CHAPTER XIII.

JESUS BROUGHT TO THE GENTILES.

ST PAUL knew that he was called to be a missionary to the Gentiles. External circumstances favoured this conviction. He himself was a Jew of the dispersion, a seasoned traveller accustomed from his earliest years to the life of the Greek towns. The pride that he took in his peculiar and independent position must have caused his work amongst the distant Gentiles to appear especially desirable to him, unhindered as it would be by the tradition of the early apostles. Next may be mentioned the opposition of the Jews, which he knew only too well from his own past. And besides it was advisable for the renegade—such he appeared to his friends—to depart to a safe distance. Such circumstances and such considerations no doubt contributed largely to aid St. Paul in forming his decision; but the really decisive cause was the clearly-felt impulse that urged him to go forth from the very moment of his call. He was under a necessity—he had to go to the Gentiles.

A tremendous task was laid upon him, to announce 175Jesus as the Saviour of the heathen. Yet the way had been paved—stepping-stones at least were not entirely wanting. First of all, Paul had a companion, Barnabas, who gave him the benefit of his riper knowledge and past experience. In the next place, the separation between Jew and Gentile was not absolutely complete. Little communities of Jews were scattered far and wide in all the larger Mediterranean towns; their synagogues attracted a number of Gentiles who became members of the community in a variety of ways, or were at least on terms of friendship with it. The first thing that St Paul did, therefore, was to visit the Jewish houses and synagogues in order by this means to obtain access to the proselytes and Gentiles. It was thus possible to take for granted that many of the Gentiles would be acquainted with the Jewish presuppositions of the Gospel—especially with the Old Testament. The entirely Jewish character of St. Paul’s mission and theology is of course sufficiently explained by his own Jewish education, but becomes still more intelligible to us when we remember that the surroundings in which he worked had already been interpenetrated by Jewish influences.

In spite, however, of this Jewish preparation the attempt to bring Jesus to the Greeks was something entirely new. How was it to be done?

Several ways might be tried. One had already been attempted: the preaching of the twelve. It consisted of two simple parts: the promise and the threat, together with the demand. First the message: The judgment and the kingdom are close at hand: 176the Messiah is coming, Jesus the crucified and risen Lord; He is coming as judge of the world. Thereby fear and hope are aroused; and then the exhortation: Do God’s will as Jesus taught it, and attach yourself to those who expect Jesus as their Lord. Why should the Gentiles refuse to give ear to this simple appeal?

St. Paul rejected this method with the exception of the first part, the announcement of the judgment. It is not that the presuppositions were too Jewish for him. He never experienced any difficulty in explaining the conception of the Messiah. But for himself this description of Christianity as a scheme of a promise and a claim upon conduct was altogether inadequate. Christianity was entirely a religion of redemption for him. He knew what that meant—to wish to do God’s will and not to be able to do it. All the weakness, the powerlessness and perversity of men when left to themselves, had become intelligible to him through his own failures, and at the same time he had experienced the rescue from this state, the uplifting power—God’s grace. Now, with such an experience the scheme of salvation put forward by the earlier missionaries—it was that of Jesus Himself—could never satisfy him. Jesus the Redeemer, not the lawgiver, that was his watchword. It was a great piece of good fortune for Christianity. As a mere teacher of true religion Jesus would only have taken His place in the ranks of the Greek moral philosophers by the side of Socrates or Pythagoras. As such He would doubtless have commanded respect and admiration, but never the faith which gives birth to a religion. Paul saved Christianity 177from the fate of stagnation as a school of ethics in the universal Greek rationalism.

An entirely different method of bringing Jesus to the Greeks was indicated by the great example of the Jewish-Alexandrine religious philosophy. Jesus needed but to occupy the position of Moses, as indeed He did later on. The Jews of Alexandria looked upon religion as a philosophy, with all its branches—cosmology, psychology, ethics, etc. But as distinguished from the Greek philosophy, they looked upon their own as a revealed philosophy resting upon the oracles of the Old Testament, to which all the wisdom of the Greeks was related either as borrowed or as a preparatory stage. For they either ascribed to the Spirit of God only the sacred writings of the Jews, in which case the Greeks must have stolen from them, or they allowed a certain activity of the divine reason in the Greek thinkers and poets, but proclaimed at the same time the superiority of the absolute revelation which had been granted to Moses.

It is quite possible that the Alexandrine Apollos gave utterance to similar thoughts about Jesus in his teaching regarding the ‘divine wisdom,’ as his countrymen did about Moses. But such a mixture of religion and philosophy appeared to St. Paul pure perversity. Once more his own personal experience was the decisive factor in the judgment which he formed. There had been a time when, as teacher of the law, he had boasted of the wisdom of his religion, and looked proudly down upon the blind heathen that were ignorant as children. But the collapse of his zeal for the law implied at the same time the fall of his pride in his wisdom. The foolishness of the Cross 178as opposed to all the wisdom of the learned, be they Jews or Gentiles, that was his new motto. First brought low in so wonderful a manner, and then exalted as he had been, he seemed to see, at least when he began his work, the essence of all religion in the paradoxical, and rejoiced in the thought that the world had not recognized God through its wisdom, whilst the foolish and the lowly had accepted Jesus as their Redeemer, when He had been presented to them. This, too, was fortunate for early Christianity. Before it had been drawn into the philosophical evolution of the succeeding age, it was able to stand forth in all its sovereignty as a religion. All religion is a paradox. Jesus is not to be counted on the side of the philosophers. His religion can only be treated as an intellectual system, to its own loss and damage. The sole reason that arrested its entire decay was that, thanks to St. Paul, it came to the Greeks at the time of its growth as a power of life, and not as a system of philosophy. Jesus no lawgiver, no teacher of philosophy—that is the kernel of Paul’s preaching, as it was in later times of the Reformers. Hereby alone Paul proves himself to be the foremost interpreter of Jesus, in spite of his deviations from the message of the twelve.

