, when he returned to mankind, he was in possession
of that view of Christianity which was peculiar to himself and
formed the burden of his preaching during the subsequent years.

52. There is some doubt as to the precise place of his retire-
ment, because Arabia is a word of vague and variable significance.
But most probably it denotes the Arabia of the Wanderings,
whose principal feature was Mount Sinai. This was a spot
hallowed by great memories and by the presence of other great
men of revelation. Here Moses had seen the burning bush and
communed with God on the top of the mountain. Here Elijah
had roamed in his season of despair and drunk anew at the wells
of inspiration. What place could be more appropriate for the
meditations of this successor of these men of God? In the
valleys where the manna fell and under the shadow of the peaks
which had burned beneath the feet of Jehovah he pondered the
problem of his life. It is a great example. Originality in the
preaching of the truth depends on the solitary intuition of it.
Paul enjoyed the special inspiration of the Holy Ghost ; but this
did not render the concentrated activity of his own thinking
unnecessary, but only lent it peculiar intensity ; and the clear-
ness and certainty of his gospel were due to these months of
sequestered thought. His retirement may have lasted a year
or more ; for between his conversion and his final departure
from Damascus, to which he returned from Arabia, three years
intervened ; and one of them at least was spent in this way.

53. We have no detailed record of what the outlines of his
gospel were till a period long subsequent to this ; but as these,
when first they are traceable, are a mere cast of the features of

HIS GOSPEL. 47

his conversion, and, as his mind was working so long and power-
fully on the interpretation of this event at this period, there can
be no doubt that the gospel sketched in the Epistles to the
Romans and the Galatians was substantially the same as he
preached from the first ; and we are safe in inferring from these
writings our account of his Arabian meditations.

54. The starting-point of Paul's thinking was still, as it had
been from his childhood, the conviction, inherited from pious
generations, that the true end and felicity of man lay in the
enjoyment of the favour of God. This was to be attained through
righteousness ; only the righteous could God be at peace with
and favour with His love. To attain righteousness must there-
fore be the chief end of man.

55. But man had failed to attain righteousness and had there-
fore come short of the favour of God, and exposed himself to
His wrath. Paul proves this by taking a vast survey of the
history of mankind in pre-Christian times in its two great sections
— the Gentile and the Jewish.

56. The Gentiles failed. It might, indeed, be supposed that
they had not the preliminary conditions for entering on the
pursuit of righteousness at all, because they did not enjoy the
advantage of a special revelation. But Paul holds that even the
heathen know enough of God to be aware of the obligation to
follow after righteousness. There is a natural revelation of God
in His works and in the human conscience sufficient to enlighten
men as to this duty. But the heathen, instead of making use of
this light, wantonly extinguished it. They were not willing to
retain God in their knowledge and to fetter themselves with the
restraints which a pure knowledge of Him imposed. They
corrupted the idea of God in order to feel at ease in an immoral
life. The revenge of nature came upon them in the darkening
and confusion of their intellects. They fell into such insensate
folly as to change the glorious and incorruptible nature of God
into the images of men and beasts, birds and reptiles. This

48 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

intellectual degeneracy was followed by still deeper moral de-
generacy. God, when they forsook Him, let them go ; and,
when His restraining grace was removed, down they rushed into
the depths of moral putridity. Lust and passion got the mastery
of them, and their life became a mass of moral disease. In the
end of the first chapter of Romans the features of their condition
are sketched in colours that might be borrowed from the abode
of devils, but were literally taken, as is too plainly proved by the
pages even of Gentile historians, from the condition of the cul-
tured heathen nations at that time. This, then, was the history
of one half of mankind : it had utterly fallen from righteousness
and exposed itself to the wrath of God, which is revealed from
heaven against all unrighteousness of men.

57. The Jews were the other half of the world. Had they
succeeded where the Gentiles had failed ? They enjoyed, indeed,
great advantages over the heathen ; for they possessed the
oracles of God, in which the divine nature was exhibited in a
form which rendered it inaccessible to human perversion, and
the divine law was written with equal plainness in the same form.
But had they profited by these advantages ? It is one thing to
know the law and another thing to do it ; but it is doing, not
knowing, which is righteousness. Had they, then, fulfilled the
will of God, which they knew? Paul had lived in the same
Jerusalem in which Jesus assailed the corruption and hypocrisy
of scribes and Pharisees ; he had looked closely at the lives of
the representative men of his nation ; and he does not hesitate to
charge the Jews in mass with the very same sins as the Gentiles ;
nay, he says that through them the name of God was blasphemed
among the Gentiles. They boasted of their knowledge and were
the bearers of the torch of truth, whose fierce blaze exposed the
sins of the heathen. But their religion was a bitter criticism oi
the conduct of others. They forgot to examine their own con-
duct by the same light ; and, whilst they were repeating, Do not
steal, Do not commit adultery, and a multitude of other com-
mandments, they were indulging in these sins themselves. What

HIS GOSPEL. 49

good in these circumstances did their knowledge do them? It
only condemned them the more ; for their sin was against light.
Whilst the heathen knew so little that their sins were compara-
tively innocent, the sins of the Jews were conscious and pre-
sumptuous. Their boasted superiority was therefore inferiority.
They were more deeply condemned than the Gentiles they
despised, and exposed to a heavier curse.

58. The truth is, Gentiles and Jews had both failed for the
same reason. Trace these two streams of human life back to
their sources and you come at last to a point where they are not
two streams but one ; and, before the bifurcation took place,
something had happened which predetermined the failure of
both. In Adam all fell, and from him all, both Gentiles and
Jews, inherited a nature too weak for the arduous attainment of
righteousness ; human nature is carnal now, not spiritual, and
therefore unequal to this supreme spiritual achievement. The
Law could not alter this ; it had no creative power to make the
carnal spiritual. On the contrary, it aggravated the evil. It
actually multiplied offences ; for its clear and full description of
sins, which would have been an incomparable guide to a sound
nature, turned into temptation for a morbid one. The very
knowledge of sin tempts to its commission ; the very command
not to do anything is a reason to a diseased nature for doing it.
This was the effect of the law : it multiplied and aggravated
transgressions. And this was God's intention. Not that He
was the author of sin ; but, like a skilful physician, who has
sometimes to use appliances to bring a sore to a head before
he heals it, He allowed the heathen to go their own way and
gave the Jews the law, that the sin of human nature might
exhibit all its inherent qualities, before He intervened to heal it.
The healing, however, was His real purpose all the time : He
concluded all under sin that He might have mercy upon all

59. Man's extremity was God's opportunity ; not, indeed, in the
sense that one way of salvation having failed, God devised

D

50 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

another. The Law had never, in His intention, been a way of
salvation. It was only a means of illustrating the need of
salvation. But the moment when this demonstration was com-
plete was the signal for God to produce His method, which He
had kept locked in His counsel through the generations of human
probation. It had never been His intention to permit man to
fail of his true end. Only He allowed time to prove that fallen
man could never reach righteousness by his own efforts ; and,
when the righteousness of man had been demonstrated to be a
failure, He brought forth His secret — the righteousness of God.
This was Christianity ; this was the sum and issue of the mission
of Christ — the conferring upon man, as a free gift, of that which
is indispensable to his blessedness, but which he had failed
himself to attain. It is a divine act ; it is grace ; and man
obtains it by acknowledging that he has failed himself to attain it
and by accepting it from God ; it is got by faith only. It is " the
righteousness of God, by the faith of Jesus Christ, unto all and
upon all them that believe."

60. Those who thus receive it enter at once into that position
of peace and favour with God in which human felicity consists
and which was the goal aimed at by Paul when he was striving
for righteousness by the law. " Being justified by faith, we have
peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom also we
have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice
in hope of the glory of God." It is a sunny life of joy, peace and
hope which those lead who have come to know this gospel.
There may be trials in it ; but, when a man's life is reposing in
the attainment of its true end, trials are light and all things work
together for good

61. This righteousness of God is for all the children of men —
not for the Jews only, but for the Gentiles also. The demonstra-
tion of man's inability to attain righteousness was made, in
accordance with the divine purpose, in both sections of the
human race ; and its completion was the signal for the exhibition
of God's grace to both alike. The work of Christ was not for the

HIS GOSPEL. 51

children of Abraham, but for the children of Adam. "As in
Adam all died, so in Christ shall all be made alive." The
Gentiles did not need to undergo circumcision and to keep the
Law in order to obtain salvation ; for the law was no part of
salvation ; it belonged entirely to the preliminary demonstration
of man's failure ; and, when it had accomplished this service, it
was ready to vanish away. The only human condition of obtaining
God's righteousness is faith ; and this is as easy for Gentile as
Jew. This was an inference from Paul's own experience. It was
not as a Jew, but as a man, that he had been dealt with in his
conversion. No Gentile could have been less entitled to obtain
salvation by merit than he had been. So far from the Law
raising him a single step towards salvation, it had removed him
to a greater distance from God than any Gentile, and cast him
into a deeper condemnation. How, then, could it profit the
Gentiles to be placed in this position ? In obtaining the right-
eousness in which he was now rejoicing he had done nothing
which was not competent to any human being.

62. It was this universal love of God revealed in the gospel
which inspired Paul with unbounded admiration for Christianity.
His sympathies had been cribbed, cabined and confined in a
narrow conception of God ; the new faith uncaged his heart and
let it forth into the free and sunny air. God became a new God
to him. He calls his discovery the mystery which had been
hidden from ages and generations, but had been revealed to him
and his fellow-apostles. It seemed to him to be the secret of the
ages and to be destined to usher in a new era, far better than any
the world had ever seen. What kings and prophets had not
known had been revealed to him. It had burst on him like the
dawn of a new creation. God was now offering to every man the
supreme felicity of life — that righteousness which had been the
vain endeavour of the past ages.

63. This secret of the new epoch had not, indeed, been entirely
unanticipated in the past It had been " witnessed by the law
and the prophets." The Law could bear witness to it only

52 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

negatively by demonstrating its necessity. But the prophets
anticipated it more positively. David, for example, described
"the blessedness of the man unto whom God imputed righteous-
ness without works." Still more clearly had Abraham anticipated
it. He was a justified man ; and it was by faith, not by works,
that He was justified — " he believed God, and it was imputed unto
him for righteousness." The Law had nothing to do with his
justification, for it was not in existence for four centuries after-
wards. Nor had circumcision anything to do with it, for he was
justified before this rite was instituted. In short, it was as a man,
not as a Jew, that he was dealt with by God, and God might deal
with any human being in the same way. It had once made the
thorny road of legal righteousness sacred to Paul to think that
Abraham and the prophets had trodden it before him ; but now
he knew that their life of religious joy and psalms of holy calm
were inspired by quite different experiences, which were now
diffusing the peace of heaven through his heart also. But only
the first streaks of dawn had been descried by them ; the perfect
day had broken in his own time.

64. Paul's discovery of this way of salvation was an actual
experience ; he simply knew that Christ, in the moment when He
met him, had placed him in that position of peace and favour
with God which he had long sighed for in vain, and, as time went
on, he felt more and more that in this position he was enjoying
the true blessedness of life. His mission henceforth would be to
herald this discovery in its simple and concrete reality under the
name of the Righteousness of God. But a mind like his could
not help inquiring how it was that the possession of Christ did so
much for him. In the Arabian wilderness he pondered over this
question, and the gospel he subsequently preached contained a
luminous answer to it.

65. From Adam his children derive a sad double heritage — a
debt of guilt, which they cannot reduce, but are constantly
increasing, and a carnal nature, which is incapable of righteous-

HIS GOSPEL. 53

ness. These are the two features of the religious condition of
fallen man, and they are the double source of all his woes. But
Christ is a new Adam, a new head of humanity, and those who
are connected with Him by faith become heirs of a double
heritage of a precisely opposite kind. On the one hand, just as
through our birth in the first Adam's line we get inevitably
entangled in guilt, like a child born into a family which is
drowned in debt, so through our birth in the line of the second
Adam we get involved in a boundless heritage of merit, which
Christ, as the Head of His family makes the common property
of its members. This extinguishes the debt of our guilt and
makes us rich in Christ's righteousness. "As by one man's dis-
obedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one
shall many be made righteous." On the other hand, just as
Adam transmitted to his posterity a carnal nature, alien to God
and unfit for righteousness, so the new Adam imparts to the race
of which He is the Head, a spiritual nature, akin to God and
delighting in righteousness. The nature of man, according to
Paul, normally consists of three sections— -body, soul, and spirit^
In his £.ri.ginaI-CQnstitutioii these occupied definite relations of
superiority and subordination to one another, the_spirit being
supreme, the body undermost, and the soul occupying the
middle position. L But the fall disarranged this order, and all sin
consists in the usurpation by the body or the soul of the place of
the spirit."^ In fallen man these two inferior sections of human
nature, which together form what Paul calls the Flesh, or that
side of human nature which looks towards the world and time,
have taken possession of the throne and completely rule the life,
whilst the spirit, the side of man which looks towards God and
eternity, has been dethroned and reduced to a condition of
inefficiency and death. Christ restores the lost predominance of
the spiriLof man hy taking possession^of it by His own Spirit.
His Spirit dwells in the human spirit, vivifying it and sustaining
it in such growing strength that it becomes more and more the
sovereign part of the human constitution. The man ceases to be

54 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

carnal and becomes spiritual ; he is led by the Spirit of God and
becomes more and more harmonious with all that is holy and
divine. The flesh does not, indeed, easily submit to the loss of
supremacy. It clogs and obstructs the spirit and fights to regain
possession of the throne. Paul has described this struggle in
sentences of terrible vividness, in which all generations of Chris-
tians have recognised the features of their deepest experience.
But the issue of the struggle is not doubtful. Sin shall not again
have dominion over those in whom Christ's Spirit dwells, or
dislodge them from their standing in the favour of God. " Neither
death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities nor powers, nor
things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any
other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

66. Such are the bare outlines of the gospel which Paul brought
back with him from the Arabian solitudes and afterwards
preached with unwearied enthusiasm. ^ It could not but be mixed
up in his mind and in his writings with the peculiarities of his
own experience as a Jew, and these make it difficult for us to
grasp his system in some of its details. J The belief in which he
was brought up, that no man could be saved without becoming a
Jew, and the notions about the Law from which he had to cut
himself free lie very distant from our modern sympathies ; yet his
theology could not shape itself in his mind except in contrast to
these misconceptions. This became subsequently still more in-
evitable when his own old errors met him as the watchwords of a
party within the Christian Church itself, against which he had to
wage a long and relentless war. Though this conflict forced his
views into the clearest expression, it encumbered them with
references to feelings and beliefs which are now dead to the
interest of mankind. But, in spite of these drawbacks, the Gospel
of Paul remains a possession of incalculable value to the human
race. Its searching investigation of the failure and the wants of
human nature, its wonderful unfolding of the wisdom of God in

hui

HIS GOSPEL 55

the education of the pre-Christian world, and its exhibition of
the depth and universality of the divine love are among the
profoundest elements of revelation.J

67. But it is in its conception of Christ that Paul's gospel wears
its imperishable crown. The Evangelists sketched in a hundred
traits of simple and affecting beauty the fashion of the earthly
life of the man Christ Jesus, and in these the model of human
conduct will always have to be sought ; but to Paul was reserved
the task of making known, in its heights and depths, the work
which the Son of God accomplished as the Saviour of the race.
He scarcely ever refers to the incidents of Christ's earthly life,
although here and there he betrays that he knew them well. To
him Christ was ever the glorious Being, shining with the splendour
of heaven, who appeared to him on the way to Damascus, and
the Saviour who caught him up into the heavenly peace and joy
of a new life. When the Church of Christ thinks of her Head
as the deliverer of the soul from sin and death, as a spiritualising
presence ever with her and at work in every believer, and as the
Lord over all things who will come again without sin unto salva-
tion, it is in forms of thought given her by the Holy Ghost
through the instrumentality of this apostlfc,

CHAPTER V.
THE WORK AWAITING THE WORKER.

Paragraphs 68-78.

68-70. Eight years of Comparative Inactivity at Tarsus,

Gentiles admitted to Christian Church.

71, 72- Paul discovered by Barnabas and brought to Antioch.
His Work there.

73-78. THE KNOWN WORLD OF THAT PERIOD.

75. The Greeks ; 76. The Romans ; 77. The Jews ;
78. Barbarians and Slaves.

CHAPTER V.

THE WORK AWAITING THE WORKER.

68. PAUL was now in possession of his gospel and was aware
that it was to be the mission of his life to preach it to the Gentiles ;
but he had still to wait a long time before his peculiar career
commenced. We hear scarcely anything of him for other seven
or eight years ; and yet we can only guess what may have been the
reasons of Providence for imposing on His servant so long a time
of waiting.

69. There may have been personal reasons for it connected
with Paul's own spiritual history ; because waiting is a common
instrument of providential discipline for those to whom exceptional
work has been appointed. A public reason may have been that
he was too obnoxious to the Jewish authorities to be tolerated yet
in those scenes where Christian activity commanded any notice.
He had attempted to preach in Damascus, where his conversion
had taken place, but was immediately forced to flee from the fury
of the Jews ; and, going thence to Jerusalem and beginning to
testify as a Christian, he found the place in two or three weeks too
hot to hold him. No wonder ; how could the Jews be expected
to allow the man who had so lately been the chief champion of
their religion to preach the faith which they had employed him to
destroy ? When he fled from Jerusalem, he bent his steps to his
native Tarsus, where for years he remained in obscurity. No
doubt he testified for Christ there to his own family, and there
are some indications that he carried on evangelistic operations in

58 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

his native province of Cilicia : but, if he did so, his work may be
said to have been that of a man in hiding, for it was not in the
central or even in a visible stream of the new religious movement.
70. These are but conjectural reasons for the obscurity of these
years. But there was ojie undoubted reason for the delay of
Paul's career of the greatest possible importance. In this
interval took place that revolution — one of the most momentous
In the history of mankind — by which the Gentiles were admitted
to equal privileges with the Jews in the Church of Christ. This
change proceeded from the original Circle of apostles in Jerusalem,
and Peter, the chief of the apostles, was the instrument of it. By
the vision of the sheet of clean and unclean beasts, which he saw
at Joppa, he was prepared for the part he was to play in this
transaction, and he admitted the Gentile Cornelius, of Caesarea,
and his family to the Church by baptism without circumcision.
This was an innovation involving boundless consequences. It
\y was a necessary preliminary to Paul's mission-work, and subse-
quent events were to show how wise was the divine arrangement
that the first Gentile entrants into the Church should be admitted
by the hands of Peter rather than by those of Paul.

i. As soon as this event had taken place, the arena was clear
for Paul's career, and a door was immediately opened for his
entrance upon it. Almost simultaneously with the baptism of the
Gentile family at Caesarea a great revival broke out among the
Gentiles of the city of Antioch, the capital of Syria. The move-
ment had been begun by fugitives driven by persecution from
Jerusalem, and it was carried on with the sanction of the^apostles,
who ^ent Barnabas, one of their trusted coadjutors^ from Jerusalem
to superintend"]?. This man knew Paul. When the latter first
came to Jerusalem after his conversion and assayed to join himself
to the Christians there, they were all afraid of him, suspecting the
teeth and claws of the wolf beneath the fleece of the sheep. But
Barnabas rose superior to these fears and suspicions, and, having
taken the new convert and heard his story, believed in him and
persuaded the rest to receive him. The intercourse thus begun

THE WORK AWAITING THE WORKER. 59

only lasted a week or two at that time, as Paul had to leave
Jerusalem ; but Barnabas had received a profound impression of
his personality and did not forget him. When he was sent down
to superintend the revival at Antioch, he soon found himself
embarrassed with its magnitude and in need of assistance ; and
the idea occurred to him that Paul was the man he wanted.
Tarsus was not far off, and thither he went to seek him. Haul
accepted his invitation and returned with him to Antioch.