How does Paul preach Jesus the Redeemer to the Greek world?

As for Jesus and the twelve so also for St. Paul, the eschatological message stands in the forefront. The day of judgment is at hand, when each single individual, whether living or dead, shall have to appear before God’s throne and give an account of all that he has done. Reward and punishment are meted out 179by God with perfect justice—to the one destruction and death: salvation, everlasting life in the kingdom of God to the other. The expressions which St. Paul uses are often different to those which we meet with in the message of Jesus. The Jewish conceptions—hell, Paradise, even the kingdom of God—recede into the background. Instead of judgment Paul always uses the word ‘wrath’; instead of ‘kingdom of God’ he prefers ‘salvation’; and instead of ‘hell,’ ‘death.’

The influence of Jesus is felt in the emphasis that is laid upon the individual, and in the entire abolition of all the privileges of Israel. It is individual men and women that appear before God, not peoples; and moral character is the only issue at stake. As before, an especially earnest appeal is founded upon the nearness of the approaching end: it is still time; soon it may be “too late.” “The night is far spent, the day is at hand.”

The question may be raised whether St. Paul provided sanctions for his eschatological message to the heathen. Prophecy has at no time been greatly disturbed to seek for sanctions. Does it not rest upon God’s word, upon the foretelling of His messengers?

The approach of the final catastrophe was a certain fact both for the apostle and for the Jews, proved out of the Old Testament; and Paul might reasonably presuppose among all proselytes of the synagogues some knowledge of the prophecies contained in the Scriptures. Nevertheless he spared no trouble in trying to give reasons for the positions that he advanced, and met the Greeks as well as he could on their own ground. The conceptions of requital after 180death, of torments for the wicked, and of rewards for the righteous in the divine blessedness, were spread far and wide amongst the Greeks by means of Orphic sects and philosophical schools. When Paul announced to each individual the near approach of the day of the revelation of the just judgment of God, and prophesied tribulation and sorrow for all evildoers, and honour, glory and immortality to all the righteous, he was calling up long familiar pictures in the minds of his hearers: the only new element was contained in the message concerning the day on which all should appear before the judgment-seat of God. The apostle, however, was not content even with this. He proved how the beginning of the judgment was revealed even here and now in the moral ruin of the servants of sin. And in so doing he met the demand of those who required a visible pledge for this message of a future hope.

Even though the announcement of the judgment thus appeared to the Greeks as a message that could be grasped at once—in fact, as one with which they were almost familiar—the preaching of the resurrection was, it must be admitted, a stone of stumbling to them from the very first. Many Corinthians looked upon his conception of the restoration of the earthly body as an utter absurdity. Rather than believe such nonsense they would abandon the thought of any resurrection whatever. St. Paul finds himself compelled to draw up an elaborate defence of the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which does in fact so far meet the objections of the Greeks that it removes the chief ground of offence, the quickening of the old body. In this apology he makes use of the 181conceptions of the new spiritual body, while at the same time he routs his adversaries that deny the resurrection by means of popular arguments. This is the most instructive point in the whole proceeding. St Paul is fighting for the old Jewish dogma of the resurrection—which differs entirely from the Greek hope in immortality; and while doing so he deprives it of that which constitutes its essence, by surrendering the belief in the quickening of the mortal body in order thereby to gain over the Greeks. Whether these concessions met with any success amongst the Greeks we do not know; at any rate it was only the old Jewish dogma of the resurrection which gained a permanent footing in the Churches founded by St Paul. We have, however, a striking instance in this explanation of an eschatological doctrine of the way in which the apostle showed his readiness to become a Greek unto the Greeks. Immediately after delivering his eschatological message St. Paul proceeds to paint the corrupt state of his audience, the full extent of which has only been realized by the near approach of the judgment day. Their corruption consists in idolatry and in impurity. Insisting on the degradation implied by these sins, he thus passes on at the same time to preach the faith in the one God and to awaken their consciences.

It is especially over the worship of idols that St Paul waxes wroth. He shows no understanding for any religion but his own. He is just a Jew counting all Gentiles as fallen away from the true religion. The two theories which underlie his criticism are both Jewish—the image theory and the demon theory. Either the heathen are fools because they worship 182mere images, things of nought, dumb idols, the works of men’s hands instead of the God that hath no form; or else they are the poor slaves of demons, bewitched and under a spell, driven to this worship by some wild and wicked impulse. Nowhere, however, do we find him criticising any single one of these different rites from what he has himself observed. He has judged idolatry en bloc before he knows what it is, and he does not want to know what it is.

The explanation of the monotheistic faith which is to take the place of this idolatrous worship is likewise based upon Jewish presuppositions, nor could one have expected St. Paul to do otherwise. He could have found no suitable proof in the person of Jesus. At first the whole of nature is interpreted as a revelation of God. In His works God has manifested His power and His divinity to all men. But then St Paul proceeds to utter that hard saying about the falling away of the heathen from the original revelation and the uselessness of all that philosophy attempts to do. The Jews alone have kept God’s primary revelation. It has been preserved and set forth in the sacred Scriptures. And indeed the Old Testament was the indispensable handbook to any monotheistic form of belief at a time when all higher knowledge of the Greek thinkers and poets was precluded. “The wisdom of the world” meant “foolishness unto God.” And yet even a Paul who wishes to set himself in uncompromising opposition against the whole of the heathen world, even he cannot escape the influence of Hellenism entirely. The doctrine of the ‘nous’ that can behold the invisible essence of God in His works, the conception of truth, the definition of God as the 183Being of whom, through whom, and in whom all things are, prove that—albeit, of course, unconsciously—St. Paul had submitted to the purifying influence of Greek speculation upon Jewish thought.

Moral degradation, impurity, was closely connected with this intellectual corruption—the worship of idols, heathen rites, magic ceremonies, and sexual excesses were all mutually interdependent. Many of those who listened to St. Paul, especially at Corinth, were the scum and offscouring of the depraved masses of the great cities where the apostle taught. Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, abusers of themselves with mankind, thieves, usurers, drunkards, revilers—all these the apostle enumerates in order to continue “and such were some of you.” Even the blackest pessimism did not paint the situation in too dark colours. We have more than sufficient documentary evidence for the prevalence of unnatural vices in this period. St. Paul therefore could say to those to whom he preached that they were a “massa perditionis” without meeting with much contradiction. But in order to gain a hearing he appeals at the same time to reason and conscience, which he does not believe to be quite extinct even in the most bestial of men. Even without any knowledge of the Old Testament they have the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile excusing or else accusing one another. This recognition of the divine in man, which goes so far as to acknowledge that there are uncircumcized heathen that keep the law, is all the more surprising by the side of the apostle’s pessimistic estimate of the Gentile world as a whole.

But after all, in thus appealing to the conscience St Paul is aiming merely at the awakening of the feeling of sin, and his optimistic utterances are made to serve his preaching of the judgment that is to come. They are of importance for us, because St. Paul is here again clearly borrowing from Greek rationalism through intermediate Jewish sources. The Jews had taken over from the Stoic popular philosophy the use of the words “Reason, Conscience, Nature,” and at the same time that conception of men as beings normally endowed with moral faculties and standards of conduct, of which these words are the expression. All differences of time and place sink into comparative insignificance by the side of this the common property of all normally developed moral human beings in the civilized world. This rationalism is one of the most important causes of the rapid spread of Christianity, and St. Paul is the first to make use of it.

The introductory stage of St. Paul’s missionary work was thus formed of two parts—the eschatological message and the description of the degradation of the heathen world. We are not yet in the temple of Christianity itself, but only in the porch. The Jewish element still almost entirely dominates the preaching of St. Paul. His estimates are still influenced by Jewish prophecy, by the Jewish Scriptures, and by Jewish views of the Gentiles. But as a matter of fact lines of communication already lead over to the Greek world, even though they are mostly derived by St. Paul directly from the Jews. His eschatology reminds the Greeks of nearly related doctrines, and they have more that is akin to the monotheistic faith than the apostle is ready to believe. But he himself 185makes earnest appeals to their moral knowledge. Christianity and Hellenism begin to amalgamate in the preaching of the apostle who was in so many ways opposed to everything that was Greek.

St. Paul’s object in thus bringing the Gentile hearers face to face with the near approaching judgment, utterly degraded and fallen away from God as they were, was not to lead them to repentance in the earlier sense of the word, but to faith. To repent meant, with Jesus, to turn round and do God’s will. Paul does not at all believe that his hearers can do that. In spite of all the power that a man possesses of forming moral judgments, it is perfectly useless to appeal to his reason as long as it is held captive by his senses—by the law of sin in the flesh. His own experience had shattered his faith in the victorious power of the will; this, however, was not the only or even the decisive reason for the new demand for faith. As the whole object of his missionary labours is to win over the Gentiles for the Christian Churches, Paul can never grant that any awakening of new moral power would be possible through man’s unaided efforts apart from the Church. He must, on the contrary, be so entirely broken and powerless that no other path of safety remains open to him in the whole world but faith—i.e. entrance into the Christian fellowship. This is the point where Jesus and His apostle are furthest apart from each other. With Jesus, courage, joy, and feeling of strength and entire health; as He Himself does God’s will so He bids others do it, without attaching any ecclesiastical limitation. In Paul’s case we have the description of a weak and heartbroken man who can only gain the 186victory within the Church and by supernatural grace. Extreme pessimism and the dogma of salvation by faith alone and in the Church—“extra ecclesiam nulla salus”—are correlatives. Jesus knows neither the one nor the other.

Oppressed by the burden of his sin, and trembling at the thought of the judgment, the convert is brought to Jesus his Redeemer—not the Jesus of the Gospels who promised the kingdom of God, revealed God’s will, drove out demons and made God and man at one: this Jesus Paul himself never knew. He would, accordingly, have been obliged to have preached Him on the authority of the early apostles. But in their message He appeared as a prophet and a lawgiver, and that did not suit Paul’s purpose. Jesus the crucified alone, or the crucified and risen Son of God, such is the Redeemer in St. Paul’s preaching. He gives a short title to the whole of his message—the “word of the Cross.” Now the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are not really deeds of Jesus, but experiences in which He played a very passive part. From an external point of view they are purely historical facts—paradoxes for the understanding, miracles and mysteries. Paul grants all this. The statement, Jesus the crucified is our Redeemer, is merely folly for the understanding; it is only through faith, that makes its way through all that is repulsive and paradoxical, that it becomes a power unto salvation.