72. The hour he had been waiting for had struck, and he threw
himself into the work of evangelizing the Gentiles with the
enthusiasm of a great nature that found itself at last in its proper
sphere. The movement at once responded to the pressure of
such a hand ; the disciples became so numerous and prominent
that the heathen gave them a new name — that name of
" Christians," which has ever since continued to be the badge of
faith in Christ ; and Antioch, a city of half a million inhabitants,
became the headquarters of Christianity instead of Jerusalem.
Soon a large church was formed, and one of the manifestations
of the zeal with which it was pervaded was a proposal, which
gradually shaped itself into an enthusiastic resolution, to send
forth a mission to the heathen. As a matter of course, Paul was
designated for this service.

73. As we see him thus brought at length face to face with the
task of his life, let us pause to take a brief survey of the world
which he was setting out to conquer. Nothing less was what
he aimed at. In Paul's time the known world was so small a
place, that it did not seem impossible even for a single man to
make a spiritual conquest of it ; and it had been wonderfully
prepared for the new force which was about to assail it.

74. It consisted of a narrow disc of land surrounding the
Mediterranean Sea. That sea deserved at that time the name it
bears, for the world's centre of gravity, which has since shifted to
other latitudes, was in it. The interest of human life was concen-
trated in the southern countries of Europe, the portion of western

60 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

Asia, and the strip of northern Africa which form its shores. In
this little world there were three cities which divided between
them the interest of those ages. These were Rome, Athens, and
Jerusalem, the capitals of the three races — the Romans, the
Greeks and the Jews — which in every sense ruled that old world.
It was not that each of them had mastered a third part of the
circle of civilisation, but each of them had in turn diffused itself
over the whole of it, and either still held its grip or at least had
left imperishable traces of its presence.

75. The Greeks were the first to take possession of the world.
They were the people of cleverness and genius, the perfect
masters of commerce, literature and art. In very early ages they
displayed the instinct for colonisation and sent forth their sons to
find new abodes on the east and the west, far from their native
home. At length there arose among them one who concentrated
in himself the strongest tendencies of the race and by force of
arms extended the dominion of Greece to the borders of India.
The vast empire of Alexander the Great split into pieces at his
death ; but a deposit of Greek life and influence remained in all
the countries over which the deluge of his conquering armies had
swept. Greek cities, such as Antioch in Syria and Alexandria in
Egypt, flourished all over the East ; Greek merchants abounded
in every centre of trade ; Greek teachers taught the literature of
their country in many lands ; and — what was most important of
all — the Greek language became the general vehicle for the
communication of the more serious thought between nation and
nation. Even the Jews in New Testament times read their own
Scriptures in a Greek version, the original Hebrew having become
a dead language. Perhaps the Greek is the most perfect tongue
the world has known, and there was a special providence in its
universal diffusion before Christianity needed a medium of inter-
national communication. The New Testament was written in
Greek, and, wherever the apostles of Christianity travelled, they
were able to make themselves understood in this language.

76. The turn of the Romans came next to obtain possession of

THE WORK AWAITING THE WORKER. 6l

the world. Originally a small clan in the neighbourhood of the
city from which they derived their name, they gradually extended
and strengthened themselves and acquired such skill in the arts
of war and government that they became irresistible conquerors
and marched forth in every direction to make themselves masters
of the globe. They subdued Greece itself and, flowing eastwardsj
seized upon the countries which Alexander and his successors had
ruled. The whole known world, indeed, became theirs from the
Straits of Gibraltar to the utmost East. They did not possess
the genius or geniality of the Greeks ; their qualities were strength
and justice ; and their arts were not those of the poet and the
thinker, but those of the soldier and the judge. They broke
down the. divisions between the tribes of men and compelled
them to be friendly towards each other, because they were all
alike prostrate beneath one iron rule. They pierced the countries
with roads, which connected them with Rome and were such
solid triumphs of engineering skill that some of them remain to
this day. Along these highways the message of the gospel ran.
Thus the Romans also proved to be pioneers for Christianity, for
their authority in so many countries afforded to its first publishers
facility of movement and protection from the arbitrary justice of
local tribunals.

77. Meanwhile the third nation of antiquity had also completed
its conquest of the world. Not by force of arms did thejews diffuse
themselves, as the Greeks and Romans had done. For centuries,
indeed, they had dreamed of the coming of a warlike hero, whose
prowess should outshine that of the most celebrated Gentile
conquerors. But he never came : and their occupation of the
centres of civilisation had to take place in a more silent way.
There is no change in the habits of any nation more striking than
that which passed over the Jewish race in that interval of four
centuries between Malachi and Matthew of which we have no
record in the sacred Scriptures. In the Old Testament we see
the Jews pent within the narrow limits of Palestine, engaged
mainly in agricultural pursuits and jealously guarding themselves

62 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

from intermingling with foreign nations. In the New Testament
we find them still, indeed, clinging with a desperate tenacity to
Jerusalem and to the idea of their own separateness ; but their
habits and abodes have been completely changed : they have
given up agriculture and betaken themselves with extraordinary
eagerness and success to commerce ; and with this object in view
they have diffused themselves everywhere — over Africa, Asia,
Europe — and there is not a city of any importance where they
are not to be found. By what steps this extraordinary change
came about it were hard to tell and long to trace. But it had
taken place ; and this turned out to be a circumstance of extreme
importance for the early history of Christianity. £\Vherever the
Jews weie settled, they had their synagogues, their sacred Scrip-
tures, their uncompromising belief in the One true God. ""! Not
only so ; their synagogues everywhere attracted proselytes from
the surrounding Gentile populations. The heathen religions were
at that period in a state of utter collapse. The smaller nations
had lost faith in their deities, because they had not been able to
defend them from the victorious Greeks and Romans. But the
conquerors had for other reasons equally lost faith in their own
gods. It was an age of scepticism, religious decay and moral
corruption. But there are always natures which must possess a
faith in which they can trust. These were in search of a religion,
and many of them found refuge from the coarse and incredible
myths of the gods of polytheism in the purity and monotheism of
the Jewish creed. The fundamental ideas of this creed are also
the foundations of the Christian faith. Wherever the messengers
•, , of Christianity travelled, they met with people with whom they
had many religious conceptions in common. Their first sermons
were delivered in synagogues, their first converts were Jews and
proselytes. The synagogue was the bridge by which Christianity^x-
crossed over to the heathen.

78. Such, then, was the world which Paul was setting out to
conquer. It was a world everywhere pervaded with these three
influences. But there were two other elements of population

THE WORK AWAITING THE WORKER. 63

which require to be kept in mind, as both of them supplied
numerous converts to the early preachers : there

inhabitants of the various countries ; and there were the slaves,
who were either captives taken in war or their descendants, and
were liable to be shifted from place to place, being sold according
to the necessities or caprices of their masters. A religion whose
chief boast it was to preach glad tidings to the poor could not
neglect these down-trodden classes, and, although the conflict of
Christianity with the forces of the time which had possession of
the fate of the w.orld naturally attracts attention, it must not
be forgotten that its best triumph has always consisted in the
sweetening and brightening of the lot of the humble.

CHAPTER VI.
HIS MISSIONARY TRAVELS.

Paragraphs 79-114.

79-88. THE FIRST JOURNEY.
79, 80. His Companions.
81. Cyprus. Change of his Name.
82-87. The Mainland of Asia Minor.

83. Desertion of Mark ; 84. Antioch-in-Pisidia
and Iconium ; 85-87. Lystra and Derbe }'
88. Return.

89-108. THE SECOND JOURNEY.
90, 91. Separation from Barnabas.
92, 93. Unrecorded Half of the Journey.
94-96. Crossing to Europe.
97-108. Greece.

97-101. Macedonia.

99. Women and the Gospel ; 100. Liberality

of Churches.
102-108. Achaia.

103-105. Athens j 106-108. Corinth.

109-114. THE THIRD JOURNEY.

Ephesus ; Polemic against Superstition.

CHAPTER VI.

HIS MISSIONARY TRAVELS.

The First Journey.

79. FROM the beginning it had been the wont of the preachers
of Christianity not to go alone on their expeditions, but two
and two. Paul improved on this practice by going generally with
two companions, one of them being a younger man, who perhaps
took charge of the travelling arrangements. On his first journey
his comrades were Barnabas and John Mark, the nephew of
Barnabas.

80. We have already seen that Barnabas may be called the
discoverer of Paul ; and, when they set out on this journey
together, he was probably in a position to act as Paul's patron ;
for he enjoyed much consideration in the Christian community.
Converted apparently on the day of Pentecost, he had played a
leading part in the subsequent events. He was a man of high
social position, a landed proprietor in the island of Cyprus ; and he
sacrificed all to the new movement into which he had been drawn.
In the outburst of enthusiasm which led the first Christians to
share their property with one another, he sold his estate and laid
the money at the apostles' feet. He was constantly employed
thereafter in the work of preaching, and he had so remarkable a
gift of eloquence that he was called the Sonof Exhortation. An
incident which occurred at a later stage of this journey gives us a
glimpse of the appearance of the two men. When the inhabitants
of Lystra mistook them for gods, they called Barnabas Jupiter

66 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

and Paul Mercury. Now, in ancient art Jupiter was always
represented as a tall, majestic and benignant figure, while Mercury
was the small, swift messenger of the father of gods and men.
Probably it appeared, therefore, that the large, gracious, paternal
Barnabas was the head and director of the expedition, while
Paul, little and eager, was the subordinate. The direction in
which they set out, too, was the one which Barnabas might
naturally have been expected to choose. They went first to
Cyprus, the island where his property had been and many of his
friends still were. It lay eighty miles to the south-west of
Seleucia, the seaport of Antioch, and they might reach it on the
very day they left their headquarters.

8 1. But, although Barnabas appeared to be the leader, the
good man probably knew already that the humble words of the
Baptist might be used by himself with reference to his companion,
" He must increase, but I must decrease." At all events, as soon
as their work commenced in earnest, this was shown to be the
relation between them. After going through the length of the
island, from east to west, evangelizing, they arrived at Paphos,
its chief town, and there the problems they had come out to face
met them in the most concentrated form. Paphos was the seat
of the worship of Venus, the goddess of love, who was said to
have been born of the foam of the sea at this very spot ; and her
worship was carried on with the wildest licentiousness. It was a
picture in miniature of Greece sunk in moral decay. Paphos was
also the seat of the Roman government, and in the proconsular
chair sat a man, Sergius Paulus, whose noble character but utter
lack of certain faith formed a companion picture of the inability
of Rome at that epoch to meet the deepest necessities of her best
sons. In the proconsular court, playing upon the inquirer's
credulity, a Jewish sorcerer and quack, named Elymas, was
flourishing, whose arts were a picture of the lowest depths to
which the Jewish character could sink. fThe whole scene was a
kind of miniature of the world whose evils the missionaries had
set forth to cure. (In the presence of these exigencies Paul

HIS MISSIONARY TRAVELS : FIRST JOURNEY. 67

unfolded for the first time the mighty powers which lay in him,
An access of the Spirit seized him and enabled him to overcome
all obstacles. He covered the Jewish magician with disgrace,
converted the Roman governor, and founded in the town a
Christian church in opposition to the Greek shrine. From that
hour Barnabas sank into the second place and Paul took his
natural position as the head of the mission. We no longer read,
as heretofore, of " Barnabas and Saul," but always of " Paul and
Barnabas." The subordinate had become the leader ; and, as if
to mark that he had become a new man and taken a new place,
he was no longer called by the Jewish name of Saul, which up to
this point he had borne, but by the name of Paul, which has ever
since been his designation among Christians.

82. The next move was as obviously the choice of the new
leader as the first one had been due to Barnabas. They struck
across the sea to Perga, a town near the middle of the southern
coast of Asia Minor, then right up, a hundred miles, into the
mainland, and thence eastward to a point almost straight north of
Tarsus. This route carried them in a kind of half circuit through
the districts of Pamphylia, Pisidia and Lycaonia, which border,
to the west and north, on Cilicia, Paul's native province ; so that,
if it be the case that he had evangelized Cilicia already, he was
now merely extending his labours to the nearest surrounding
regions.

83. At Perga, the starting-point of this second half of the
journey, a misfortune befell the expedition : John Mark deserted
his companions and sailed for home. It may be that the new
position assumed by Paul had given him offence, though his
generous uncle felt no such grudge at that which was the ordinance
of nature and of God. But it is more likely that the cause of his
withdrawal was dismay at the dangers upon which they were
about to enter. These were such as might well strike terror even
into resolute hearts. Behind Perga rose the snow-clad peaks of
the Taurus mountains, which had to be penetrated through narrow
passes, where crazy bridges spanned the rushing torrents, and the

68 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

castles of robbers, who watched for passing travellers to pounce
upon, were hidden in positions so inaccessible that even the
Roman arms had not been able to exterminate them. When
these preliminary dangers were surmounted, the prospect beyond
was anything but inviting : the country to the north of the Taurus
was a vast table-land, more elevated than the summits of the
highest mountains in this country, and scattered over with solitary
lakes, irregular mountain masses and tracts of desert, where the
population was rude and spoke an almost endless variety of
dialects. These things terrified Mark, and he drew back. But
his companions took their lives in their hand and went forward.
To them it was enough that there were multitudes of perishing
souls there, needing the salvation of which they were the heralds ;
and Paul knew that there were scattered handfuls of his own
people in these remote regions of the heathen.

84. Can we conceive what their procedure was like in the
towns they visited ? It is difficult, indeed, to picture it to our-
selves. As we try to see them with the mind's eye entering any
place, we naturally think of them as the most important personages
in it ; to us their entry is as august as if they had been carried on
a car of victory. Very different, however, was the reality. They
entered a town as quietly and as unnoticed as any two strangers
who may walk into one of our towns any morning. Their first
care was to get a lodging ; and then they had to seek for employ-
ment, for they worked at their trade wherever they went. Nothing
could be more commonplace. Who could dream that this travel-
stained man, going from one tentmaker's door to another, seeking
for work, was carrying the future of the world beneath his robe !
When the Sabbath came round, they would cease from toil, like
the other Jews in the place, and repair to the synagogue. They
joined in the psalms and prayers with the other worshippers and
listened to the reading of the Scriptures. After this the presiding
elder might ask if anyone present had a word of exhortation to
deliver. This was Paul's opportunity. He would rise and, with
outstretched hand, begin to speak. At once the audience recog-

HIS MISSIONARY TRAVELS : FIRST JOURNEY. 69

nised the accents of the cultivated rabbi : and the strange voice
won their attention. Taking up the passages which had been
read, he would soon be moving forward on the stream of Jewish
history, till he led up to the astounding announcement that the
Messiah hoped for by their fathers and promised by their
prophets had come ; and he had been sent among them as His
apostle. Then would follow the story of Jesus ; it was true, He
had been rejected by the authorities of Jerusalem and crucified,
but this could be shown to have taken place in accordance with
prophecy ; and His resurrection from the dead was an infallible
proof that He had been sent of God : now He was exalted a
Prince and a Saviour to give repentance unto Israel and the
remission of sins. We can easily imagine the sensation produced
by such a sermon from such a preacher and the buzz of conver-
sation which would arise among the congregation after the dis-
mission of the synagogue. During the week it would become the
talk of the town : and Paul was willing to converse at his work
or in the leisure of the evening with any who might desire further
information. Next Sabbath the synagogue would be crowded,
not with Jews only, but Gentiles also, who were curious to see
the strangers ; and Paul now unfolded the secret that salvation
by Jesus Christ was as free to Gentiles as to Jews. This was
generally the signal for the Jews to contradict and blaspheme ;
and, turning his back on them, Paul addressed himself to the
Clentiles. But meantime the fanaticism of the Jews was roused,
and they either stirred up the mob or secured the interest of the
authorities against the strangers ; and in a storm of popular
tumult or by the breath of authority the messengers of the gospel
were swept out of the town. This was what happened at Antioch
in Pisidia, their first halting-place in the interior of Asia Minor ;
and it was repeated in a hundred instances in Paul's subsequent
life.

85. Sometimes they did not get off so easily. At Lystra, for
example, they found themselves in a population of rude heathens,
who were at first so charmed with Paul's winning words and

7<D THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

impressed with the appearance of the preachers that they took
them for gods and were on the point of offering sacrifice to them.
This filled the missionaries with horror, and they rejected the
intentions of the crowd with unceremonious haste. A sudden
revolution in the popular sentiment ensued, and Paul was stoned
and cast out of the city apparently dead.

86. Such were the scenes of excitement and peril through
which they had to pass in this remote region. But their enthusiasm
never flagged ; they never thought of turning back, but, when
they were driven out of one city, moved forward to another.
And, total as their discomfiture sometimes appeared, they quitted
no city without leaving behind them a little band of converts —
perhaps a few Jews, a few more proselytes, and a number of
Gentiles. The-^rospel found those for whom it was intencjejd —
penitents burdened with sin, souls dissatisfied with the world and
their ancestral religion, hearts yearning for divine sympathy and
love ; " as many as were ordained to eternal life believed ; " and
these formed in every city the nucleus of a Christian church.
Even at Lystra, where the defeat seemed so utter, a little group
of faithful hearts gathered round the mangled body of the apostle
outside the city gates ; Eunice and Lois were there with tender
womanly ministrations ; and young Timothy, as he looked down
on the pale and bleeding face, felt his heart for ever knit to the
hero who had courage to suffer to the death for his faith.

87. In the intense love of such hearts Paul received compen-
sation for suffering and injustice. If) as some suppose, the people
of this region formed part of the Galatian churches, we see from
his Epistle to them the kind of love they gave him. They
received him, he says, as an angel of God, nay, as Jesus Christ
Himself; they were ready to have plucked out their eyes and
given them to him. They were people of rude kindness and
headlong impulses ; their native religion was one of excitement
and demonstrativeness, and they carried these characteristics
into the new faith they had adopted. They were filled with joy
and the Holy Ghost, and the revival spread on every hand with

HIS MISSIONARY TRAVELS : SECOND JOURNEY. 71

great rapidity, till the word, sounding out from the little Christian
communities, was heard all along the slopes of Taurus and down
the glens of the Cestrus and Halys. Paul's warm heart could
not but enjoy such an outburst of affection. He responded to it
by giving in return his own deep love. The towns mentioned in
their itinerary are the Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and
Derbe ; but when at the last of them he had finished his course
and the way lay open to him to descend by the Cilician Gates to
Tarsus and thence get back to Antioch, he preferred to return by
the way he had come. [_In spite of .the most imminent danger he
revisited all these places, to see his dear converts again and cheer
them in face of persecution ; and_he ordained eldersjinjsvery city
to watch over the churches in his absence.