Christianity, says St. Paul to the Corinthians, so clearly that there can be no possibility of a mistake, Christianity is not a philosophy: it is no rational system, but it is something historical, irrational and 187paradoxical, in which faith either recognizes God’s power or else it does not. True, the facts have their meaning. The Cross implies God’s love, grace, and forgiveness; the Resurrection the beginning of the life to come; but this meaning itself exists for faith alone. It is, of course, in any case painful for us to observe how the rich contents of the life of Christ and, above all, His message—though this, to be sure, we do meet with later on in the apostle’s preaching—are entirely sacrificed to these two facts. But then what does this loss signify when we balance it against the immense simplification and concentration of this preaching of salvation? Simplification is always the mark of great men. In the preaching of St Peter and the other twelve all was presented side by side: the promise, the commandments, the miracles, the cross and the resurrection. It would have been difficult, especially for Greeks, to distinguish the redemptive power of Jesus in all this mass of material, whereas Paul brought them something which was simple and great that roused their enthusiasm (in spite of all paradox). There must surely be something divine when One that was crucified was made the object of such love and such enthusiasm. And when, thereupon, he exclaimed at the end of his address, “This is the way to salvation on the judgment day—faith in the crucified Saviour; here is atonement, grace, peace and certain salvation,” then his words found their way home and faith cried ‘Amen.’

Furthermore, this preaching, paradoxical as it was, contained elements that were extremely congenial to the Greek mind. The crucified Lord is the Son of God, who according to St. Paul descended from 188heaven. However incomprehensible the death of a heavenly being must have appeared to the Greeks in this statement—for the ideas of divinity and of death are incompatible—they were perfectly familiar with the title ‘Son of God’ and with the idea of the descent of such an one from heaven. And as in addition to this Jesus’ resurrection follows on the third day after His death and is then in turn succeeded by the Ascension to heaven, the divine nature is restored to its rights and a portion at least of the difficulty is removed. St. Paul’s christology appeared therefore to the Greeks simply as the revelation of a new myth, like those with which they were already familiar, only surpassing them all in grandeur and power. In spite of the apostle’s firm belief in the parousia, the emphasis in his christology is laid so entirely on past historical events, that for the hearers at any rate it is not the expected Messiah but the Son of God who has already come down from heaven, that becomes the centre of their faith. But the real stumbling-block still remained—Christ’s death. St. Paul attempted to familiarize the Greeks with the idea by means of the conception of sacrifice. However Jewish his methods might be, his arguments after all contained elements common to the universal religious experience of mankind—sacrifice, vicarious atonement, and expiation. The greater part of his hearers especially, belonging as they did to classes that were morally degraded, were only too ready to accept the atoning death of Jesus which promised them remission of their punishment. In spite of all, however, there was paradox enough to cause amazement and surprise.

When once this first step had been taken, when faith had been aroused and the enthusiastic confession had fallen from the convert’s lips—“Jesus is the Lord” (the apostle uses this title and not ‘Messiah’ amongst the Greeks)—St. Paul immediately proceeded to gather the disciples together into an organzied community. No Christian could have fought his way through the great dark night of idolatry and immorality as an isolated unit: the community—St. Paul calls it Church, using a Jewish word—was here the necessary condition for all permanent life. Here, again, many points of contact were presented by the Greek system of guilds and confraternities, of which the Jews had already made some use.

At the present day we are scarcely in a position to decide whether Paul exclusively followed Jewish patterns, or whether in some points he modelled his organizations directly upon the Greek type. As in addition he was bound to take over the characteristic rites of the Jewish Christian Church, and many of its forms and customs, he in any case created something that was entirely new to the world in which he lived. Through this amalgamation of Jewish, Greek, and Christian elements arose the Christian Church of the Gentiles, which throughout its future history remained ever open to receive new impressions, as a direct consequence of its origin from different sources. Baptism in the name of Jesus the Crucified was the form of entrance. Then followed very numerous meetings, for meals partaken in common, for divine worship, and also for the support of the poor brethren in the different localities as well as at Jerusalem. They were true communities of brethren, closely knit 190together for social, ceremonial and legal purposes, which gave their individual members a sense of strength and comfort, and often stood to them in the place of the family. St. Paul attached an almost exaggerated importance to the value of these communities. They were to be nothing more or less than mediators of the Spirit of God or of Jesus to the individual. Though the aim and object of his preaching had been the conversion of the individual, he conceived the power of the new life to be exclusively confined to the Church. Here and here alone is the sphere of the Spirit’s miraculous operations—the speaking with tongues, the healing of the sick and prophecy, and at the same time the renewal of the life, the power to start afresh. Only he who is a member of Christ’s body—that is, who actually belongs to the Christian fellowship—experiences the Redeemer’s influence that absorbs all that is sinful and earthly and implants that which is good and pure. St. Paul was sober-minded enough to recognize that these Christian communities were very far indeed from being his ideal the body of Jesus the temple of God. If in spite of this he clung fast hold to his belief in the power of the Church, he relied upon the fact that in spite of everything, many in the community shone like stars in the world in the midst of a wicked and perverse generation. For it was the beautiful time of the early spring, when the Church and the fellowship of them that believed entirely coincided, and did not, as now, stand in opposition to each other; when the influence of Jesus—that is, the Spirit—imparted itself so mightily to the whole community through the apostle, his fellow workers, and 191the first converts, that each individual was subject to it. This influence of Jesus did at first of course often find expression in excited behaviour and wildly enthusiastic actions, and it was only after repeated humiliations of one kind and another that it assumed a quiet and practically useful character. But without something of this enthusiasm, there had been no courage to lay the new foundation, and to separate from the world. The soul of Jesus, confined before within the secluded Jewish sects, now created for itself a second time a body, and this time one that was a great deal better suited to its power and glad joy. And that cannot be done without some stormy experiences. But the communities in which the Spirit finds a habitation are destined to alter the current of the world’s history.

Scarcely have the Gentiles become members of the Christian community than Paul tries to discover something for them to do. His aim is now to train these masses of men, who had hitherto been for the most part without any kind of discipline, to work for the realization of the Christian ideal. He who had up till now only given and promised, now summons them to do the will of God in the strength of that which they have received. Words of Jesus, texts of the Old Testament, claims of the conscience, rules of Christian custom and discipline, reflections prompted by consideration for the outside heathen world, are all to become one combined motive for moral regeneration.

A very important question here arises: Did St. Paul keep faithfully to the ideal of Jesus, subordinating everything else to it?

Two preliminary observations are necessary to obviate any unfairness in the comparison.

1. St. Paul had to do with Gentiles, not with Jews. He cannot presuppose the high average of morality which Jesus merely purified, simplified, and set free from all impediments. A great part of his task consists in bringing his converts to the point where Jesus found His disciples from the very first. He cannot effect anything without lowering the standard to a certain extent. He is obliged, e.g., to attach greater value to outer deeds and respectability than to thoughts, even though he himself has exactly the same opinion as Jesus about the inner motive. In the next place, he is confronted with a whole mass of new ethical problems with which Jesus was not acquainted. The whole domain of social ethics, the state, the family, slavery, woman’s position—all directly concern him, for it must now be decided whether these forms and institutions have any meaning for Christians. Whether St. Paul’s solution is the right one may be doubted. At any rate he creates new values.

2. Jesus’ claim concerned the individual simply and solely. St. Paul has the Christian Churches in view. There is a Christian form of worship, Christian discipline, the beginnings of ecclesiastical law, all of them things which did not exist in Jesus’ time. Thus, whilst Jesus detached the individual as far as possible from his surroundings and left him to his own resources, St. Paul looks upon the duties which a man owes to the fellowship as the highest. This necessarily implies certain ecclesiastical claims even though they be reduced to a minimum.

Hence the simple division which was obviously 193sufficient for Jesus’ demand is no longer quite suitable for St. Paul’s. Jesus placed men in their right relation to the three realities: to themselves, their neighbour, and God. Everything else either completely vanished or receded into comparative insignificance by the side of these three realities. Three other problems have come to be of primary importance for St. Paul: the position of the Christian to the world; his duty to the Church; public worship. The same three realities, as in Jesus' case, lie at the basis of these problems, and yet there has been of necessity a certain shifting of interest. The comparison with Jesus is facilitated if from the very first we take this shifting of the problems into account.

The position to the world is the first and most urgent problem. The Christians come forth from this world where the demons bear sway and idolatry and immorality prevail. What is to be avoided as heathenish and sinful? What is necessary for the support of life? What is left to the free decision of the individual conscience? Can laws for all be set up? And what do they embrace?

St. Paul’s solution of these difficult problems cannot but excite our highest admiration.

He starts from that which is obviously wicked, from downright vices, which are not to be tolerated in the Church. Idolatry, immorality of every kind, theft, drunkenness, are not to occur amongst Christians, were it but for the reason that they would thereby compromise themselves in the eyes of the world. Under the same category come, furthermore, party divisions, strife and bickering. Thence he goes down to the roots of these vices in the sins of thought and word. 194Impure desires, low words, anger, envy and jealousy, blasphemy, lying, all that proceeds from the flesh and not from the Spirit, is to be torn out and put away. Thus far the law can be set up for all. But are the limits thereby laid down beyond which lies the kingdom of the good, and of that which is permitted?

No, it is only when we have reached the individual conscience that we come to the decisive point. All that does not proceed from faith is sin. Whatever the conscience does not forbid is good. The conscience is individual, free, and only liable to give reckoning to God. But the matter is not settled with this proclamation of the freedom of conscience. Who can deny that the conscience of the masses of the Gentile converts is anything but degraded and darkened? How indistinct, in such cases, are the boundaries between conscience, bad habits, and caprice! The aim is the transformation and education of this conscience till it attains to Christian standards. The ‘nous,’ the practical reason itself, must be changed step by step, that it may be entirely weaned from its former worldly standards and may become capable of understanding God’s will, that which is good, pleasing and perfect. This comes to pass through the influence of the Christian community, and yet only on condition that the individual himself works at the purifying and deepening of his moral sense. The Christian has therefore never attained completeness in his relation to the world, but is always in the midst of a process of growth and development. He knows that he has always a number of problems set before him which only he, 195the individual, can solve, and which no written laws can prescribe.

The man who reached the height of these principles—higher than these there are none—did not only personally renounce the part of lawgiver in favour of free development of the Churches, but he saved Christianity itself from the fate of ever lasting immobility by setting up a code of laws. A religion like that of Islam is stereotyped for all time through its sacred book of laws, both from an ecclesiastical, social, and political point of view. Thanks to the Apostle Paul, Christianity is bound to no other law than that of the Christian conscience. To attain to this point of view, and still more, to maintain it, called for a courageous faith which perhaps no other man possessed in that age.