88. At length the missionaries descended again from these
uplands to the southern coast and sailed back Jto. Antioch, from
which they had set out. Worn with toil and suffering, but flushed
with the joy of success, they appeared among those who had sent
them forth and had doubtless been following them with their
prayers ; and, like discoverers returned from the finding of a new
world, they related the miracles of grace they had witnessed in
the strange world of the heathen.

The Second Journey.

89. In his first journey Paul may be said to have been only
trying his wings ; for his course, adventurous though it was, only
swept in a limited circle round his native province. In his
second journey he performed a far more distant and perilous
flight Indeed, this journey was not only the greatest he achieved
but perhaps the most momentous recorded in the annals of the
human race. In its issues it far outrivalled the expedition of
Alexander the Great, when he carried the arms and civilisation of
Greece into the heart of Asia, or that of Caesar, when he landed
on the shores of Britain, or even the voyage of Columbus, when
he discovered a new world. Yet, when he set out on it, he had

72 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

no idea of the magnitude which it was to assume or even the
direction which it was to take. After enjoying a short rest at the
close of the first journey, he said to his fellow-missionary, " Let
us go again and visit our brethren in every city where we have
preached the word of the Lord and see how they do." It was the
parental longing to see his spiritual children which was drawing
him ; but God had far more extensive designs, which opened up
before him as he went forward.

90. Unfortunately the beginning of this journey was marred by
a dispute between the two friends who meant to perform it
together. The occasion of their difference was the offer of John
Mark to accompany them. No doubt when this young man saw
Paul and Barnabas returning safe and sound from the undertaking
which he had deserted, he recognised what a mistake he had
made ; and he now wished to retrieve his error by rejoining them.
Barnabas naturally wished to take his nephew, but Paul abso-
lutely refused. The one missionary, a man of easy kindliness,
urged the duty of forgiveness and the effect which a rebuff might
have on a beginner ; whilst the other, full of zeal for God, repre-
sented the danger of making so sacred a work in any way
dependent on one who could not be relied upon, for " confidence
in an unfaithful man in time of trouble is like a broken tooth or a
foot out of joint." We cannot now tell which of them was in the
right or if both were partly wrong. Both of them, at all events,
suffered for it : Paul had to part in anger from the man to whom
he probably owed more than to any other human being ; and
Barnabas was separated from the grandest spirit of the age.

91. They never met again. This was not due, however, to an
unchristian continuation of their quarrel ; the heat of passion
soon cooled down and the old love returned. Paul mentions
Barnabas with honour in his writings, and in the very last of his
Epistles he sends for Mark to come to him at Rome, expressly
adding that he is profitable to him for ministry — the very thing
he had disbelieved about him before. In the meantime, however,
their difference separated them. They agreed to divide between

HIS MISSIONARY TRAVELS : SECOND JOURNEY. 73

them the region they had evangelized together. Barnabas and
Mark went away to Cyprus ; and Paul undertook to visit the
churches on the mainland. As companion he took with him
Silas, or Silvanus, in the place of Barnabas ; and he had not
proceeded far on his new journey when he met with one to take
the place of Mark. This was Timothy, a convert he had made
at Lystra in his first journey ; he was youthful and gentle ; and
he continued a faithful companion and a constant comfort to the
apostle to the end of his life.

92. In pursuance of the purpose with which he had set out,
Paul commenced this journey by revisiting the churches in whose
founding he had taken part. Beginning at Antioch and pro-
ceeding in a north-westerly direction, he did this work in Syria,
Cilicia and other parts, till he reached the centre of Asia Minor,
where the primary object of his journey was completed. But,
when a man is on the right road, all sorts of opportunities open
up before him. When he had passed through the provinces which
he had visited before, new desires to penetrate still farther began
to fire his mind, and Providence opened up the way. He still
went forward in the same direction through Phrygia and Galatia.
Bithynia, a large province lying along the shore of the Black
Sea, and Asia, a densely populated province in the west of Asia
Minor, seemed to invite him and he wished to enter them. But
the Spirit who guided his footsteps indicated, by some means
unknown to us, that these provinces were shut to him in the
meantime ; and, pushing onwards in the direction in which his
divine Guide permitted him to go, he found himself at Troas, a
town on the north-west coast of Asia Minor.

93. Thus he had travelled from Antioch in the south-east to
Troas in the north-west of Asia Minor, a distance as far as from
Land's End to John o' Groat's, evangelizing all the way. It
must have taken months, perhaps even years. Yet of this long,
laborious period we possess no details whatever except such
features of his intercourse with the Galatians as may be gathered

74 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL,

from the Epistle to that church. The truth is that, thrilling as
are the notices of Paul's career given in the Acts, this record is a
very meagre and imperfect one, and his life was far fuller of
adventure, of labours and sufferings for Christ, than even Luke's
narrative would lead us to suppose. The plan of the Acts is to
tell only what was most novel and characteristic in each journey,
while it passes over, for instance, all his repeated visits to the
same scenes. There are thus great blanks in the history, which
were in reality as full of interest as the portions of his life which
are fully described. There is a startling proof of this in an
Epistle which he wrote within the period covered by the Acts of
the Apostles. His argument calling upon him to enumerate some
of his outstanding adventures, " Are they ministers of Christ ? "
he asks, " I am more ; in labours more abundant, in stripes above
measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft. Of the Jews
five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten
with rods. Once was I stoned. Thrice I suffered shipwreck. A
night and a day have I been in the deep. In journeyings often,
in perils of water, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own
countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in
perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false
brethren ; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in
hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness." Now,
of the items of this extraordinary catalogue the book of Acts
mentions very few : of the five Jewish scourgings it notices not
one, of the three Roman beatings only one ; the one stoning it
records, but not one of the three shipwrecks, for the shipwreck so
fully detailed in the Acts happened later. It was no part of the
design of Luke to exaggerate the figure of the hero he was
painting ; his brief and modest narrative comes far short even of
the reality ; and, as we pass over the few simple words into which
he condenses the story of months or years, our imagination
requires to be busy, filling up the outline with toils and pains at
least equal to those whose memory he has preserved

HIS MISSIONARY TRAVELS: SECOND JOURNEY. 75

94. It would appear that Paul reached Troas under the direc-
tion of the guiding Spirit without being aware whither his steps
were next to be turned. But could he doubt what the divine
intention was when, gazing across the silver streak of the
Hellespont, he beheld the shores of Europe on the other side ?
He was now within the charmed circle where for ages civilisation
had had her home ; and he could not be entirely ignorant of those
stories of war and enterprise and those legends of love and valour
which have made it for ever bright and dear to the heart of man-
kind. At only four miles' distance lay the Plain of Troy, where
Europe and Asia encountered each other in the struggle cele-
brated in Homer's immortal song. Not far off Xerxes, sitting on a
marble throne, reviewed the three millions of Asiatics with whicl
he meant to bring Europe to his feet. On the other side of that
narrow strait lay Greece and Rome, the centres from which
issued the learning, the commerce and the armies which governed
the world. Could his heart, so ambitious for the glory of Christ,
fail to be fired with the desire to cast himself upon these
strongholds, or could he doubt that the Spirit was leading him
forward to this enterprise ? He knew that Greece, with all her
wisdom, lacked that knowledge which makes wise unto salvation,
and that the Romans, though they were the conquerors of this
world, did not know the way of winning an inheritance in the
world that is to come ; but in his breast he carried the secret
which they both required.

95. It may have been such thoughts, dimly moving in his mind,
that projected themselves into the vision which he saw at Troas ;
or was it the vision which first awakened the idea of crossing to
Europe ? As he lay asleep, with the murmur of the >Egean in his
ears, he saw a man standing on the opposite coast, on which he
had been looking before he went to rest, beckoning and crying,
" Come over into Macedonia and help us." That figure repre-
_sented__Europe, and its cry for help Europe's need of Christ.

Paul recognised in it a divine summons ; and the very next
sunset which bathed the Hellespont in its golden light shone

76 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

upon his figure seated on the deck of a ship whose prow was
moving towards the shore of Macedonia.

96. In this passage of Paul, from Asia to Europe, a great
providential decision was taking effect, of which, as children of
the West, we cannot think without the profoundest thankfulness.
Christianity arose in Asia and among an Oriental people ; and it
might have been expected to spread first among those races to
which the Jews were most akin. Instead of coming west, it might
have gone eastwards. It might have penetrated into Arabia and
taken possession of those regions where the faith of the False
Prophet now holds sway. It might have visited the wandering
tribes of Central Asia, and, piercing its way down through the
passes of the Himalayas, reared its temples on the banks of the
Ganges, the Indus and the Godavery. It might have travelled
farther east to deliver the swarming millions of China from the
cold secularism of Confucius. Had it done so, missionaries from
India and Japan might have been coming to England at the
present day to tell the story of the Cross. But Providence con-
ferred on Ejurope a blessed priority, and the fate of our continent
was decided when Paul crossed the y£gean.

97. As Greece lay nearer than Rome to the shore of Asia, its
conquest for Christ was the great achievement of this second
missionary journey Like the rest of the world it was at that time
under the sway of Rome, and the Romans had divided it into
two provinces — Macedonia in the north and Achaia in the south.
Macedonia was therefore the first scene of Paul's Greek mission.
It was traversed from east to west by a great Roman road, along
which the missionary moved, and the places where we have
accounts of his labours are Philippi, Thessalonica and Bercea.

98. The Greek character in this northern province was much
v less corrupted than in the more polished society to the south. In

the Macedonian population there still lingered something of the
vigour and courage which four centuries before had made its
soldiers the conquerors of the world. The churches which Paul

HIS MISSIONARY TRAVELS : SECOND JOURNEY. 77

founded here gave him more comfort than any he established

J elsewhere. There are none of his Epistles more cheerful and

(/cordial than those to the Thessalonians and Philippians ; and, as

he wrote the latter late in life, their perseverance in adhering to

the gospel must have been as remarkable as the welcome they

gave it at the first. At Bercea he even met with a generous and

open-minded synagogue of Jews— the rarest occurrence in his

experience.

99. A prominent feature of the work in Macedonia was the
partjaken in it by women. Amidst the general decay of religions
throughout the world at this period, many women everywhere
sought satisfaction for their religious instincts in the pure faith of
the synagogue. In Macedonia, perhaps on account of its sound
morality, these female proselytes were more numerous than else-
where ; and they pressed in large numbers into the Christian
church. This was a good omen ; it was a prophecy of the happy
change in the lot of woman which Christianity was to produce in
the nations of the West. If man owes much to Christ, woman
owes still more. He has delivered her from the degradation of
being man's slave and plaything and raised her to be his friend and
his equal before Heaven ; while, on the other hand, a new glory
has been added to Christ's religion by the fineness and dignity
with which it is invested when embodied in the female character.
These things were vividly illustrated in the earliest footsteps of
Christianity on our continent. Tfye first convert in Europe was a
woman : at the first Christian service held on European soil the
helirTofLyjdia was opened to receive the truth : and the change
which passed upon her prefigured what woman in Europe was
to become under the influence of Christianity. Dn the same town
oFPhilippi there was seen too at the same time an equally
representative image of the condition of woman in Europe before
the gospel reached it,1 in a poor girl, possessed of a spirit of
divination and held in slavery by men who were making gain
out of her misfortune, whom Paul restored to sanity. Her misery
and degradation were a symbol of the disfiguration, as Lydia's

?8 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

sweet and benevolent Christian character was of the trans-
figuration of womanhood.

100. Another feature which prominently marked the Macedonian
churches was the spirit of liberality. They insisted on supplying
the bodily wants of the missionaries ; and, even after Paul had
left them, they sent gifts to meet his necessities in other towns.
Long afterwards, when he was a prisoner at Rome, they deputed
Epaphroditus, one of their teachers, to carry thither similar gifts
to him and to act as his attendant. Paul accepted the generosity
of these loyal hearts, though in other places he would work his
fingers to the bone and forego his natural rest rather than accept
of similar favours. Nor was their willingness to give due to
superior wealth. On the contrary, they gave out of deep poverty.
They were poor to begin with, and they were made poorer by the
persecutions which they had to endure. These were very severe
after Paul left, and they lasted long. Of course they had broken
first of all on Paul himself. Though he was so successful in
Macedonia, he was swept out of every town at last like the off-
scourings of all things. It was generally by the Jews that this
was brought about. They either fanaticised the mob against
him, or accused him before the Roman authorities of introducing
a new religion or disturbing the peace or proclaiming a king who
would be a rival to Caesar. They would neither go into the
kingdom of heaven themselves nor suffer others to enter.

101. But God protected His servant. At Philippi He delivered
him from prison by a physical miracle and by a miracle of grace
still more marvellous wrought upon his cruel jailor ; and in other
towns He saved him by more natural means. In spite of bitter
opposition, churches were founded in city after city, and from
these the glad tidings sounded out over the whole province of
Macedonia.

102. When, leaving Macedonia, Paul proceeded south into
Achaia, he entered the real Greece — the paradise of genius and
renown. The memorials of the country's greatness rose around

HIS MISSIONARY TRAVELS: SECOND JOURNEY. 79

him on his journey. As he quitted Beroea, he could see behind
him the snowy peaks of Mount Olympus, where the deities of
Greece had been supposed to dwell. Soon he was sailing past
Thermopylae, where the immortal Three Hundred stood against
the barbarian myriads ; and, as his voyage neared its close, he
saw before him the island of Salamis, where again the existence
of Greece was saved from extinction by the valour of her sons.

103. His destination was Athens, the capital of the country.
As he entered the city, he could not be insensible to the great
memories which clung to its streets and monuments. Here the
human mind had blazed forth with a splendour it has never
exhibited elsewhere. In the golden age of its history Athens
possessed more men of the very highest genius than have ever
lived in any other city. To this day their names invest hers with
glory. Yet even in Paul's day the living Athens was a thing
of the past. Four hundred years had elapsed since its golden
age» and in the course of these centuries it had experienced a sad
decline. Philosophy had degenerated into sophistry, art inta
dilettantism, oratory into rhetoric, poetry into versemaking. It
was a city living on its past. Yet it still had a great name and
was full of culture and learning of a kind. It swarmed with
so-called philosophers of different schools, and with teachers and
professors of every variety of knowledge ; and thousands of
strangers of the wealthy class, collected from all parts of the
world, lived there for study or the gratification of their mental
tastes. It still represented to an intelligent visitor one of the
great factors in the life of the world.

104. With the amazing versatility which enabled him to be all
things to all men, Paul adapted himself to this population also.
In the market-place, the lounge of the learned, he entered into
conversation with students and philosophers, as Socrates had
been wont to do on the same spot five centuries before. But he
found even less appetite for the truth than the wisest of the
Greeks had met with. Instead of the love of truth an insatiable
intellectual curiosity possessed the inhabitants. This made them

80 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

willing enough to tolerate the advances of anyone bringing
before them a new doctrine ; and as long as Paul was merely
developing the speculative part of his message, they listened to
him with pleasure. Their interest seemed to deepen, and at last
a multitude of them conveyed him to Mars' Hill, in the very
centre of the splendours of their city, and requested a full state-
ment of his faith. He complied with their wishes and in the
magnificent speech he made them there gratified their peculiar
tastes to the full, as in sentences of the noblest eloquence he
unfolded the great truths of the unity of God and the unity of
man, which lie at the foundation of Christianity. But, when he
advanced from these preliminaries to touch the consciences of his
audience and address them about their own salvation, they
departed in a body and left him talking.

105. He_quitted Athens and never returned to it. Nowhere
else had he so completely failed. He had been accustomed to
endure the most violent persecution and to rally from it with a
light heart. But there is something worse than persecution to a
fiery faith like his, and he had to encounter it here ; his message
roused neither interest nor opposition. The Athenians never
thought of persecuting him ; they simply did not care what the
babbler said ; and this cold disdain cut him more deeply than the
stones of the mob or the lictors' rods. Never perhaps was he so
much depressed. When he left Athens, he moved on to Corinth,
the other great city of Achaia ; and he tells us himself that he
arrived there in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.

106. There was in Corinth enough of the spirit of Athens to
* prevent these feelings from being easily assuaged. Corinth was to

Athens very much what Glasgow is to Edinburgh. The one was
the commercial, the other the intellectual capital of the country.
Even the situations of the two places in Greece resembled in some
respects those of these two cities in Scotland. But the Corinthians
also were full of disputatious curiosity and intellectual hauteur.
Paul dreaded the same kind of reception as he had met with
in Athens. Could it be that these were people for whom the

HIS MISSIONARY TRAVELS : SECOND JOURNEY. 8l

gospel had no message ? This was the staggering question which
was making him tremble. There seemed to be nothing in them
on which the gospel could take hold : they appeared to feel no
wants which it could satisfy.

107. There were other elements of discouragement in Corinth.
It was the Paris of ancient times — a city rich and luxurious,
wholly abandoned to sensuality. Vice displayed itself without
shame in forms which struck deadly despair into Paul's pure
Jewish mind. Could men be rescued from the grasp of such
monstrous vices ? Besides, the opposition of the Jews rose here
to unusual virulence. He was compelled at length to depart
from the synagogue altogether, and did so with expressions of
strong feeling. Was the soldier of Christ going to be driven off
the field and forced to confess that the gospel was not suited for
cultured Greece ? It looked like it.

108. But the tide turned. At the critical moment Paul was
visited with one of those visions which were wont to be vouch-
safed to him at the most trying and decisive crises of his history.
The Lord appeared to him in the night, saying, " Be not afraid,
but speak, and hold not thy peace ; for I am with thee, and no
man shall set on thee to hurt thee ; for I have much people in
this city." The apostle took courage again, and the causes of
discouragement began to clear away. The opposition of the Jews
was broken, when they hurried him with mob violence before the
Roman governor, Gallio, but were dismissed from his tribunal
with ignominy and disdain. The very president of the synagogue
became a Christian, and conversions multiplied among the
native Corinthians. Paul enjoyed the solace of living under the
roof of two leal-hearted friends of his own race and his own
occupation, Aquila and Priscilla. He remained a year and a
half in the city and founded one of the most interesting of his
churches, thus planting the standard of the cross in Achaia also
and proving that the gospel was the power of God unto salvation
even in the headquarters of the world's wisdom.

82 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

The Third Journey.

109. It must have been a thrilling story Paul had to tell at
Jerusalem and Antioch when he returned from his second
journey ; but he had no disposition to rest on his laurels, and
it was not long before he set out on his third journey.

no. It might have been expected that, having in his second
journey planted the gospel in Greece, he would in his third
journey have made Rome his aim. But, if the map be referred
to, it will be observed that, in the midst, between the regions of
Asia Minor which he evangelized during his first journey and the
provinces of Greece in which he planted churches in his second
journey, there was a hiatus — the populous province of Asia, in
the west of Asia Minor. It was on this region that he descended
in his third journey. Staying for no less than three years in
Ephesus, its capital, he effectively filled up the gap and con-
nected together the conquests of his former campaigns. This
journey included, indeed, at its beginning, a visitation of all the
churches formerly founded in Asia Minor, and, at its close, a
flying visit to the churches of Greece ; but, true to his plan of
dwelling only on what was new in each journey, the author of the
Acts has supplied us only with the details relating to Ephesus.

in. This city was at that time the Liverpool of the Medi-
terranean. It possessed a splendid harbour, in which was
concentrated the traffic of the sea which was then the highway
of the nations ; and, as Liverpool has behind her the great towns
of Lancashire, so had Ephesus behind and around her such cities
as those mentioned along with her in the epistles to the churches
in the book of Revelation — Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis,
Philadelphia, and Laodicea. It was a city of vast wealth, and it
was given over to every kind of pleasure, the fame of its theatre
and racecourse being world-wide.

112. But Ephesus was still more famous as a sacred city. It
was a seat of the worship of the goddess Diana, whose temple
was one of the most celebrated shrines of the ancient world.

HIS MISSIONARY TRAVELS : THIRD JOURNEY. 83

This temple was enormously rich and harboured great numbers
of priests. It was a resort at certain seasons of the year of flocks
of pilgrims from the surrounding regions ; and the inhabitants of
the town flourished by ministering in various ways to this super-
stition. The goldsmiths drove a trade in little silver models of
the image of the goddess which the temple contained and which
was said to have fallen from heaven. Copies of the mystic
characters engraven on this ancient relic were sold as charms.
The city swarmed with wizards, fortune-tellers, interpreters of
dreams and other gentry of the like kind, who traded on the
mariners, merchants and pilgrims who frequented the port.

113. Paul's work had therefore to assume the form of a polemic
against superstition. He wrought such astonishing miracles in
the name of Jesus that some of the Jewish palterers with the
invisible world attempted to cast out devils by invoking the
same name ; but the attempt issued in their signal discomfiture.
Other professors of magical arts were converted to the Christian
faith and burnt their books. The vendors of superstitious objects
saw their trade slipping through their fingers. To such an'
extent did this go at one of the festivals of the goddess that the
silversmiths, whose traffic in little images had been specially
smitten, organized a riot against Paul, which took place in the
theatre and was so successful that he was forced to quit the
city.

114. But he did not go before Christianity was firmly estab-
lished in Ephesus, and the beacon of the gospel was twinkling
brightly on the Asian coast, in response to that which was shining
from the shores of Greece on the other side of the ^Egean.
We have a monument of his success in the churches lying all
around Ephesus which St. John addressed a few years afterwards
in the Apocalypse ; for they were probably the indirect fruit
of Paul's labours. But we have a far more astonishing monu-
ment of it in the Epistle to the Ephesians. This is perhaps
the profoundest book in existence ; yet its author evidently
expected the Ephesians to understand it If the orations of

84 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

Demosthenes, with their closely packed arguments between
whose articulations even a knife cannot be thrust, be a monument
of the intellectual greatness of the Greece which listened to them
with pleasure ; if the plays of Shakspeare, with their deep views of
life and their obscure and complex language, be a testimony to
the strength of mind of the Elizabethan Age, which could enjoy
such solid fare in a place of entertainment ; then the Epistle to
the Ephesians, which sounds the lowest depths of Christian
doctrine and scales the loftiest heights of Christian experience,
is a testimony to the proficiency which Paul's converts had
attained under his preaching at Ephesus.

CHAPTER VII.
fffS WRITINGS AND HIS CHARACTER.

Paragraphs 115-127.

115-119. His WRITINGS.

115, 1 1 6. Principal Literary Period.

117. Form of his Writings.

118. His Style.

119. Inspiration.

120-127. His CHARACTER.

121. Combination of Natural and Spiritual.
122-127. Characteristics.

122. Physique ; 123. Enterprise ; 124. Influence

over Men ; 125. Unselfishness ; 126. Sense
of having a Mission ; 127. Personal Devotion
bo Christ

CHAPTER VII.

HIS WRITINGS AND HIS CHARACTER

115. IT has been mentioned that the third missionary journey
closed with a flying visit to the churches of Greece. This
visit lasted several months ; but in the Acts it is passed over
in two or three verses. Probably it was little marked with those
exciting incidents which naturally tempt the biographer into
detail. Yet we know from other sources that it was nearly the
most important part of Paul's life ; for during this half-year he
wrote the greatest of all his Epistles, that to the Romans, and
two others only less important — that to the Galatians and the
Second to the Corinthians.

1 1 6. We have thus alighted on the portion of his life most
signalised by literary work. Overpowering as is the impression
of the remarkableness of this man produced by following him, as
we have been doing, as he hurries from province to province,
from continent to continent, over land and sea, in pursuit of the
object to which he was devoted, this impression is immensely
deepened when we remember that he was at the same time
the greatest thinker of his age, if not of any age, and, in the
midst of his outward labours, was producing writings which have
ever since been among the mightiest intellectual forces of the
world, and are still growing in their influence. In this respect he
rises sheer above all other evangelists and missionaries. Some
of them may have approached him in certain respects — Xavier or
Livingstone in the world-conquering instinct, St Bernard or

88 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL,

Whitefield in earnestness and activity. But few of these men
added a single new idea to the world's stock of beliefs, whereas
Paul, while at least equalling them in their own special line, gave
to mankind a new world of thought. If his Epistles could perish,
the loss to literature would be the greatest possible with only
one exception — that of the Gospels which record the life, the
sayings and the death of our Lord. They have quickened the
mind of the Church as no other writings have done, and scattered
in the soil of the world hundreds of seeds whose fruit is now
the general possession of mankind. Out of them have been
brought the watchwords of progress in every reformation which
the church has experienced. When Luther awoke Europe from
the slumber of centuries, it was a word of Paul which he uttered
with his mighty voice : and when, one hundred years ago, our
own country was revived from almost universal spiritual death,
she was called by the voices of men who had re-discovered the
truth for themselves in the pages of Paul.

117. Yet in penning his Epistles Paul may himself have had
little idea of the part they were to play in the future. They
were drawn out of him simply by the exigencies of his work.
In the truest sense of the word they were letters, written to meet
particular occasions, not formal writings, carefully designed
and executed with a view to fame or to futurity. Letters of the
right kind are, before everything else, products of the heart ;
and it was the eager heart of Paul, yearning for the weal of his
spiritual children or alarmed by the dangers to -which they were
exposed, that produced all his writings. They were part of his
day's work. Just as he flew over sea and land to revisit his
converts, or sent Timothy or Titus to carry them his counsels and
bring news of how they fared, so, when these means were not
available, he would send a letter with the same design.

118. This may seem to detract from the value of these writings.
We may be inclined to wish that, instead of having the course of
his thinking determined by the exigencies of so many special occa-
sions and his attention distracted by so many minute particulars,

HIS WRITINGS ANTD HIS CHARACTER.

he had been able to concentrate the force of his mind on one
perfect book and expound his views on the high subjects which
occupied his thoughts in a systematic form. It cannot be main-
tained that Paul's Epistles are models of style. They were
written far too hurriedly for this ; and the last thing he thought of
was to polish his periods. [ Often, indeed, his ideas, by the mere
virtue of their fineness and beauty, run into forms of exquisite
language, or there is in them such a sustained throb of emotion
that they shape themselves spontaneously into sentences of
noble eloquence. But oftener his language is rugged and form-
less ; no doubt it was the first which came to hand for expressing
what he had to say J He begins sentences and omits to finish
them ; he goes off into digressions and forgets to pick up the line
of thought he has dropped ; he throws out his ideas in lumps
instead of fusing them into mutual coherence. Nowhere perhaps
will there be found so exact a parallel to the style of Paul as in
the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. In the Protector's
brain there lay the best and truest thoughts about England and
her complicated affairs which existed at the time in these islands ;
but, when he tried to express them in speech or letter, there
issued from his mind the most extraordinary mixture of exclama-
tions, questions, arguments soon losing themselves in the sands
of words, unwieldy parentheses, and morsels of beautiful pathos
or subduing eloquence. Yet as you read these amazing utter-
ances, you come by degrees to feel that you are getting to see the
very heart and soul of the Puritan Era, and that you would rather
be beside this man than any other representative of the period.
You see the events and ideas of the time in the very process of
birth. Perhaps, indeed, a certain formlessness is a natural
accompaniment of the very highest originality. The perfect
expression and orderly arrangement of ideas is a later process ;
but, when great thoughts are for the first time coming forth, there
is a kind of primordial roughness about them, as if the earth out
of which they are arising were still clinging to them : the polishing
of the gold comes late and has to be preceded by the heaving of

90 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

the ore out of the bowels of nature. Paul in his writings is
hurling forth the original ore of truth. We owe to him hundreds
*> of ideas which were never uttered before. After the original man
has got his idea out, the most commonplace scribe may be able
to express it for others better than he, though he could never
have originated it. C So throughout the writings of Paul there are
materials which others may combine into systems of theology and
ethics, and it is the duty of the Church to do so.H But his Epistles
permit us to see revelation in the very process of birth. As we
read them closely, we seem to be witnessing the creation of a
world of truth, as the angels wondered to see the firmament
evolving itself out of chaos and the multitudinous earth spreading
itself forth in the light. Minute as are the details he has often to
deal with, the whole of his vast view of the truth is recalled in his
treatment of every one of them, as the whole sky is mirrored in
a single drop of dew. What could be a more impressive proof
of the1 fecundity of his mind than the fact that, amidst the in-
numerable distractions of a second visit to his Greek converts,
he should have written in half a year three such books as
Romans, Galatians and Second Corinthians ?

119. It was God by His Spirit who communicated this revela-
tion of truth to Paul. Its own greatness and divineness supply
the best proof that it could have had no other origin. But none
the less did it break in upon Paul with the joy and pain of original
thought ; it came to him through his experience ; it drenched and
dyed every fibre of his mind and heart ; and the expression which
it found in his writings was in accordance with his peculiar genius
and circumstances.

1 20. It would be easy to suggest compensations in the form of
Paul's writings for the literary qualities they lack. But one of
these so outweighs all others that it is sufficient by itself to justify
in this case the ways of God. In no other literary form could we,
to the same extent, in the writings have got the man. Letters
are the most personal form of literature. A man may write a

HIS WRITINGS AND HIS CHARACTER. 91

treatise or a history or even a poem and hide his personality
behind it. But letters are valueless unless the writer shows
himself. Paul is constantly visible in his letters. You can feel
his heart throbbing in every chapter he ever wrote. He has
painted his own portrait— not only that of the outward man, but
of his innermost feelings — as no one else could have painted it.
It is not from Luke, admirable as is the picture drawn in the
Acts of thej.Apostles, that we learn what the true Paul was, but
from Paul himself. The truths he reveals are all seen embodied
in the man. As there are some preachers who are greater than
their sermons, and the principal gain of their hearers, in listening
to them, is obtained in the inspiring glimpses they get of a great
and sanctified personality, so the best thing in the writings of
Paul is Paul himself, or rather the grace of God in him.

121. His character presented a wonderful combination of the
natural and the spiritual. From nature he had received a strongly
marked individuality : but the change which Christianity pro-
duces was no less obvious in him. In no saved man's character
is it possible to separate nicely what is due to nature and what
to grace ; for nature and grace blend sweetly in the redeemed
life. In Paul the union of the two was singularly complete ; yet
it was always clear that there were two elements in him of diverse
origin ; and this is indeed the key to a successful estimate of his
character.

122. To begin with what was most simply natural ; his Physique
was an important condition of his career. As want of ear may
make a musical career impossible or a failure of eyesight stop
the progress of a painter, so the missionary ltfe_is- impossible
without a certain degree of physical stamina. To anyone reading
by itself the catalogue of Paul's sufferings, and observing the
elasticity with which he rallied from the severest of them and
resumed his labours, it would naturally occur that he must have
been a person of Herculean mould. On the contrary, he appears
to have been little of stature, and his bodily presence was weak.

92 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

This weakness seems to have been sometimes aggravated by
disfiguring disease ; and he felt keenly the disappointment which
he knew his bodily presence would excite among strangers ; for
every preacher who loves his work would like to preach the gospel
with all the graces which conciliate the favour of hearers to an
orator. God, however, used his very weakness, beyond his hopes,
to draw out the tenderness of his converts ; and so, when he was
weak, then he was strong, and he was able to glory even in his
infirmities. There is a theory, which has obtained extensive cur-
rency, that the disease he suffered from was violent ophthalmia,
causing disagreeable redness of the eyelids. But its grounds are
very slender. He seems, on the contrary, to have had a remark-
able power of fascinating and cowing an enemy with the keenness
of his glance, as in the story of Elymas the sorcerer, which reminds
us of the tradition about Luther, that his eyes sometimes so
glowed and sparkled that bystanders could scarcely look on them.
There is no foundation whatever for an idea of some recent
biographers of Paul that his bodily constitution was excessively
fragile and chronically afflicted with shattering nervous disease.
No one could have gone through his labours or suffered the
stoning, the scourgings and other tortures he endured without
ionally tough _a.ndJ5QUnd constitution. It is true

that he was sometimes worn out with illness and torn down with
the acts of violence to which he was exposed ; but the rapidity
of his recovery on such occasions proves what a large fund of
bodily force he had to draw upon. And who can doubt that, when
his face was melted with tender love in beseeching men to be
reconciled to God or lighted up with enthusiasm in the delivery
of his message, it must have possessed a noble beauty far above
mere regularity of feature ?

123. There was a good deal that was natural in another element
of his character on which much depended — his spirit of Enterprise.
There are many men who like to grow where they are born ; to
have to change into new circumstances and make acquaintance
with new people is intolerable to them. But there are others

HIS WRITINGS AND HIS CHARACTER. 93

who have a kind of vagabondism in the blood ; they are the
persons intended by nature for emigrants and pioneers ; and, il
they take to the work of the ministry, they make the best
missionaries. In modern times no missionary has had this
consecrated spirit of adventure in the same degree as our
own countryman, David Livingstone. When he first went to
Africa, he found the missionaries clustered in the south of the
continent, just within the fringe of heathenism ; they had their
houses and gardens, their families, their small congregations of
natives ; and they were content. But he moved at once away
beyond the rest into the heart of heathenism, and dreams of more
distant regions never ceased to haunt him, till at length he
commenced his extraordinary tramps over thousands of miles
where no missionary had ever been before ; and, when death
overtook him, he was still pressing forward. Paul's was a nature
of the same stamp, full of courage and adventure. The unknown
in the distance, instead of dismaying, drew him on. He could
not bear to build on other men's foundations, but was constantly
hastening to virgin soil, leaving churches behind for others to
build up. He believed that, if he lit the lamp of the gospel here
and there over vast areas, the light would spread in his absence
by its own virtue. He liked to count the leagues he had left
behind him, but his watchword was ever Forward. In his dreams
he saw men beckoning him to new countries : he had always a
long unfulfilled programme in his mind ; and, as death approached
he was still thinking of journeys into the remotest corners of the
known world.

124. Another element of his character near akin to the one
just mentioned was his Influence over men. There are those to
whom it is painful to have to accost a stranger even on pressing
business ; and most men are only quite at home in their own set
— among men of the same class or profession as themselves.
But the life he had chosen brought Paul, into contact with men
of every kind, and he had constantly to be introducing to strangers
the business with which he was charged. He might be addressing

94 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

a king or a consul the one hour and a roomful of slaves or
common soldiers the next. One day he had to speak in the
synagogue of the Jews, another among a crowd of Athenian
philosophers, another to the inhabitants of some provincial town
far from the seats of culture. But he could adapt himself to
every man and every audience. To the Jews he spoke as a rabbi
out of the Old Testament Scriptures ; to the Greeks he quoted
the words of their own poets ; and to the barbarians he talked of
the God who giveth rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling
our hearts with food and gladness. When a weak or insincere
man attempts to be all things to all men, he ends by being nothing
to anybody. ^ But, living on this principle, Paul found entrance
for the gospel everywhere, and at the same time won for himself
the esteem and love of those to whom he stooped. If he was
bitterly hated by enemies, there was never a man more intensely
loved by his friends. They received him as an angel of God, or
even as Jesus Christ Himself, and were ready to pluck out their
eyes and give them to him. One church was jealous of another
getting too much of him. When he was not able to pay a visit
at the time he had promised, they were furious, as if he had
done them a wrong. When he was parting from them, they
wept sore and fell on his neck and kissed him. Numbers of
young men were continually about him, ready to go on his
messages. It was the largeness of his manhood which was the
secret of this fascination ; for to a big nature all resort, feeling
that in its neighbourhood it is well with them.

125. This popularity was partly, however, due to another
quality which shone conspicuously in his character — the spirit of
Unselfishness. This is the rarest quality in human nature, and it
is the most powerful of all in its influence on others, where it
exists in purity and strength. Most men are so absorbed in their
own interests and so naturally expect others to be the same that,
if they see anyone who appears to have no interests of his own
to serve, but is willing to do as much for the sake of others as
the generality do for themselves, they are at first incredulous,

HIS WRITINGS AND HIS CHARACTER. 95

suspecting that he is only hiding his designs beneath the cloak
of benevolence ; but, if he stand the test and his unselfishness
prove to be genuine, there is no limit to the homage they are
prepared to pay him. As Paul appeared in country after country,
and city after city, he was at first a complete enigma to those
whom he approached. They formed all sorts of conjectures as to
his real design. Was it money he was seeking, or power, or
something darker and less pure? His enemies never ceased to
throw out such insinuations. But those who got near him and
saw the man as he was, who knew that he refused money and
worked with his hands day and night to keep himself above the
suspicion of mercenary motives, who heard him pleading with
them one by one in their homes and exhorting them with tears to
a holy life, who saw the sustained personal interest he took in
every one of them — these could not resist the proofs of his
disinterestedness or deny him their affection. JJie^e^neverwas a
rr^nrr^orej^elfish j^he had literally jio interest jfhis mvn to live
JJQVj. 'Without family ties, he poured all the affections of his big
nature, which might have been given to wife and children, into
the channels of his work. He compares his tenderness to his
converts to that of a nursing-mother to her children ; he pleads
with them to remember that he is their father who has begotten
them in the gospel. They are his glory and crown, his hope and
joy and crown of rejoicing. Jiager as he was for new conquests,
he never lost his hold upon those he had won J He could assure
his churches that he prayed and gave thanks for them night and
day, and he remembered his converts by name at the throne of
grace. How could human nature resist disinterestedness like
this ? If Paul was a conqueror of the world, he conquered it by
the power of love.

126. The__twj)_jTLoji_disdji^ of his

character have still to be mentioned. One of them was thejsense
of having a divine Mission to preach Christ,, which he was bound
to fulfil. Most men merely drift through life, and the work they
do is determined by a hundred indifferent circumstances ; they

96 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

might as well be doing anything else, or they would prefer, if they
could afford it, to be doing nothing at all. But from the time
when he became a Christian, Paul knew that he had a definite
work to do ; and the call he had received to it never ceased to
ring like a tocsin in his soul. " Woe is unto rrie if I preach not
the gospel :" this was the impulse which drove him on. He felt
that he had a world of new truths to utter and that the salvation
of mankind depended on their utterance. He knew himself
called to make Christ known to as many of his fellow-creatures as
his utmost exertions could enable him to reach. It was this
whichrnade him so impetuous in his movements, so blind to
danger, so contemptuous of suffering. " None of these things
move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I
might finish my course with joy, and the ministry which I have
received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of
God." He lived with the account which he would have to give
at the judgment-seat of Christ ever in his eye, and his heart was
revived in every hour of discouragement by the vision of the crown
of life which, if he proved faithful, the Lord, the righteous Judge,
would place upon his head.