But did St. Paul himself remain quite true to his own principles in the advice that he gave and in his exhortations? The step between the setting up of a principle and its application in concrete instances is difficult enough, especially in the early days of any movement. In every case we have our highest authority in the principles which the apostle himself has laid down, even if his exhortations in the concrete case are opposed to them.

Great emphasis is laid in the epistles upon the duty of the renunciation of this world, and that with good reason: “Be not conformed to this world”; and “set your minds on the things that are above, for your citizenship is in heaven”; “seek the things that are above, not the things that are below”; “I am crucified unto the world and the world to me.” In expressions such as these the world is entirely identified 196with the kingdom of wickedness. But the heathen world, with which St. Paul was most intimately acquainted, was just that and exactly that. One need but think for a moment of cities such as Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome. To break with these heathen surroundings with their manners and customs, their superstition, with their laxity of public opinion, was a Christian’s first and foremost duty. The very first act of the new life was to become completely different even in mere external matters to one’s immediate surroundings. And as the power of custom was forever thwarting the new ideal, a constant struggle with custom—i.e. the world—was inevitable. St. Paul declares, too, in so many words that denial of the world means for him the struggle against sin. To die to sin, to be no longer the slave of sin, to crucify the flesh with its lusts and its desires—that was what bidding farewell to the world implied. Now, since the heathen religion and immorality were the chief representatives of sin and exercised at the same time the most powerful influence in public and private life was the art of that age much else than a public exhibition of immorality? It can easily be imagined that the domain into which the Christian was prohibited from entering was a very wide one. And, besides, there was the belief that it was the demons who were at work in all this wicked world, in the religious ceremonies and in the crimes, whereby a secret dread and horror were mingled with the purely moral hatred. No ultimate victory, no mere continuance even of early Christianity, had been possible without this great and powerful factor, fantastic though it was at times—renunciation of the world and constant struggle 197 against it. The fiery winged words, especially the great battle-cry in the letter to the Ephesians, prove the apostle to have grasped the real position of affairs, and do him all honour. Wherever he could he thoroughly swept out all the heathen filth and dirt without listening to any terms, without even a thought of a compromise. It is to St. Paul that Christianity owes its aggressive courage, its boldness in the destruction of all idols. And yet it was none other than St. Paul himself who prevented the exaggeration of this renunciation into asceticism or into a dualistic speculation. “There is nothing secular but what is sinful”—i.e. what the Christian conscience calls sin—that is the limit: not a step further. In spite of all demons the old saying remains true: “The earth is the Lord’s and all the fulness thereof.” St. Paul did not set up the statement that all is of God as a speculative principle but as a practical maxim, and by it the things of this world are to be judged. “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean of itself, save that to him who accounteth anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean.” And on this the apostle’s great sayings are founded: “All things are yours—even the world,” and “All things are lawful.” When one reflects upon the situation of the first Christians, they are indeed sufficient to excite one’s amazement. In every crisis of his missionary labours St. Paul adhered firmly to these principles. As against the Judaizing party he rescues the freedom with which Christ has set us free. Against the ascetics at Rome, who imagined themselves compelled by religious scruples to forgo meat and wine, he takes up the defence of the 198‘strong’ brethren. It is right to use everything for which one can give God thanks. He rejects the doctrines of the ascetics of Colossae—“Touch not, taste not, handle not”—as commandments of men, and proclaims instead the principle of liberty. “Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.”

The question concerning meats offered to idols presented the greatest difficulty of all, since it entered more deeply than any other into the every day life of the converts. Every invitation to a meal, every purchase in the market, might bring the Christian into contact with this meat. The argument that by eating such meat one entered into communion with the demons to whom it was offered, made an impression albeit a transitory one—even upon St. Paul himself. But the real reason for abstinence is love alone, regard for the conscience of the weak brother. The individual is free even in this case to regulate his own conduct. If he can thank God for his meat, no man can condemn him. On one occasion a saying of the apostle’s was misunderstood: he was supposed to have meant that a Christian was not allowed to consort any more with whoremongers, usurers, and idolaters. St. Paul emphatically protested against this misinterpretation of his words by the characteristic statement, “other wise you would have to leave this world.” The Christian must take up his position in the world and remain therein, for God has made it, and it belongs to God. So, then, in spite of his call to renunciation, St. Paul represents with reference to the world the 199standpoint, not of the Pharisees but of Jesus, to which he merely gave a fuller application and a clearer definition.

To describe the duties which a man owes towards himself, St. Paul is fond of using the word ‘sanctification,’ and, in fact, generally speaking, words derived from the language of ritual. Here one can trace the influence of St. Paul’s early training in the school of the Scribes. Jesus makes no use whatever of the Pharisaic terminology of sacred and profane. The opposite of ‘holy’ is not wicked, but unclean, unconsecrated; and the application to the world without, instead of to one’s own heart, is only too easily made. It is not difficult to find reminiscences in St. Paul’s writings of the earlier Jewish phraseology—this, e.g., that it is especially the members, the body, i.e., the external, that is to be sanctified rather than the heart above all else. Sanctification is therefore, as in later Christian literature, something that is strictly limited. It consists in avoiding the sins of the flesh, and in repressing sensuality. If we recall the few facts that we know as to the past history of the Christian converts, e.g., at Corinth, and remember the difficult position in which they were placed in the world in which they lived then, we can easily realize that sanctification, in the narrow sense of the word, was bound to constitute the first task of the Christian life. A higher morality can only grow up where the individual has attained the mastery over his lower, his animal impulses. Hence the following sentence stands at the head of all the rest of the apostle’s exhortations to the Thessalonians: “This is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain 200from fornication.” The first sign that one is to look for in the newly baptized Christian is that he no longer follows his lusts, but has nailed them for good to the Cross. So again in the great exhortation in the Epistle to the Romans: the presenting of our bodies as a sacrifice to God—i.e., their sanctification—is placed before everything else. A passage in the First Epistle to the Corinthians shows us that this duty was by no means regarded as a matter of course. The Christians at Corinth must have been heard reasoning somewhat as follows: As complete liberty is granted in matters of food, seeing that the belly perishes, so sexual intercourse, too, is one of the adiaphora, for the whole body is doomed to corruption. The abhorrence which this reasoning excited in St. Paul, and the number of arguments which he employed against it, prove to us how serious he considered the danger to be. For the Greeks, religion was almost entirely a matter of ceremonial. The apostle’s main object, therefore, was to show them that self-discipline in the ordinary everyday life—and especially chastity—was a part of religion itself, and that without the fulfilment of this preliminary condition they could have no share in redemption or in communion with God. The immense emphasis that was thus laid upon sanctification naturally led to a certain narrowing of the Christian conception of duty as a whole. That which in the teaching of Jesus appears merely as a part, and not even a very prominent part, of the Christian ideal, seems to be the one thing needful in many passages in St. Paul’s writings. But such concentration was an absolute necessity. Here was the most dangerous enemy. The full 201impetus of the attack must be directed against him, and he must be completely routed, and then the way to the higher stages of Christian morality would be rendered possible. In Jewish writings of a moral character we find exactly the same emphasis laid upon the same duty. St. Paul is here working for the education of the masses. He has to raise them up out of the mire and filth of the world to the level of the morality of the Gospel. And by the side of these exhortations we read those beautiful words to the Philippians: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” The man who sets up so exalted and comprehensive an ideal is far from expending all his moral force in the struggle against sensuality.

As we pass on to consider St. Paul’s relation to social institutions, it is surprising to find in what favourable terms he speaks of the State, and that, too, when Nero sat on the throne. The difference between Jesus and His apostle is very striking in this point. For Jesus living in Palestine, the State is naturally regarded as a foreign power resting upon brute force and oppression. For Paul, the Roman citizen, it is the great empire of peace, which enables him to exercise his calling as missionary without let or hindrance, and more than once protects him and his congregations from the Jews and the rabble. Thus he calls the State the great minister of God for good. It receives all its power from God Himself. It is none other than the State that will for a season 202restrain Antichrist, and thereby render the undisturbed expansion of Christianity possible. It is very probable that we have here the after-effects of important doctrines of the Pharisees, dating from a time when politics and religion were unfortunately intermingled. Had it not been for his own fortunate experience, however, he would not have given them the powerful expression which he did. But one must be very careful not to confuse this optimistic religious view of the State with anything like patriotic feeling. St. Paul sought his own fatherland, and that of all Christians, in heaven, and that not only after his imprisonment at Home. Hence, too, the duties of the Christian to the State are practically all included in the paying of taxes and the rendering of the outer marks of obedience. The Lord of the Christians is after all not the Caesar at Home, but Jesus in heaven, whose speedy return shall put an end even to the Roman empire. If we look at the 13th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans carefully, there is no perceptible trace of political thinking, or even of political interest. The only matter that is of importance from the point of view of the world’s history is that even before the great struggle between Church and State broke out, Christians are forbidden under all circumstances to engage in revolution. That is not much, but it saved the Church.

St. Paul regards the organization of human society, the relation of master and slave, as something divinely ordained and admitting of no reform. There is no thought of the abolition of slavery, or of equality at least between Christian slaves and their masters. God calls the one to be a slave and the other to be a 203master: hence one can serve Him in either relation. The only result of any attempt to change this social order would be a state of uncertainty and danger. Hence the slave, even if liberated, had better make no use of his manumission. The real reason for this indifference to the existing order is not only the hope that the end of the world is near at hand—and with that, of course, all else will end—but also the feeling that these social differences neither directly further nor hinder one’s development, but that they are beneficial or injurious according to the use which the Christian makes of them. And, besides, it must not be forgotten that modern slavery is a very different thing from ancient. The modern feelings of misery and wretchedness which we associate with slavery were then unknown. And yet St. Paul is not the man simply to leave things as he found them. In the passages relating to the duties of domestic life which are to be found in the later letters and in the Epistle to Philemon we have the first brief but promising attempts to Christianize the relationship of master and slave. If the Christian master and the Christian slave will ever remember their responsibility to their heavenly Master, then a new spirit is bound by degrees to find an entrance. The Christian master is to look upon his former runaway slave who now returns of his own free will as his “brother beloved.” Instead of severing the existing relationships without substituting anything better for them, simply in order to proclaim a merely negative result—the freedom from bondage—the apostle endeavours to Christianize the social order of his day.