127. The other peculiarly Christian quality which shaped his
career was personal Devotion to Christ. This was the supreme
characteristic of the man and from first to last the mainspring of
his activities. From the moment of his first meeting with Christ
he had but one passion ; his love to his Saviour burned with
more and more brightness to the end. He delighted to call
himself the slave of Christ, and had no ambition except to be the
propagator of His ideas and the continuer of His influence. He
took up this idea of being Christ's representative with startling
boldness. He says the heart of Christ is beating in- his bosom
towards his converts ; he says the mind of Christ is thinking in his
brain ; he says that he is continuing the work of Christ and
filling up that which was lacking in His sufferings ; he says the
wounds of Christ are reproduced in the scars upon his body ; he
says he is dying that others may live, as Christ died for the life

HIS WRITINGS AND HIS CHARACTER. 97

of the world. But it was in reality the deepest humility which
lay beneath these bold expressions. _lle had the sense that
Christ had done everything for him ; He had entered into him,
casting out the old Paul and ending the old life, and. had begotten
a new man, with neV designs, feelings and activities/) And it was
his deepest longing that this process should go on and become
complete — that his old self should vanish quite away, and that the
new self, which Christ had created in His own image and still
sustained, should become so predominant that, when the thoughts
of his mind were Christ's thoughts, the words on his lips Christ's
words, the deeds he did Christ's deeds, and the character he wore
Christ's character, he might be able to say, " I live, yet not I, but
Christ liveth in me."

CHAPTER VIII.
PICTURE OF A PAULINE CHURCH.

Paragraphs 128-144.

128, 129. The Exterior and the Interior View of History.
130-143. A CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN A HEATHEN CITY.
131. The Place of Meeting.
T32> 133- The Persons Present.
»34-i3 7- Tne Services.
138-143. Abuses and Irregularities,
139, 140. Of Domestic Life.
141-143. Inside the Church.
144. Inferences.

98

CHAPTER VIII.

PICTURE OF A PAULINE CHURCH.

128. A HOLIDAY visitor to a foreign city walks through the
streets, guide-book in hand, looking at monuments, churches,
public buildings, and the outsides of the houses, and in this way
is supposed to be made acquainted with the town ; but, on reflec-
tion, he will find that he has scarcely learned anything about it,
because he has not been inside the houses. He does not know
how the people live — not even what kind of furniture they have,
or what kind of food they eat — not to speak of far deeper matters,
such as how they love, what they admire and pursue, and whether
they are content with their lot. In reading history one is often
at a loss in the same way. It is only the outside of life that is
made visible. It is as if the eye were carried along the external
surface of a tree, instead of seeing a cross section of its substance.
The pomp and glitter of the court, the wars waged and the
victories won, the changes in the constitution and the rise and
fall of administrations, are faithfully recorded. But the reader
feels that he would learn far more of the real history of the time
if he could see for one hour what was happening beneath the
roofs of the peasant, the shopkeeper, the clergyman, and the
noble. Even in Scripture history there is the same difficulty.
In the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles we receive thrilling
accounts of the external details of Paul's history ; we are carried
rapidly from city to city, and informed of the incidents which
accompanied the founding of the various churches. But \ve

100 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

cannot help wishing sometimes to stop and learn what one of these
churches was like inside. In Paphos or Iconium, in Thessalonica
or Bercea or Corinth, how did things go on after Paul left ? What
were the Christians like, and what was the aspect of their worship?

129. Happily it is possible to obtain this interior view of things.
y As Luke's narrative describes the outside of Paul's career, so

^Paul's own Epistles permit us to see its deeper aspects. They
rewrite the history on a different plane. This is especially the
case with those Epistles written at the close of his third journey,
which cast a flood of light back upon the period covered by all his
journeys. In addition to the three Epistles already mentioned as
having been written at this time, there is another belonging to the
same part of his life — the First to the. Corinthians — which may be
said to transport us, as on a magician's mantle, back over two
thousand years, and, stationing us in mid-air above a great
Greek city, in which there was a Christian church, to take the
roof off the meeting-house of the Christians and permit us to
see what was going on within.

130. It is a strange spectacle we witness from this coigne of
vantage. It is Sabbath evening, but of course the heathen city
knows of no Sabbath. The day's work at the busy seaport is
over, and the streets are thronged with gay revellers intent on
a night of pleasure, for it is the wickedest city of that wicked
ancient world. Hundreds of merchants and sailors from foreign
parts are lounging about. The gay young Roman, who has come
across to this Paris for a bout of dissipation, drives his light chariot
through the streets. If it is near the time of the annual games,
there are groups of boxers, runners, charioteers, and wrestlers,
surrounded by their admirers and discussing their chances of
winning the coveted crowns. In the warm genial climate old
and young are out of doors enjoying the evening hour, whilst
the sun, going down over the Adriatic, is casting its golden light
upon the palaces and temples of the wealthy city.

131. Meantime the little company of Christians has been

PICTURE OF A PAULINE CHURCH. IOI

gathering- from all directions to their place of worship ; for it is
the hour of their stated assembly. The place of meeting itself
does not rise very clearly before our view. But at all events it is
*io gorgeous temple like those by which it is surrounded ; it has
not even the pretensions of the neighbouring synagogue. It may
be a large room in a private house or the wareroom of some
Christian merchant cleared for the occasion.

132. Glance round the benches and look at the faces. You
at once discern one marked distinction among them : some have
the peculiar facial contour of the Jew, while the rest are Gentiles
of various nationalities ; and the latter are the majority. But
look closer still and you notice another distinction : some wear
the ring which denotes that they are free, while others are slaves ;
and the latter preponderate.-- Here and there among the Gentile
members there is one with the regular features of the born Greek,
perhaps shaded with the pale thoughtfulness of the philosopher
or distinguished with the self-confidence of wealth ; but not many
great, not many mighty, not many noble are there ; the majority
belong to what in this pretentious city would be reckoned the
foolish, the weak, the base, and despised things of this world ;
they are slaves, whose ancestors did not breathe the pellucid air of
Greece, but roamed in savage hordes on the banks of the Danube
or the Don.

133. But observe one thing besides on all the faces present —
the terrible traces of their past life. In a modern Christian con-
gregation one sees in the faces on every hand that peculiar cast of
feature which Christian nurture, inherited through many centuries,
has produced ; and it is only here and there that a face may
be seen in whose lines the tale is written of debauchery or crime.
But in this Corinthian congregation these awful hieroglyphics are
everywhere. " Know ye not," Paul writes to them, " that the
unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God ? Be not
deceived : neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor
effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves,
nor covetous, nor extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God.

(02 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

And such were some of you." Look at that tall, sallow-faced
Greek ; he has wallowed in the mire of Circe's swine-pens.
Look at that low-browed Scythian slave ; he has been a pick-
pocket and a jail-bird. Look at that thin-nosed, sharp-eyed Jew ;
he has been a Shylock, cutting his pound of flesh from the gilded
youth of Corinth. Yet there has been a great change. Another
story besides the tale of sin is written on these countenances.
" But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in
the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God."
Listen, they are singing ; it is the fortieth Psalm : " He took me
from the fearful pit and from the miry clay." What pathos they
throw into the words, what joy overspreads their faces ! They
know themselves to be monuments of free grace and dying love.

134. But suppose them now all gathered ; how does their
worship proceed ? There was this difference between their
services and most of ours, that instead of one man conducting
them — offering their prayers, preaching, and giving out the psalms —
all the men present were at liberty to contribute their part. There
may have been a leader or chairman ; but one member might
read a portion of Scripture, another offer prayer, a third deliver
an address, a fourth raise a hymn, and so on. Nor does there
seem to have been any fixed order in which the different parts of
the service occurred ; any member might rise and lead away the
company into praise or prayer or meditation, as he felt prompted.

135. This peculiarity was due to another great difference be-
tween them and us. The members were endowed with veiy
extraordinary gifts. Some of them had the power of working
miracles, such as the healing of the sick. Others possessed a
strange gift called the gift of tongues. It is not quite clear what
it was ; but it seems to have been a kind of tranced utterance,
in which the speaker poured out an impassioned rhapsody by
which his religious feeling received both expression and exalta-
tion. Some of those who possessed this gift were not able to
tell others the meaning of what they were saying, while others

PICTURE OF A PAULINE CHURCH. 103

had this additional power ; and there were those who, though
not speaking with tongues themselves, were able to interpret
what the inspired speakers were saying. Then again, there were
members who possessed the gift of prophecy — a very valuable
endowment. It was not the power of predicting future events,
but a gift of impassioned eloquence, whose effects were some-
times marvellous : when an unbeliever entered the assembly
and listened to the prophets, he was seized with uncontrollable
emotion, the sins of his past life rose up before him, and,
falling on his face, he confessed that God was among them of a
truth. Other members exercised gifts more like those we are
ourselves acquainted with, such as the gift of teaching or the gift
of management. But in all cases there appears to have been a
kind of immediate inspiration, so that what they did was not the
effect of calculation or preparation, but of a strong present impulse.

136. These phenomena are so remarkable that, if narrated in
a history, they would put a severe strain on Christian faith. But
the evidence for them is incontrovertible ; no man, writing to
people about their own condition, invents a mythical description
of their circumstances ; and besides, Paul was writing to restrain
rather than encourage these manifestations. They show with /
what mighty force, at its first entrance into the world, Christianity '-
took possession of the spirits which it touched. Each believer
received, generally at his baptism, when the hands of the baptizer
were laid on him, his special gift, which, if he remained faithful

to it, he continued to exercise. It was the Holy Spirit, poured
forth without stint, that entered into the spirits of men and dis-
tributed these gifts among them severally as He willed ; and each
member had to make use of his gift for the benefit of the whole
body.

137. After the services just described were over, the members
sat down together to a love-feast, which was wound up with the
breaking of bread in the Lord's Supper ; and then, after a
fraternal kiss, they parted to their homes. It was a memorable
scene, radiant with brotherly love and alive with outbreaking

104 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

spiritual power. As the Christians wended their way homewards
through the careless groups of the heathen city, they were con-
scious of having experienced that which eye had not seen nor
ear heard.

138. But truth demands that the dark side of the picture be
shown as well as the bright one. There were abuses and irregu-
larities in the church which it is exceedingly painful to recall.
Tht.y were due to two things, — the antecedents of the members
and the mixture in the church of Jewish and Gentile elements.
If it be remembered how vast was the change which most of the
members had made in passing from the worship of the heathen
temples to the pure and simple worship of Christianity, it will
not excite surprise that their old life still clung to them or that
they did not clearly distinguish which things needed to be
changed and which might continue as they had been.

139. Yet it startles us to learn that some of them were living
in gross sensuality, and that the more philosophical defended
this on principle. One member, apparently a person of wealth
and position, was openly living in a connection which would
have been a scandal even among heathens, and, though Paul
had indignantly written to have him excommunicated, the church
had failed to obey, affecting to misunderstand the order. Others
had been allured back to take part in the feasts in the idol
temples, notwithstanding their accompaniments of drunkenness
and revelry. They excused themselves with the plea that they
no longer ate the feast in honour of the gods, but only as an
ordinary meal, and argued that they would have to go out of the
world if they were not sometimes to associate with sinners.

140. It is evident that these abuses belonged to -the Gentile
section ~of~ the church. In the Jewish section, on the other
hand, there were strange doubts and scruples about the same
subjects. Some, for instance, revolted with the loose behaviour
of their Gentile brethren, had gone to the opposite extreme,
denouncing marriage altogether and raising anxious questions

PICTURE OF A PAULINE CHURCH. 105

as to whether widows might marry again, whether a Christian
married to a heathen wife ought to put her away, and other
points of the same nature. While some of the Gentile converts
were participating in the idol feasts, some of the Jewish ones
had scruples about buying in the market the meat which had
been offered in sacrifice to idols, and looked with censure on
their brethren who allowed themselves this freedom.

141. These difficulties belonged to the domestic life of the
Christians ; but in their public meetings also there were grave
irregularities. The very gifts of the Spirit were perverted into
instruments of sin ; for those possessed of the more showy gifts,
such as miracles and tongues, were too fond of displaying them,
and turned them into grounds of boasting. This led to confusion
and even uproar ; for sometimes two or three of those who spoke
with tongues would be pouring forth their unintelligible utterances
at once, so that, as Paul said, if any stranger had entered their
meeting, he would have concluded that they were all mad. The
prophets spoke at wearisome length, and too many pressed
forward to take part in the services. Paul had sternly to rebuke
these extravagances, insisting on the principle that the spirits
of the prophets were subject to the prophets, and that therefore
the spiritual impulse was no apology for disorder.

142. But there were still worse things inside the church. Even
the sacredness of the Lord's Supper was profaned. It seems
that the members were in the habit of taking with them to church
the bread and wine which were needed for this sacrament. But
the wealthy brought abundant and choice supplies, and, instead
of waiting for their poorer brethren and sharing their provisions
with them, began to eat and drink so gluttonously that the table
of the Lord actually resounded with drunkenness and riot.

143. One more dark touch must be added to this sad picture.
In spite of the brotherly kiss with which their meetings closed,
they had fallen into mutual rivalry and contention. No doubt
this was due to the heterogeneous elements brought together in
the_.chtirch. But it had been allowed to go to great lengths.

106 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

Brother went to law with brother in the heathen courts instead
of seeking the arbitration of a Christian friend. The body of the
members was split up into four theological factions. Some
called themselves after Paul himself. These treated the scruples
of the weaker brethren about meats and other things with scorn.
Others took the name of Apollonians from Apollos, an eloquent
teacher from Alexandria, who visited Corinth between Paul's
second and third journeys. These were the philosophical party ;
they denied the doctrine of the resurrection, because it was absurd
to suppose that the scattered atoms of the dead body could ever
be reunited again. The third party took the name of Peter, or
Cephas, as in their Hebrew purism they preferred to call him.
These were narrow-minded Jews, who objected to the liberality of
Paul's views. The fourth party affected to be above all parties
and called themselves simply Christians. Like many despisers of
the sects since then, who have used the name of Christian in
the same way, these were the most bitterly sectarian of all and
rejected Paul's authority with malicious scorn.

144. Such is the chequered picture of one of Paul's churches
given in one of his own Epistles ; and it shows several things
with much impressiveness. <^It shows, for instance, how excep-
tional, even in that age, his own mind and character were,
and what a blessing his gifts and graces of good sense, of
large sympathy blended with conscientious firmness, of per-
sonal purity and honour, were to the infant church. It show?
that it is not behind but in front that we have to look for
the golden age of Christianity, it shows how perilous it is to
Vassume that the prevalence of any ecclesiastical usage at that
time must constitute a rule for all times. Everything of this
kind was evidently at the experimental stage. Indeed in the latest
writings of Paul we find the picture of a very different state of
things, in which the worship and discipline of the church were
far more fixed and orderly. It is not for a pattern of the
machinery of a church we ought to go back to this early time,

PICTURE OF A PAULINE CHURCH. 107

but for a spectacle of fresh and transforming spiritual power.
This is what will always attract to the Apostolic Age the longing
eyes of Christians ; the power of the Spirit was energizing in
every member, the tides of fresh emotion swelled in every
breast, and all felt that the dayspring of a new revelation had
visited them ; life, love, light were diffusing themselves every-
where. Even the vices of the young church were the irregu-
larities of abundant life, for the lack of which the lifeless order
of many a subsequent generation has been a poor compensation.

CHAPTER IX.
HIS GREAT CONTROVERSY

Paragraphs 145-162.

146-148. The Question at Issue.
149- r 53- The Settlement of it.

149, 150. By Peter; 151. By Paul; 152, 153. By the

Council of Jerusalem.
154-156. Attempt to unsettle it.
T57> I5%> Paul crushes the Judaizers.

1 59-162. A subordinate Branch of the Question : the Relation
of Christian Jews to the Law.

CHAPTER IX.

HIS GREAT CONTROVERSY.

145. THE version of the apostle's life supplied in his o\vn
letters is largely occupied with a controversy which cost him
much pain and took up much of his time for many years, but of
which Luke says little. At the date when Luke wrote it was a
dead controversy, and it belonged to a different plane from that
along which his story moves. But at the time when it was raging
it tried Paul far more than tiresome journeys or angry seas. It
was at its hottest about the close of his third journey, and the
Epistles already mentioned as having been written then may be
said to have been evoked by it. The Epistle .to the G.alaUa&s
especially was a thunderbolt, hurled against his opponents in this
controversy ; and its burning sentences show how rjrofoundly he
was moved by the subject.

146. The question at issue was whether the Gentiles required
to become Jews before they could be true Christians ; or, in
other words, whether they had to be circumcised in order to be
saved.

147. It had pleased God in the primitive times to choose the
Jewish race from amongst the nations and make it the repository
of salvation ; and, till the advent of Christ, those from other
nations who wished to become partakers of the true religion had
to seek entrance as proselytes within the sacred enclosure of
Israel. Having thus destined this race to be the guardians of

109

110 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

revelation, God had to separate them very completely from all
other nations and from all other aims which might have distracted
their attention from the sacred trust which had been committed
to them. For this purpose he regulated their whole life with
rules and arrangements intended to make them a peculiar
people, different from all other races of the earth. Every detail
of their life — their forms of worship, their social customs, their
dress, their food — was prescribed for them ; and all these
prescriptions were embodied in that vast legal instrument which
they called the Law. The rigorous prescription of so many
things which are naturally left to free choice was a heavy yoke
upon the chosen people ; it was a severe discipline to the
conscience, and such it was felt to be by the more earnest
spirits of the nation. But others saw in it a badge of pride ; it
made them feel that they were the select of the earth and
superior to all other people ; and, instead of groaning under the
yoke, as they would have done if their consciences had been
very tender, they multiplied the distinctions of the Jew, swelling
the volume of the prescriptions of the law with stereotyped
customs of their own. To be a Jew appeared to them the mark
of belonging to the aristocracy of the nations ; to be admitted to
the privileges of this position was in their eyes the greatest
honour which could be conferred on one who did not belong to
the commonwealth of Israel. Their thoughts were all pent
within the circle of this national conceit. Even their hopes
about the Messiah were coloured with these prejudices ; they
expected Him to be the hero of their own nation, and the
extension of His kingdom they conceived as a crowding of the
other nations within the circle of their own through the gateway
of circumcision. They expected that all the cpnverts of the
Messiah would undergo this national rite and adopt the life
prescribed in the Jewish law and tradition ; in short, their
conception of Messiah's reign was a world of Jews.

148. Such undoubtedly was the tenor of popular sentiment
in Palestine when Christ came ; and multitudes of those who

HIS GREAT CONTROVERSY. Ill

accepted Jesus as the Messiah and entered the Christian church
had this set of conceptions as their intellectual horizon. They
had become Christians, but they had not ceased to be Jews ;
they still attended the temple worship ; they prayed at the stated
hours, they fasted on the stated days, they dressed in the style of
the Jewish ritual ; they would have thought themselves defiled
by eating with uncircumcised Gentiles ; and they had no thought
but that, if Gentiles became Christians, they would be circum-
cised and adopt the style and customs of the religious nation.

,^149. The question was settled by the direct intervention of
God in the case of Cornelius, the centurion of Caesarea. When
the messengers of Cornelius were on their way to the Apostle
Peter at Joppa, God showed that leader among the apostles, by
the vision of the sheet full of clean and unclean beasts, that the
V Christian church was to contain circumcised and uncircumcised
' alike. In obedience to this heavenly sign Peter accompanied
the centurion's messengers to Caesarea, and saw such evidences
that the household of Cornelius had already, without circumcision,
received the distinctively Christian endowments of faith and the
Holy Ghost, that he could not hesitate to baptize them as being
Christians already. When he returned to Jerusalem, his pro-
ceedings created wonder and indignation among the Christians
of the strictly Jewish persuasion. But he defended himself by
recounting the vision of the sheet and by an appeal to the clear
fact that these uncircumcised Gentiles were proved by their
possession of faith and of the Holy Ghost to have been already]
\Chris_tians]

150. This incident ought to have settled the question once for
all ; but the pride of race and the prejudices of a lifetime are not
easily subdued. Although the Christians of Jerusalem reconciled
themselves to Peters conduct in this single case, they neglected
to extract from it the universal principle which it implied ; and
even Peter himself, as we shall subsequently see, did not fully
comprehend what was involved in his own conduct.

112 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

151. Meanwhile, however, the question had been settled in a
far stronger and more logical mind than Peter's. Paul at this
time began his apostolic work at Antioch, and soon afterwards
went forth with Barnabas upon his first great missionary expedi-
tion into the Gentile world ; and, wherever they went, he admitted^"

^ heathens into the Christian church without circumcision. Paul
in thus acting did not copy Peter. He had received his gospel
directly from heaven. In the solitudes of Arabia, in the years
immediately after his conversion, he had thought this subject out
and come to far more radical conclusions about it than had yet
entered the minds of any of the rest of the apostles. To him far
more than to any of them the Law had been a yoke of bondage ;
he saw that it was only a stern preparation for Christianity, not
a part of it ; indeed, there was in his mind a deep gulf of contrast
between the misery and curse of the one state and the joy and
freedom of the other. iTo his mind to impose the yoke of the
! law on the Gentiles would have been to destroy the very genius
of Christianity ; it would have been the imposition of conditions
of salvation totally different from that which he knew to be the
one condition of it in the gospel. ' These were the deep reasons
which settled this question in this great mind. Besides, as a
man who knew the world and whose heart was set on winning
the Gentile nations to Christ, he felt far more strongly than did
the Jews of Jerusalem, with their provincial horizon, how fatal
such conditions as they meant to impose would be to the success
of Christianity outside Judaea. The proud Romans, the high-
minded Greeks, would never have consented to be circumcised
and to cramp their life within the narrow limits of Jewish tradi-
tion ; a religion hampered with such weights could never have
become the universal religion.

152. But, when Paul and Barnabas came back from their first
missionary tour to Antioch, they found that a still more decisive
settlement of this question was required ; for Christians of the
strictly Jewish sort were coming down from Jerusalem to Antioch
and telling the Gentile converts that, unless they were circum-

HIS GREAT CONTROVERSY. 113

cised, they could not be saved. In this way they were filling
them with alarm, lest they might be omitting something on
which the welfare of their souls depended, and they were con-
fusing their minds as to the simplicity of the gospel. [_To quiet
these disturbed consciences it was resolved by the church at
Antioch to appeal to the leading apostles at Jerusalem, and Paul
and Barnabas were sent thither to procure the decision. This
was the origin of what is called the Counci^^J^nisalemjijLt
which this question was authoritatively settled. fThe decision of
the apostles and elders was in harmony with Paul's practice : the
Gentiles were not to be required to be circumcised ; only they were
enjoined to abstain from meat offered in sacrifice to idols, from
fornication, and from bloodi\ To these conditions Paul consented.
He did not indeed see any harm in eating meat which had been
used in idolatrous sacrifices, when it was exposed for sale in the
market ; but the feasts upon such meat in the idol temples,
which were often followed by wild outbreaks of sensuality,
alluded to in the prohibition of fornication, were temptations
against which the converts from heathenism required to be
warned. The prohibition of blood— that is, of eating meat killed
without the blood being drained off— was a concession to extreme
Jewish prejudice, which, as it involved no principle, he did not
think it necessary to oppose.

153. So the agitating question appeared to be settled by an
authority so august that none could question it. If Peter, John,
and James, the pillars of the church of Jerusalem, as well as
Paul and Barnabas, the heads of the Gentile mission, arrived at
a unanimous decision, all consciences might be satisfied and all
opposing mouths stopped/

154. It fills us with amazement to discover that even this
settlement was not final. It would appear that, even at the time
when it was come to, it was fiercely opposed by some who were
present at the meeting where it was discussed ; and, although

the authority of the apostles determined the official note which

H

II4T THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

was sent to the distant churches, the Christian community at
Jerusalem was agitated with storms of angry opposition to it.
Nor did the opposition soon die down. On the contrary, it
waxed stronger and stronger. It was fed from abundant sources.
Fierce national pride and prejudice sustained it ; probably it was
nourished by self-interest, because the Jewish Christians would
live on easier terms with the non-Christian Jews the less the
difference between them was understood to be ; religious con-sjic-
tion, rapidly warming into fanaticism, strengthened it ; and very
soon it was reinforced by all the rancour of hatred and the zeal of
propagandism. For to such a height did this opposition rise
that the party which was inflamed with it at length resolved to
send out propagandists to visit the Gentile churches one by one,
and, in contradiction to the official apostolic rescript, warn them
that they were imperilling their souls by omitting circumcision,
and could not enjoy the privileges of true Christianity unless they
kept the Jewish law.

155. For years and years these emissaries of a narrow-minded
fanaticism, which believed itself to be the only genuine Chris-
tianity, diffused themselves over all the churches founded by Paul
throughout the Gentile world. Their work was not to found
churches of their own ; they had none of the original pioneer
ability of their great rival. Clheir business was to steal into the
Christian communities he had founded and win them to their
own narrow views. J They haunted Paul's footsteps wherever he
went, and for many years were a cause to him of unspeakable
pain. They whispered to his converts that his version of the
gospel was not the true one, and that his authority was not to be
trusted. Was he one of the twelve apostles? Had he kept
company with Christ ? They represented themselves as having
brought the true form of Christianity from Jerusalem, the sacred
headquarters ; and they did not scruple to profess that they had
been sent from the apostles there. They distorted the very
noblest parts of Paul's conduct to their purpose. For instance,
his refusal to accept money for his services they imputed to a

HIS GREAT CONTROVERSY. 11$

sense of his own lack of authority : the real apostles always
received pay. In the same way they misconstrued his abstinence
from marriage. They were men not without ability for the work
they had undertaken : they had smooth, insinuating tongues,
they could assume an air of dignity, and they did not stick at
trifles.

1 56. Unfortunately they were by no means without success.
They alarmed the consciences of Paul's converts and poisoned
their minds against him. The Galatian church especially fell a
prey to them ; and the Corinthian church allowed its mind to be
turned against its founder. But, indeed, the defection was more
or less pronounced everywhere. It seemed as if the whole
structure which Paul had reared with years of labour was to be
thrown to the ground. For this was what he believed to be
happening. Though these men called themselves Christians,
Paul utterly denied their Christianity. Their gospel was not
another ; if his converts believed it, he assured them they were
fallen from grace ; and in the most solemn terms he pronounced
a curse on those who were thus destroying the temple of God
which he had built.

157. He was not, however, the man to allow such seduction
. /to go on among his converts without putting forth the most

strenuous efforts to counteract it. He hurried, when he could, '
to see the churches which were being tampered with ; he sent
messengers to bring them back to their allegiance ; above all,
he wrote letters to those in peril — letters in which the extra-
ordinary powers of his mind were exerted to the utmost.
He argued the subject out with all the resources of logic and
Scripture ; he exposed the seducers with a keenness which cut
like steel and overwhelmed them with sallies of sarcastic wit ; he
flung himself at his converts' feet and with all the passion and
tenderness of his mighty heart implored them to be true to Christ
and to himself. We possess the records of these anxieties in oui
New Testament ; and it fills us with gratitude to God and a
strange tenderness to Paul himself to think that out of his

Il6 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

heart-breaking trial there has come such a precious heritage
to us.

158. It is comforting to know that he was successful. Perse-
vering as his enemies were, he was more than a match for them.
Hatred is strong, but stronger still is love. In his later writings
the traces of this opposition are slender or entirely absent. It
had given way before the crushing force of his polemic, and its
traces had been swept off the soil of the church. Had the event
been otherwise, Christianity would have been a river lost in the
sands of prejudice near its very source ; it would have been at the
present day a forgotten Jewish sect instead of the religion of the
world.

159. Up to this point the course of this ancient controversy
can be clearly traced. But there is another branch _of_ it about
whose true course it is far from easy to arrive at certainty. What
was the relation of the Christian Jews to the law, according to
the teaching and preaching of Paul? Was it their duty to
abandon the practices they had been wont to regulate their lives
by, and to abstain from circumcising their children or teaching
them to keep the law ? This would appear to be implied in Paul's
principles. If Gentiles could enter the kingdom without keeping
the law, it could not be necessary for Jews to keep it. If the
law was a severe discipline intended to drive men to Christ, its
obligations fell away when this purpose was fulfilled. [The
bondage of tutelage ceased as soon as the son entered on the
actual possession of his inheritance.)

1 60. It is certain, however, that the other apostles and the
mass of the Christians of Jerusalem did not for many a day
realise this. The apostles had agreed not to demand from the
Gentile Christians circumcision and the keeping of the law. But
they kept it themselves and expected all Jews to keep it. This

^involved a contradiction of ideas and it led to unhappy practical
consequences. If it had continued or been yielded to by Paul, it ..
would have split up the church into two sections, one of which **

HIS GREAT CONTROVERSY. 117

have looked down upon the other. For it was part of the
strict observance of the law to refuse to eat with the uncircum-
cised ; and the Jews would have refused to sit at the same table
with those whom they acknowledged to be their Christian
brethren. This unseemly contradiction actually came to pass in
a prominent instance. The Apostle Peter, chancing on one
occasion to be in the heathen city of Antioch, at first mingled
freely in social intercourse with the Gentile Christians. But
some of the stricter sort, coming thither from Jerusalem, so
cowed him that he withdrew from the Gentile table and held
aloof from his fellow-Christians. Even Barnabas was carried
away by the same tyranny of bigotry. Paul alone was true to the
principles of gospel freedom. He withstood Peter to the face
and exposed the inconsistency of his conduct.

161. Paul never, indeed, carried on a polemic against circum-
i'cision and the keeping of the law among born Jews. This was
reported of him by his enemies ; but it was a false report. When
he arrived in Jerusalem at the close of his third missionary
journey, the Apostle James and the elders informed him of the
damage which this representation was doing to his good name
and advised him publicly to disprove it. The words in which
they made this appeal to him are very remarkable. " Thou seest,
brother," they said, "how many thousands of Jews there are who
believe ; and they are all zealous of the law ; and they are
informed of thee that thou teachest all the Jews who are among
the Gentiles to forsake Moses, saying that they ought not to
circumcise their children, neither to walk after the customs.
Do therefore this that we say to thee : We have four men who
have a vow on them. Take them and purify thyself with them,
and be at charges with them, that they may shave their heads ;
and all may know that those things whereof they were informed
concerning thee are nothing, but thou thyself also walkest orderly
and keepest the law." Paul complied with this appeal and went
through the rite which James recommended. This clearly
proves that he never regarded it as part of his work to dissuade

fl8 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

born Jews from living as Jews. It may be thought that he ought
to have done so — that his principles required a stern opposition
to everything associated with the dispensation which had passed
away. He understood them differently, however, and had a
good reason to render for the line he pursued. LWe find him
advising those who were called into the kingdom of Christ being
circumcised not to become uncircumcised, and those called in
uncircumcision not to submit to circumcision ; and the reason he
gives is that circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is
nothing. \ Thejiisjtinction was nothing more to him, in a religious
point of view, than the distinction of sex or the distinction of
slave and master. In short, it had no religious significance at
_al.L_-.If, however, a man professed Jewish modes of life as a mark
of his nationality, Paul had no quarrel with him ; indeed, in some
degree he preferred them himself. LHe stickled as little against
mere forms as for them ; only, if they stood between the soul
and Christ or between a Christian and his brethren, then he
was their uncompromising opponent] But he knew that liberty
may be made an instrument of oppression as well as bondage,
and therefore in regard to meats, for instance, he penned those
noble recommendations of self-denial for the sake of weak and
scrupulous consciences which are among the most touching
testimonies to his utter unselfishness.

162. Indeed, we have here a man of such heroic size that it is
no easy matter to define him. Along with the clearest vision of
the lines of demarcation between the old and the new in the
greatest crisis of human history and an unfaltering championship
of principle when real issues were involved, we see in him the
most genial superiority to mere formal rules and the utmost
consideration for the feelings of those who did not see as he saw.
By one huge blow he had cut himself free from the bigotry of
bondage ; but he never fell into the bigotry of liberty, and had
always far loftier aims in view than the mere logic of his own
position.

CHAPTER X,

THE END.

Paragraphs 163-189.

163, 164. RETURN TO JERUSALEM.

Prophecy of Approaching Imprisonment.

165-168. ARREST.

166. Tumult in Temple ; 167. Paul before the
Sanhedrim ; 168. Plot of Zealots,

169-172. IMPRISONMENT AT OESAREA.

170. Providential Reason for this Confinement.

171. Paul's later Gospel.

172. His Ethics.

173-176. JOURNEY TO ROME.

173. Appeal to Caesar.

174. Voyage to Italy.

175. Arrival in Rome.

176-182. FIRST IMPRISONMENT AT ROME.

176. Trial delayed.
177-182. Occupations of a Prison.

179. His Guards converted ; 180. Visits of Apostolic
Helpers ; 181. Messengers from his Churches ;
182. His Writings.

183-188. LAST SCENES.

185. Release from Prison ; New Journeys.

1 86. Second Imprisonment at Rome.

187. 1 88. Trial and Death.

iS$. Epilogue.

CHAPTER X.

THE END.

163. AFTER completing his brief visit to Greece at the close of
his third missionary journey, Paul returned to Jerusalem. He
V must by this time have been nearly sixty years of age ; and for
twenty years he had been engaged in almost superhuman labours.
He had been travelling and preaching incessantly, and carrying
on his heart a crushing weight of cares. His body had been
worn with disease and mangled with punishments and abuse ;
and his hair must have been whitened, and his face furrowed with
the lines of age. As yet, however, there were no signs of his
body breaking down, and his spirit was still as keen as ever in
its enthusiasm for the service of Christ. His eye was specially
directed to Rome, and, before leaving Greece, he sent word to
the Romans that they might expect to see him soon. But, as he
was hurrying towards Jerusalem along the shores of Greece and
Asia, the signal sounded that his work was nearly done, and the
shadow of approaching death fell across his path. In city after
city the persons in the Christian communities who were endowed
with the gift of prophecy foretold that bonds and imprisonment
were awaiting him, and the nearer he came to the close of his
journey these warnings became more loud and frequent. He felt
their solemnity ; his was a brave heart, but it was too humble
and reverent not to be overawed with the thought of death and
judgment. He had several companions with him, but he sought
opportunities of being alone. He parted from his converts as a

f22 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

dying man, telling them that they would see his face no more.
But, when they entreated him to turn back and avoid the threat-
ened danger, he gently pushed aside their loving arms, and said,
" What mean ye to weep and to break my heart ? for I am
ready not to be bound only, but also to die at Jerusalem for the
name of the Lord Jesus."

164. We do not know what business he had on hand which so
peremptorily demanded his presence in Jerusalem. He had to
deliver up to the apostles a collection on behalf of their poor saints,
which he had been exerting himself to gather in the Gentile
churches ; and it may have been of importance that he should
discharge this service in person. Or he may have been solicitous
to procure from the apostles a message for his Gentile churches,
giving an authoritative contradiction to the insinuations of his
enemies as to the unapostolic character of his gospel. At all
events there was some imperative call of duty summoning him,
and, in spite of the fear of death and the tears of friends, he went
forward to his fate.

165. It was the feast of Pentecost when he arrived in the city
of his fathers, and, as usual at such seasons, Jerusalem was

\j crowded with hundreds of thousands of pilgrim Jews from all
parts of the world. Among these there could not but be many
who had seen him at his work of evangelization in the cities of
the heathen and come into collision with him there. Their rage
against him had been checked in foreign lands by the interposi-
tion of Gentile authority ; but might they not, if they met with
him in the Jewish capital, wreak on him their vengeance with the
support of the whole population ?

166. This was actually the danger into which he fell. Certain
Jews from Ephesus, the principal scene of his labours during his
third journey, recognised him in the temple, and, crying out that
here was the heretic who blasphemed the Jewish nation, law, and
temple, brought about him in an instant a raging sea of fanaticism.
It is a wonder he was not torn limb from limb on the spot ;

THE END. 123

but superstition prevented his assailants from defiling with blood
the court of the Jews, in which he was caught, and, before they
got him hustled into the court of the Gentiles, where they would
soon have despatched him, the Roman guard, whose sentries were
pacing the castle ramparts which overlooked the temple courts,
rushed down and took him under their protection ; and, when
their captain learned that he was a Roman citizen, his safety was
secured.

167. But the fanaticism of Jerusalem was now thoroughly
aroused, and it raged against the protection which surrounded
Paul like an angry sea. i_The Roman captain on the day after the
apprehension took him down to the Sanhedrim in order to ascer-
tain the charge against him ; but the sight of the prisoner created
such an uproar that he had to hurry him away, lest he should be
torn in pieces.^ Strange city and strange people ! There was
never a nation which produced sons more richly dowered with
gifts to make her name immortal ; there was never a city whose
children clung to her with a more passionate affection ; yet, like
a mad mother, she tore the very goodliest of them in pieces and
dashed them mangled from her breast. Jerusalem was now
within a few years of her destruction ; here was the last of her
inspired and prophetic sons come to visit her for the last time,
with boundless love to her in his heart ; but she would have
murdered him ; and only the shields of the Gentiles saved him
from her fury.

1 68. Forty zealots banded themselves together under a curse
to snatch Paul even from the midst of the Roman swords ; and
the Roman captain was only able to foil their plot by sending
him under a heavy guard down to Cassarea. This was a Roman
city on the Mediterranean coast ; it was the residence of the
Roman governor of Palestine and the headquarters of the Roman
garrison ; and in it the apostle was perfectly safe from Jewish
violence.

169. Here he remained in prison for two years. The Jewish

THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

authorities attempted again and again either to procure his con-
\ ; demnation by the governor or to get him delivered up to them-
selves to be tried as an ecclesiastical offender : but they failed
to convince the Roman that Paul had been guilty of any crime of
which he could take cognisance or to hand over a Roman citizen
to their tender mercies. The prisoner ought to havebeen released,
but his enemies were so vehement in asserting that he was a
criminal of the deepest dye that he was detained on the chance of
new evidence turning up against him. Besides, his release was
prevented by the expectation of the corrupt governor, Felix, that
the life of the leader of a religious sect might be purchased from
him with a bribe. Felix was interested in his prisoner and even
heard him gladly, as Herod had listened to the Baptist,
i 170. Paul was not kept in close confinement ; he had at least
the range of the barracks in which he was detained. There we
can imagine him pacing the ramparts on the edge of the
Mediterranean, and gazing wistfully across the blue waters in the
direction of Macedonia, Achaia, and Ephesus, where his spiritual
children were pining for him or perhaps encountering dangers
in which they sorely needed his presence. It was a
mysterious providence which thus arrested his energies and
condemned the ardent worker to inactivity. Yet we can
see now the reason for it. Paul was needing rest. After
twenty years of incessant evangelization he required leisure to
garner the harvest of experience. During all that time he had
been preaching that view of the gospel which at the commence-
ment of his Christian career he had thought out, under the
influence of the revealing Spirit, in the solitudes of Arabia. But
he had now reached a stage when, with leisure to think, he might
penetrate into more recondite regions of the truth as it is in
Jesus. And it was so important that he should have this leisure
that, in order to secure it, God even permitted him to be shut up
in prison.

171. During these two years he wrote nothing ; it was a time
of internal mental activity and silent progress. But, when he

THE END. 125

^

began to write again, the results of it were at once discernible.
:The Epistles written after this imprisonment have a mellower
I tone and set forth a profounder view of doctrine than his earlier
^writings. There is no contradiction, indeed, or inconsistency
between his earlier and later views : in Ephesians and Colos-
Isians he builds on the broad foundations laid in Romans and
Jpalatians. But the superstructure is loftier and more imposing.
He dwells less on the work of Christ, and more on His person ;
less on the justification of the sinner, and more on the sanctifica-
tion of the saint. In the gospel revealed to him in Arabia he had
set Christ forth as dominating mundane history, and shown His
first coming to be the point towards which the destinies of Jews
and Gentiles had been tending. In the gospel revealed to him
at Caesarea the point of view is extramundane : Christ is repre-
sented as the reason for the creation of all things, and as the
Lord of angels and of worlds, to whose second coming the vast
procession of the universe is moving forwards — of whom, and
through whom, and to whom are all things. ,In the earlier
Epistles the initial act of the Christian life — the justification of the
soul — is explained with exhaustive elaboration : but in the later
Epistles it is on the subsequent relations to Christ of the person
who has been already justified that the apostle chiefly dwells.
According to his teaching, the whole spectacle of the Christian
life is due to a union between Christ and the soul ; and for the
description of this relationship he has invented a vocabulary of
phrases and illustrations : believers are in Christ, and Christ is in
them : they have the same relation to Him as the stones of a
building to the foundation-stone, as the branches to the tree, as
the members to the head, as a wife to her husband. This union
is ideal, for the divine mind in eternity made the destiny of Christ
and the believer one : it is legal, for their debts and merits are
common property : it is vital, for the connection with Christ
supplies the power of a holy and progressive life : it is moral, for,
in mind and heart, in character and conduct, Christians are
constantly becoming more and more identical with ChrisL

126 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

»y 172. Another feature of these later Epistles is the balance
/'between their theological and their moral teaching. This is
visible even in the external structure of the greatest of them, for
they are nearly equally divided into two parts, the first of which
is_occupied with doctrinal statements and the second with moral
exhortations. [The ethical teaching of Paul spreads itself over
all parts of the Christian life ; but it is not distinguished by a
systematic arrangement of the various kinds of duties, although the
domestic duties are pretty fully treated. Its chief characteristic
lies in the motives which it brings to bear upon conduct. To Paul
Christian morality was emphatically a morality of motives. The
whole history of Christ, not in the details of His earthly life, but
in the great features of his redemptive journey from heaven to
earth and from earth back to heaven again, as seen from the
extramundane standpoint of these Epistles, is a series of examples
to be copied by Christians in their daily conduct. No duty is too
small to illustrate one or other of the principles which inspired
the divinest acts of Christ. The commonest acts of humility and
beneficence are to be imitations of the condescension which
brought Him from the position of equality with God to the
obedience of the cross : and the ruling motive of the love
and kindness practised by Christians to one another is
to be the recollection of their common connection with
Him.

* 173. After Paul's imprisonment had lasted for two years, Felix
^was succeeded in the governorship of Palestine by Festus. The
Jews had never ceased to intrigue to get Paul into their hands,
and they at once assailed the new ruler with further impor-
tunities. As Festus seemed to be wavering, Paul availed him-
self of his privilege of appeal as a Roman citizen and demanded
to be sent to Rome and tried at the bar of the emperor. This
could not be refused him ; and a prisoner had to be sent to Rome
at once after such an appeal was taken. Very soon therefore
Paul was shipped off under the charge of Roman soldiers and in

THE END. 127

ihe company of many other prisoners on their way to the same
destination.

174. The journal of the voyage has been preserved in the Acts
of the Apostles and is acknowledged to be the most valuable I
document in existence concerning the seamanship of ancient *"
times. It is also a precious document of Paul's life ; for it shows
how his character shone out in a novel situation. A ship is a
kind of miniature of the world. It is a floating island, in which
there are the government and the governed. But the government

is like that of States liable to sudden social upheavals, in which
the ablest man is thrown to the top. This was a voyage of
extreme perils, which required the utmost presence of mind and
power of winning the confidence and obedience of those on
board. Before it was ended Paul was virtually both the captain
of the ship and the general of the soldiers ; and all on board,
owed him their lives.

175. At length the dangers of the deep were left behind ; and
Paul found himself approaching the capital of the Roman world
by the Appian Road, the great highway by which Rome was
entered by travellers from the East. The bustle and noise
increased as he neared the city, and the signs of Roman grandeur
and renown multiplied at every step. For many years he had'
been looking forward to seeing Rome, but he had always thought
of entering it in a very different guise from that which now he
wore. He had always thought of Rome as a successful general
thinks of the central stronghold of the country he is subduing,
who looks eagerly forward to the day when he will direct the
charge against its gates. Paul was engaged in the conquest of
the world for Christ, and Rome was the final stronghold he had
hoped to carry in his Master's name. Years ago he had sent to
it the famous challenge, " I am ready to preach the gospel to you
that are at Rome also ; for I am not ashamed of the gospel
of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one
that believeth." But now, when he found himself actually at its.

I2fl THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

gates and thought of the abject condition in which he was — an
old, grey-haired, broken man, a chained prisoner just escaped
from shipwreck, his heart sank within him, and he felt dreadfully
alone. At the right moment, however, a little incident took
place which restored him to himself : at a small town forty miles
out of Rome he was met by a little band of Christian brethren,
who, hearing of his approach, had come out to welcome him ;
and, ten miles farther on, he came upon another group, who had
come out for the same purpose. Self-reliant as he was, he was
exceedingly sensitive to human sympathy, and the sight of these
brethren and their interest in him completely revived him. He
thanked God and took courage ; his old feelings came back in
their wonted strength, and when, in the company of these friends,
he reached that shoulder of the Alban Hills from which the first
view of the city is obtained, his heart swelled with the anticipa-
tion of victory ; for he knew he carried in his breast the force
which would yet lead captive that proud city. It was not with
the step of a prisoner, but with that of a conqueror, that he
passed at length beneath the city gate. His road lay along that
very Sacred Way by which many a Roman general had passed
in triumph to the Capitol, seated on a car of victory, followed by
the prisoners and spoils of the enemy, and surrounded with the
plaudits of rejoicing Rome. Paul looked little like such a hero : no
car of victory carried him, he trode the causewayed road with way-
worn foot ; no medals or ornaments adorned his person, a chain of
iron dangled from his wrist ; no applauding crowds welcomed his
approach, a few humble friends formed all his escort ; yet never
did a more truly conquering footstep fall on the pavement of Rome
or a heart more confident of victory pass beneath her gates.

176. Meanwhile, however, it was not to the Capitol his steps
were bent, but to a prison ; and he was destined to lie in .prison
long, for his trial did not come on For two years. The law's
delays have been proverbial in all countries and at all eras ; and
the law of imperial Rome was not likely to be free from this
•reproach during the reign of Nero, a man of such frivolity that

THE KND. 129

any engagement of pleasure or freak of caprice was sufficient to
make him put off the most important call of business. The_
imprisonment, it is true, was of the mildest description. It may
have been that the officer who brought him to Rome spoke a
good word for the man who had saved his life during the voyage,
or the officer to whom he was handed over, and who is known
in profane history as a man of justice and humanity, may have
inquired into his case and formed a favourable opinion of his
character ; but at all events Paul was permitted to hire a house
of his own and live in it in perfect freedom, with the single
exception that a soldier, who was responsible for his person, was
his constant attendant.

177. This was far from the condition which such an active
spirit would have coveted. He would have liked to be moving
from synagogue to synagogue in the immense city, preaching in
its streets and squares, and founding congregation after congrega-
tion among the masses of its population. Another man, thus
arrested in a career of ceaseless movement and immured within
prison walls, might have allowed his mind to stagnate in sloth
and despair. But Paul behaved very differently. Availing him-
self of every possibility of the situation, he .converted his one
room into a centre of far-reaching activity and beneficence. On
the few square feet of space allowed him he erected a fulcrum
with which he moved the world, and established within the walls
of Nero's capital a sovereignty more extensive than his own.

178. Even the most irksome circumstance of his lot was turned
to good account. This was the soldier by whom he was watched
To a man of Paul's eager temperament and restlessness of mood
this must often have been an intolerable annoyance ; and, indeed,
in the letters written during this imprisonment he is constantly
referring to his chain, as if it were never out of his mind. But
he did not suffer this irritation to blind him to the opportunity of
doing good presented by the situation. Of course his attendant
was changed every few hours, as one soldier relieved another

130 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

upon guard. In this way there might be six or eight with him
every four-and-twenty hours. They belonged to the imperial
guard, the flower of the Roman army. Paul could not sit for
hours beside another man without speaking- of the subject which
lay nearest his heart. He_s^Qkfi-lQOhese -soldiers about- thein~
immortal souls and the faith of Christ. To men accustomed to
the horrors of Roman warfare and the manners of Roman bar-
racks nothing could be more striking than a life and character
like his ; and the result of these conversations was that many of
them became changed men, and a revival spread through the
barracks and penetrated into the imperial household itself. His
room was sometimes crowded with these stern, bronzed faces,
glad to see him at other times than those when duty required
them to be there. [jJe sympathized with them and entered into
the spirit of their occupation ; indeed, he was full of the spirit of
the warrior himself.! We have an imperishable relic of these
visits in an outburst of inspired eloquence which he dictated at this
period : Jj* Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able
to stand against the wiles of the devil ; for we wrestle not against
flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against
the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wicked-
ness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour
of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and,
having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins
girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteous-
ness, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of
peace ; above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall
be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the
helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word
of God." \ That picture was drawn from the life, from the armour
of the soldiers in his room ; and perhaps these ringing sentences
were first poured into the ears of his warlike auditors before they
were transferred to the Epistle in which they have been preserved. '
179. But he had other visitors. All who took an interest in
Christianity in Rome, both Jews and Gentiles, gathered to him.

THE END. 131

Perhaps there was not a day of the two years of his imprison-
ment but he had such visitors. The_Roman Christians learned
to go to that room as to an oracle or shrine. Many a Christian
teacher got his sword sharpened there j and new energy began
to diffuse itself through the Christian circles of the city. Many
an anxious father brought his son, many a friend his friend,
hoping that a word from the apostle's lips might waken the
sleeping conscience. Many a wanderer, stumbling in there by
chance, came out a new man. Such an one was Onesimus, a
slave from Colossae, who arrived in Rome as a runaway, but was
sent back to his Christian master, Philemon, no longer as a slave,
but as a brother beloved.

1 80. Still more interesting visitors came. At all periods of his
^life he exercised a stong fascination over young men. They

were attracted by the manly soul within him, in which they found
sympathy with their aspirations and inspiration for the noblest
work. CThese youthful friends, who were scattered over the world
in the work of Christ, flocked to him at Rome3 Timothy and
Luke, Mark and Aristarchus, Tychicus and Epaphras, and many
more came, to drink afresh at the weH of his ever-springing
wisdom and earnestness. (j\nd he sent them forth again to carry
messages to his churches, or bring him news of their condition.3

1 8 1. Of his spiritual children in the distance he never ceased to
think. Daily he was wandering in imagination among the glens
of Galatia and along the shores of Asia and Greece ; every night
he was praying for the Christians of Antioch and Ephesus, of
Philippi and Thessalonica and Corinth. Nor were gratifying
proofs awanting that they were remembering him. ^Now and
then there would appear in his lodging a deputy from some
distant church, bringing the greetings of his converts, or, perhaps,
a contribution to meet his temporal wants, or craving his decision
on some point of doctrine or practice about which difficulty had
arisen. CThese messengers were not sent empty away: they
carried warm-hearted messages or golden words of counsel from
their apostolic friend. Some of them carried far more. ' When

132 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

Epaphroditus, a deputy from the church at Philippi, which had
sent to their dear father in Christ an offering of love, was
returning home, Paul sent with, him, in acknowledgment of their
kindness, the Epistle to the Philippians, the most beautiful of
all his letters, in which he lays bare his very heart and every
sentence glows with love more tender than a woman's. When
the slave Onesimus was sent back to Colossas, he received as the
branch of peace to offer to his master the exquisite little Epistle
to Philemon, a priceless monument of Christian courtesy. He
earned too a letter addressed to the church of the town in
which his master lived, the Epistle to the Colossians. _The
composition of these Epistles was by far the most important

part of Paul's varied prison activity ; and
with the writing of the Epistle to the Ephesians, which is perhaps
the profoundest and sublimest book in the world. The church
of Christ has derived many benefits from the imprisonment of
the servants of God ; the greatest book of uninspired religious
genius, the Pilgriirfs Progress^ was written in a jail ; but never
did there come to the church a greater mercy in the disguise of
misfortune than when the arrest of Paul's bodily activities at
Cassarea and Rome supplied him with the leisure needed to
reach the depths of truth sounded in the Epistle to the
Ephesians.

182. It may have seemed a dark dispensation of providence to
Paul himself that the course of life he had pursued so long was
so completely changed ; but God's thoughts are higher than
man's thoughts and His ways than man's ways ; and He
gave Paul grace to overcome the temptations of his situation and
do far more in his enforced inactivity for the welfare of the world
and the permanence of his own influence than he could have
done by twenty years of wandering missionary work. Sitting in
his room, he gathered within the sounding cavity of his sym-
pathetic heart the sighs and cries of thousands far away, and
v/diffused courage and help in every direction from his own
inexhaustible resources. He sank his mind deeper and deeper

THE END. 133

in solitary thought, till, smiting the rock in the dim depth to
which he had descended, he caused streams to gush forth which
are still gladdening the city of God

183. The book of Acts suddenly breaks off with a brief
summary of Paul's two years' imprisonment at Rome. Is this
because there was no more to tell ? When his trial came on
did it issue in his condemnation and death ? Or did he get out
of prison and resume his old occupations? Where Luke's lucid
narrative so suddenly deserts us, tradition comes in proffering
its doubtful aid. [It tells us that he was acquitted on his trial
and let out of prison ; that he resumed his travels, visiting
Spain among other places ; but that before long he was arrested
again and sent back to Rome, where he died a martyr's death at
the cruel hands of Nero.^

184. Happily, however, we are not altogether dependent on
the precarious aid of tradition. We have writings of Paul's own
undoubtedly subsequent to the two year,s of his first imprison-
ment. These are what are called the Pastoral Epistles — the
Epistles to Timothy and Titus. Mn these we see that he regained
his liberty and resumed his employment of revisiting his old
churches and founding new ones/] His footsteps cannot, indeed,
be any longer traced with certainty. We find him back at
Ephesus and Troas ; we find him in Crete, an island at which he
touched on his voyage to Rome and in which he may then have
become interested ; we find him exploring new territory in the
northern parts of Greece. We see him once more, like the
commander of an army who sends his aides-de-camp all over the
field of battle, sending out his young assistants to organize and
watch over the churches.

185. But this was not to last long. An event had happened
immediately after his release from prison, which could not but
influence his fate. This was the burning of Rome — an appalling
disaster, the glare of which even at this distance makes the heart
shudder. It was probably a mad freak of the malicious monster

134 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

who then wore the imperial purple. But Nero saw fit to attribute
it to the Christians, and instantly the most atrocious persecution
broke out against them. Of course the fame of this soon spread
over the Roman world ; and it was not likely that the foremost
apostle of Christianity could long escape. £" Every Roman
governor knew that he could not do the emperor a more
pleasing service than by sending Paul to him in chains.;

1 86. It was not long, accordingly, before Paul was lying once
more in prison at Rome ; and it was no mild imprisonment this
time, but the worst known to the law. No troops of friends now
filled his room ; for the Christians of Rome had been massacred
or scattered, and it was dangerous for anyone to avow himself a
Christian. We have a letter written from his dungeon, the last
he ever wrote, the_Second Epistle to^Tiraoihy, which affords us a
glimpse of unspeakable pathos into the circumstances of the
prisoner. He tells us that one part of his trial is already over.
Not a friend stood by him as he faced the bloodthirsty tyrant
who sat on the judgment-seat. But the Lord stood by him and
enabled him to make the emperor and the spectators in the
crowded basilica hear the sound of the gospel. The charge
against him had broken down. But he had no hope of escape.
Other stages of the trial had yet to come, and he knew that
evidence to condemn him would either be discovered or manu-
factured. The letter betrays the miseries of his dungeon. He
prays Timothy to bring a cloak he had left at Troas to defend
him from the damp of the cell and the cold of the winter. He
asked for his books and parchments, that he may relieve the
tedium of his solitary hours with the studies he had always loved.
But, above all, he beseeches Timothy to come himself; for he
was longing to feel the touch of a friendly hand and see the face
of a friend yet once again before he died. Was the brave heart
then conquered at last ? Read the Epistle and see. How does
it begin ? "I also suffer these things ; nevertheless I am not
ashamed ; for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded
that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him

THE END. 135

against that day." How does it end ? " I am now ready to be
offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought
a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.
Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness,
which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day ;
and not to me only, but unto all them that love His appearing."
This is not the strain of the vanquished.

187. There can be little doubt that he appeared again at Nero's
bar, and this time the charge did not break down. In all history
there is not a more startling illustration of the irony of human
life than this scene of Paul at the bar of Nero. On the judgment-
seat, clad in the imperial purple, sat a man who in a bad
world had attained the eminence of being the very worst and
meanest being in it — a man stained with every crime, the
murderer of his own mother, of his wives and of his best bene-
factors ; a man whose whole being was so steeped in every
nameable and unnameable vice that body and soul of him were,
as some one said at the time, nothing but a compound of mud
and blood ; and in the prisoner's dock stood the best man the
world possessed, his hair whitened with labours for the good
of men and the glory of God. Such was the occupant of the
seat of justice, and such the man who stood in the place of the
criminal.

1 88. The trial ended, Paul was condemned and delivered over
to the executioner. He was led out of the city with a crowd of
the lowest rabble at his heels. The fatal spot was reached ; he
knelt beside the block ; the headsman's axe gleamed in the sun
and fell ; and the head of the apostle of the world rolled down in
the dust

189. So sin did its uttermost and its worst Yet how poor and
empty was its triumph ! The blow of the axe only smote off the
lock of the prison and let the spirit go forth to its home and to
its crown. The city falsely called eternal dismissed him with
execration from her gates ; but ten thousand times ten thousand

t3& THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

welcomed him in the same hour at the gates of the city which is
really eternal. Even on earth Paul could not die. He lives /
among us to-day with a life a hundredfold more influential than
that which throbbed in his brain whilst the earthly hull which
made him visible still lingered on the earth. Wherever the feet
of them who publish the glad tidings go forth beautiful upon the
mountains, he walks by their side as an inspirer and a guide ; in
ten thousand churches every Sabbath and on a thousand thousand
hearths every day his eloquent lips still teach that gospel of
which he was never ashamed ; and, wherever there are human
souls searching for the white flower of holiness or climbing the
difficult heights of self-denial, there he whose life was so pure,
whose devotion to Christ was so entire, and whose pursuit of a
single purpose was so unceasing, is welcomed as the best of
friends.

HINTS TO TEACHERS AND QUESTIONS FOR
PUPILS.

Teacher's Apparatus. — The English theology of this century has
no juster cause for pride than the books it has produced on the
Life of Paul. Perhaps there is no other subject in which it has
so outdistanced all rivals. Conybeare and Howson's Life and
Epistles of St. Paul will probably always keep the foremost
place ; in many respects it is nearly perfect ; and a teacher
who has mastered it will be sufficiently equipped for his work
and require no other help. The works of Lewin and Farrar
are written on the same lines ; the former is rich in maps of
countries and plans of towns ; and the strong point of the latter
is the analysis of Paul's writings — the exposition of the mind of
Paul. The German books are not nearly as valuable as these
three. Hausrath's The Apostle Paul is a brilliant performance,
but it is as weak in handling the deeper things as it is strong in
colouring up the external and picturesque features of the subject.
Naur's work is an amazingly clever* tour de force, but it is not so
much a well-proportioned picture of the apostle, as a prolonged
paradox thrown down as a challenge to the learned. The French
Essay by Sabatier is highly spoken of, but I have not seen it.
Adolphe Monod's Saint Paul^ a series of five discourses, is an
inquiry into the secret of the apostle's life, written with deep
sympathy and glowing eloquence. But the best help is to be
found in the original sources themselves — the cameo-like pictures
of Luke and the self-revelations of Paul's Epistles. The latter
especially, read in the fresh translation of Conybeare, will show
the apostle to anyone who has eyes to see. Johnstone's wall-map
of Paul's journeys is indispensable in the class-room.

138 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

CHAPTER I.

Paragraph 2. Subject of class essay — Paul and the other
Apostles : Points of Connection and Contrast.

5. Subject of class essay — Relation of Christianity to Learning
and Intellectual Gifts : its Use of them and its Independence of
them.

9. Quote passages of Scripture in which Pants destination to be the
missionary of the Gentiles is expressed.

CHAPTER II.

On the external features of the period embraced in this chapter
compare the corresponding pages of Hausrath ; on the internal
features see Principal Rainy's lecture on Paul in The Evangelical
Succession Lectures, vol. i.

14. On the chronology of Paul's life see the notes at the end of
Conybeare and Howson, and Farrar, ii. 623.

The principal dates may be given at this stage from Cony-
beare and Howson, for reference throughout : —

36. Conversion.

38. Flight to Tarsus.

44. Brought to Antioch by Barnabas.

48. First Missionary Journey.

50. Council at Jerusalem.

51-54. Second Missionary Journey. I and 2 Thessalonians written

at Corinth.
54-58. Third Missionary Journey.

57. I Corinthians written at Ephesus ; 2 Corinthians, in Macedonia;

Galatians, at Corinth.

58. Romans written at Corinth.

Arrest at Jerusalem.

59. In prison at Csesarea.

HINTS AND QJESTIONS. [39

60. Voyage to Rome.

62. Philemon, Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, written at Rome.

63. Release from prison.

67. r Timothy and Titus written.

68. In prison again at Rome. 2 Timothy,

Death.

15. The goat's-hair cloth was called Cilicium, from the name of
the province.

16. Dean Howson's Metaphors of St. Paul. Also Hausrath,
p. 15.

28. Subject for class essay : Paul's First Sight of Jerusalem.

27. A startling picture of the state of society in Jerusalem
might be constructed from the materials supplied in Matt, xxiii.

28. Detailed comparison of the experience of Paul with that
of Luther : their early religious ideas ; the state of religion
around them ; their failure to find peace and their sufferings of
conscience ; their discovery of the righteousness of God.

On the religious associations of Paul's early life see the first
loo pages of Reuss' Christian Theology in the Apostolic Age.

31. On the history of Christianity between the death of Christ
and the conversion of St. Paul see Dykes' From Jerusalem to
Antioch.

34. The question whether Paul was married. His views on the
subject of the place of woman.

35. Perhaps Acts xxvi. n may not imply that any of the
Christians yielded to his endeavours to make them blaspheme.

15. What -was the Latin name for a town enjoying the political

privileges possessed by Tarsus ?

1 6. What are Paul's principal metaphors ?

17. Where does he make this boast?

19. What was the Latin name for the Roman citizenship, and what
privileges did it include ? On what occasions is Paul recorded
to have used it? On what occasions might he have been
expected to use it, when he omitted to do so ? What reasons
may be given for the omission ?

ao. Name friends of Paul who were engaged in the same trade as /:«.

140 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

21. Give Paul 's quotations from the Greek poets. Do you know tht

authors he quoted from ? Explain Septuagint and Diaspora.

22. Where does Paul refer to the sophists and rhetoricians ?

26. Make a collection of Paufs quotations from the Old Testament^

showing whence each of them was taken.
28. What does Paul mean by the Law ?
32. Trace out the points of contact between the language and views of

Stephen's speech and those of Paul.
Explain —

" Si Stephanus non or asset >

Ecclesia Paulum non haberei"

34. Where is it said that Paul voted in the Sanhedrim ?
45. Collect Paufs references to the persecution and bring out how
severe it was.

CHAPTER III.

On Paul's mental processes before and at the time of his
conversion see Principal Rainy's lecture, already quoted.

The conversion of Paul is one of the strong apologetic positions
of Christianity. See this worked out in Lyttelton's Conversion of
St. Paul. But it might be worked out afresh on more modern
lines.

40. Principal Rainy, in the lecture above referred to, says that
he sees no evidence of such a conflict as this in Paul's mind ; but
what, then, is the meaning of " It is hard for thee to kick against
the pricks"?

41. The general tenor of the earliest Christian apologetic, as it
is to be found in the speeches of the Acts of the Apostles.

44. Nothing could be more alien to the spirit, of the New
Testament than to turn this round the other way, and, assuming
that what Paul saw was only a vision, argue that the other
appearances of Christ, because they are put on the same level,
may have been only visions too. This is a mere stroke of

HINTS AND QUESTIONS. 141

dialectical cleverness, which shows no regard to the obvious
intention of the writers.

There are three accounts of the conversion of Paul in the Acts. What
is the significance of this reduplication in so small a book f
Enumerate the differences between these accounts ', and explain
them.

38. Prove that the first Christians called Christianity THE WAY,
and explain the signification of this name.

CHAPTER IV.

On the subject of this chapter see the relevant portions of any
of the Handbooks of New Testament Theology— Weiss, Reuss,
Schmid, van Oosterzee ; also Neanderjs Planting of Christianity,
and Pfleiderer's Paulinismus. Hausrath's sketch is so out of
proportion as to be really a caricature. Weiss' exposition is
perhaps the most solid and trustworthy. He divides Paulinism
into four sections : —

I. THE EARLIEST GOSPEL OF PAUL DURING THE HEATHEN
MISSION (gathered from Thessalonians). One chapter — the
Gospel as the Way of Deliverance from Judgment.
II. THE DOCTRINAL SYSTEM OF THE FOUR GREAT DOCTRINAL
AND CONTROVERSIAL EPISTLES (Corinthians, Romans,
Galatians). Ch. i. Universal Sinfulness of Man ; ch. ii.
Heathenism and Judaism ; ch. iii. Prophecy and Fulfilment ;
ch. iv. Cluistology ; ch. v. Redemption and Justification ;
ch. vi. The New Life ; ch. vii. The Doctrine of Predestina-
tion ; ch. viii. The Doctrine of the Church ; ch. ix. The
Last Things.

III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE IN THE EPISTLES WRITTEN

IN PRISON (Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, Philemon).
Ch. i. The Pauline Foundations ; ch. ii. Further Develop-
ment of Doctrine.

IV. THE TEACHING OF THE PASTORAL EPISTLES. One chapter-

Christianity as Doctrine.

142 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

52. Luther in the Wartburg.

54-65. As these paragraphs are nothing but a paraphrase of
Rom. i.-viii., pupils ought to be asked to compare with them the
corresponding paragraphs of the Epistle.

65. On Paul's Psychology see the Handbooks of Delitzsch and
Beck : also Heard, The Tripartite Nature of Man, and Laidlaw,
The Bible Doctrine of Man.

51. Where does Paul mention his journey to Arabia?

56. What is the connection between moral and intellectual degeneracy ?

62. Where does Paul speak of the gospel as a " mystery" and what

does he mean by this word?
65. Does Paul divide human nature into two or into three sections ?

Do you know the theological names for these alternatives?

Does Paul regard the unregenerate man as possessing the part

of human nature which he calls "spirit" ?
67. Enumerate the incidents of Christ1 s earthly life referred to by

Paul.

CHAPTER V

On this subject see the first two chapters of Conybeare and
Howson ; New Testament Times of Hausrath or Schiirer.

72. Subject of class essay : The Origin and Significance of the
name " Christian."

72. By what other names were the Christians called in New Testa-
ment times, among themselves or among their enemies ?

78. What did the Greeks, the Romans, and the Jews severally eontri-
buteto Christianity?

HINTS AND QUESTIONS. 143

CHAPTER VI.

The aim of this Handbook, as of The Life of Jesus Christ in
the same series, being to show at a single glance the general
course of the life and the principal objects it touched, a good
many details have been omitted. This is especially the case in
this chapter and in chapter x. The omissions cause those great
features to stand out more prominently which details are apt to
obscure. In this chapter an endeavour has been made to show
in this way what were the different regions into which the apostle
travelled, and what the peculiarities and the extent of the work
he did in each. But in an extended Bible Class course the
lessons will naturally go more into detail and perhaps the
incidents which took place in each town may generally form a
lesson. Here, therefore, and at the beginning of chap, x., a few
hints may be given of the viewpoints for the lessons, in so far as
they are not already given in the text.

Acts

xiii. 1-12. First Footsteps of Christian Missions.

,, 14-52. Antioch. Paul's Missionary Method.

xiv. 1-6. Iconium. Among the Jews.

,, 6-20. Lystra. Among the Heathen.

,, 21-28. Paul as a Pastor.

xv. Paul as an Ecclesiastic.

xvi. 1-6. The New Companion.

,, 6-10. Opening up Virgin Soil.

,, 12-40. Philippi. Transfiguration and Disfiguration of

Humanity,
xvii. 1-9. Thtssalonica. An Honourable Reproach.

,, 10-14. Bercea. See the text.

,, 15-34. Athens. The Gospel and Intellectual

Curiosity,
xviii. 1-3. Corinth. Paul's earthly Home.

,, 4-17. The Missionary's Discouragements and En-
couragements.

,, 23-28. A polished Shaft in God's Quiver.
xix. Ephesus. See the text. Also, Conflict of Chris-
tianity with Vested Interests and Mob Violence.

144 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

79. Howson'S Companions of St. Paul.

81. A minute inspection of Acts xiii. g will confirm the view
here given of the change of name, though it is difficult to get
quit of the idea that the conversion of the governor, who bore the
same name, had something to do with it.

84. On the worship of the synagogue see Farrar's Life oj
Christ^ i. 220.

89. On the Council of Jerusalem, which took place between the
first and second journey, see ch. ix.

93. What is here said of the plan of the Acts explains still
more strikingly the meagreness of the record of the third journey.

97. Bercea was to the south of the Via Egnatia.

99. Subject of class essay : The Influence of Christianity on
the Lot of Woman.

103. Subject of class essay : Paul at Athens.

104. Subject of class essay : Paul and Socrates.

113. A strong argument against the mythical theory of the
miracles of our Lord may be constructed from the paucity of
the miracles attributed to Paul. If that age naturally wove
miraculous legends round great names, why did it not encircle
Paul with a continuous web of miracle ? and why does the New
Testament admit that the Baptist worked no miracle ?

79. Give a list of PauFs companions and friends mentioned in the.

New Testament.
84. What were the charges generally brought against him before tin

authorities ?
91. Where in his "writings does he mention Barnabas and Mark ?

93. Give the places in Acts where the items of this catalogue are recorded.

94. Mention other classical associations of this region.

98. What two kings of Macedonia are famous in history?

1 02. Expand these allusions to Greek history ?

103. Give a number of the names associated with the golden age of

Athens and mention what they were famous for.
108. Find out all the visions mentioned in PauTs life, and prove that

they were given him at the crises of his history.
HO. Distinguish our Asia and Asia Minor from thf Asia oj the Afmt

Testament.

HINTS AND QUESTIONS. 145

CHAPTER VII.

In the chronological table, p. 138, the dates of the Epistles
have already been given and the points of the history indicated
where they come in. It is a pity the Epistles are not arranged
in chronological order in our Bibles. Their characteristics may
be mentioned : —

I and 2 Thessatonians. Simple beginnings. Attitude to Christ's
second coming.

1 Corinthians. Picture of an apostolic church.

2 Corinthians. Paul's portrait of himself.
Calatians. Vehement polemic against Judaizcrs.
Romans. Paul's gospel.

Philemon. Example of Christian courtesy.
Colossians and Ephcsians. Paul's later gospel.
Philippians. Picture of Roman imprisonment.

1 Timothy and Titus. Form of the church.

2 Timothy. The last scenes.

118. On Paul's style see FarraHs Excursus at the close of vol. i.
The comparison of it to that of Thucydides is more dignified
than that of the text, but less true.

119. Inspiration did not interfere with natural characteristics
of style. It made the writer not less but more himself, while of
course it imparted to the products of his pen a divine worth and
authority.

120-127. Howson's Character of St. Paul ; Hausrath, 45-57 ;
Baur's remarks (ii. 294 flf.) on his intellectual character are
very good. But the principal sources are 2 Corinthians and
Acts xx.

122. Farrar's treatment of Paul's bodily infirmities is a serious
blot on his book. They are obtruded with a frequency and
exaggeration which produce an impression quite different from
that made by the references to them in Scripture. For a

K

146 THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

treatment of the same subject, realistic, but full of sympathy and
delicacy, see Monod.

122 fT. Illustrate these paragraphs fully from Scripture.
123. Compare Paul with Livingstone and other missionaries.

CHAPTER VIII.

On this subject compare Meander's Planting of Christianity,
Book ii. ch. 7, and SchafTs Church History ; also Bannerman's
Church of Christ. Ihis chaptei is only a piecing together of the
information scattered through I Corinthians. It would be well
to get pupils to seek out the passages of the Epistle which
correspond to the different paragraphs. A picture of a Pauline
church of a later date might be compiled in the same way from
the Pastoral Epistles.

136. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit was revealed " at sundry
times and in divers manners," and the complete doctrine is to be
obtained by uniting the representations of the various writers of
Scripture. In the New Testament there are four phases — I. In
the Synoptical Gospels the Holy Spirit is set forth in His influence
on the human nature of Christ ; 2. in the Acts and Paul, as the
power for founding the church and converting the world ; 3. in
Paul as the principle of the new life of Christians ; 4. in John as
the Comforter.

138. Compare the irregularities of other periods of vast change,
e.g. the Reformation.

144. On the extent to which an authoritative ecclesiastical
system is given in the New Testament compare Jus Divinum
Presbyterii and Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity.

130. Give the names of the principal games of ancient times, derived
from the places where tJiey ivere held.

131. Where are churches mentioned as meeting in the houses of indi-

viduals ?

132. Explain (he words "barbarian" "Scythian," in Col. iii. II.

HINTS AND QUESTIONS. 147

135. What modern divine endeavoured to revive these phenomena, and
what is the name of the church he founded? What is (he
meaning of the word " char ism " ? Were the tongues oj
Pentecost the same as those of I Corinthians? Give instances
in which New Testament prophets did predict future events.

CHAPTER IX.

The criticism which seeks to disintegrate the New Testament
writings and set the apostles against one another is founded on a
revival of the claim of the Judaizers that their propaganda had
the sanction of Peter and the other original apostles. In a
Handbook like this it is impossible to discuss at any length the
Tubingen Theory. Cut some of its points are silently met in the
text ; and the whole theory is met by an attempt to give a view
of the course of the controversy which covers all the facts. The
distinction drawn in paragraphs 159 fF. between the central
question in dispute and a subordinate aspect of the controversy
will be found to clear up many intricacies. Compare Sorley's
Jewish Christians and Judaism.

This chapter is full of references to passages in Acts and
Galatians, which pupils ought to be asked to produce.

CHAPTER X.

Viewpoints for lessons on details omitted or only slightly
referred to in the text : —

Acts xx. 4-16. Paul the Hirer of Labourers for Christ's Vine-
yard : the Unwearied Preacher ( Troas).
„ .1 17-38. The Man of Heart (Miletus).

THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

Acts xxii. Final Effort to save his Country.

xxiii. i-io. In the Dock where he had placed others,

xxiv. 22-27. The Preacher of Righteousness.

xxvi. The Inspired Student,

xxvii. Paul as a Ruler of Men.

xxviii. The Benevolence of Nature and that of Grace (Malta).

171. See notes on ch. iv. p. 141.

The authenticity of Ephesians and Colossians can only be
denied by ignoring the impression of majesty and profundity
which they have made on the greatest minds. (See the Intro-
ductions in Meyer and Alford.) What other mind of those ages
except Paul's could have erected a structure so magnificent on
the very foundations of the Epistle to the Romans ; or in what
other mind was there such a union of the doctrinal and the
ethical ?

In John's writings the relation of believers to Christ is illus-
trated by a far higher 'comparison : it is compared to the union
of Father and Son in the Deity.

172. See Ernesti : The Ethic of Paul.
174. See Smith's Voyage of St. Paul.
176. Burrus, the Praetorian Prefect.

On the various kinds of imprisonment in Roman Law see
Ramsay's Roman Antiquities, ch. ix.

177-182. The materials for this account of Paul's prison life at
Rome are chiefly gathered from the Epistle to the Philippians.

184. On the genuineness of the Pastoral Epistles see Farrar's
note, ii. 607. The comparative lack of doctrinal matter in them
is accounted for by the fact that they were written to ministers
well acquainted with his doctrinal system.

164. Trace out the different collections which Paul is recorded to have

been engaged ivith.
1 66. What were the courts of the temple ; and what was the name of

the Roman fortress which overlooked them ?
171. How often does the phrase "in Christ " (or " in " with pronouns

referring to Christ} occur in Ephesians ?

HINTS AND QUESTIONS. 149

172. Give examples from Paul's writings of the application of great

principles to small duties.
175. Give the names and localities of other great Roman roads.

Describe a Roman triumph.
179. Narrate the story of Quest mns, gathering it from the Efistle to

Philemon.
184. Explain the name of the Pastoral Epistles.

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