How different, again, are the problems which Jesus. 204and His apostle respectively had to solve with regard to marriage and the family. Apart from the frivolous practice of divorce which He abolished, Jesus could reckon upon a condition of affairs that was at bottom sound. St. Paul, on the contrary, finds himself compelled to start from the very beginning, to lay the foundations on which later a healthy family life could be built. That he did this is sufficient of itself to prove that he was more than an ascetic. It would be well for us to read the descriptions of the apostles in the later “Acts,” how they travel among the heathen populations making it their main object to separate man and wife by setting up the standard of an absolute continence.

There was no more decided opponent of asceticism on this point than the author of the first letter to the Corinthians, who enjoins their marital duties upon husband and wife, and warns them against a dangerous continence. He speaks of these matters in the down right way of old times without any appearance of prudery, which is very different from our fastidious treatment of these subjects. In a world full of crime, uncleanness, and sordidness of every kind he recognized his vocation in the education of the masses to the ideals of honourable marriage and constant fidelity. Perhaps he demanded too little: obedience of the women, love of the men—more the passages in the letters do not contain: but then this little contained, after all, all that was important, and on this foundation a new and healthy life could be built up. He likewise commended in a few brief and wise words the education of their children to Christian fathers and mothers, and to the former the duty of obedience. 205Taking it all in all, we have in St. Paul an educator with a thoroughly healthy understanding for all that was necessary and wholesome.

But, then, is there not the celebrated chapter in the First Epistle to the Corinthians? Here, surely, we have the words of a monk and an enthusiast.

First of all, “the present distress” and the “shortness of the time” have to a certain extent shifted his point of view. He here strikes a note which reminds one of the apocalypse in St Mark xiii.: “Woe to them that are with child and that give suck in those days.” But there are also echoes of thoughts of Jesus Himself. Just as Jesus uplifts His voice in warning against the light-heartedness with which as before, in the days of Noah, so once more before the end of the world—they “were marrying and giving in marriage,” St. Paul likewise fights against the fettering of the soul in the presence of eternity: “they that have wives . . . . as though they had none.” That can be understood by reference to the teaching of Jesus. But then, further: the unmarried man can care for the Lord better than the married; marriage dulls a man’s sense to higher things. As though this aptitude for the higher life were especially noticeable in bachelors and unmarried women! Paul was not married. He had his calling as an apostle, which entirely engrossed him. He forgot that when, while writing these words, he fancied all unmarried men like himself. The principal reason, however, is yet to come: there is something unclean in marriage; only the unmarried woman can be holy both body and soul—i.e., marriage defiles. Hence celibacy and virginity are higher and better than marriage. Hence 206it is better to remain a widow than marry again. Marriage is a compromise between entire chastity and the weakness of the flesh: it is better than prostitution, and in comparison therewith not sinful but good. Thus writes the Rabbi in Paul, to whom the natural no longer appears clean. These sentences—the ideal in its entirety set up for all alike—do not stand on the level of the Gospel.

This will occasion no surprise to anyone who knows how difficult it is for a man to escape entirely from the influence of his past. On the contrary, it is surprising how one with such ideals, and starting from such premises, could write so exceedingly wisely, soberly, and with such entire self-suppression as St Paul in 1 Cor. vii. It is in this very chapter that he enjoins upon husband and wife their mutual duties, that he approves of mixed marriages, and would allow divorce if the heathen husband or wife so wish it. He allows marriage to virgins and to widows. He recommends it, if it must be, to those that are spiritually betrothed. The very man who has just presupposed that marriage is in a sense polluting, even though he has not said so in so many words, declares that the heathen husband is sanctified by consorting with the Christian wife; for the children surely are holy. And nowhere else but in this passage does St. Paul subordinate his own word, as advice or opinion, to the word of Jesus, which is a command. It may, therefore, be maintained with perfect justice that St. Paul consistently and zealously fulfilled his task of educating the heathen masses, sunken as they were in unnatural vice and frivolity, to a healthy and faithful family life, and that in spite of 207his favourite ideas, which smacked of the Rabbi and the ascetic. The spirit of Jesus completely dominated, not indeed his thoughts, but his acts in his missionary calling.

The apostle’s prescription regarding the head-dress to be worn by women during divine service belongs to the reform of manners properly so called. The difference between St. Paul and Jesus is here again especially noticeable. In Jesus case we have only the three great realities by the side of which all details disappear. His gaze is directed upon eternity. St. Paul regulates a special case—woman’s dress—insisting upon it with the greatest urgency, and marshals a whole array of reasons in support of the position. But the rule which the apostle lays down is intended to counteract woman’s mistaken aim to be man’s equal in everything; and then, in the midst of the strangest statements, we are surprised by the assertion of the essential equality of the two sexes: “Nevertheless, neither is the man without the woman, nor the woman without the man in the Lord. For as the woman is of the man (in Paradise) even so is the man also by the woman (since then), but all things of God.” It was just the exaggerated emphasis which the apostle had laid upon the inferiority and subordination of woman that compelled him to reflect and make this correction.

In regulating the intercourse with the unbelievers, St. Paul sets up the simple principles of friendliness, peacefulness, and love, even towards slanderers and persecutors, and so remains true to the example of Jesus: “Provide things honest in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live 208peaceably with all men. As long as we have time let us do good to all men.” He often bids his converts think of what their heathen neighbours will be likely to say. Consideration for them should be a spur to every individual to press on towards perfection. The only passage in which he issues a curt command to be entirely separate from the servants of Beliar (quoting Old Testament texts in support of what he says), is so entirely without connection with its context that its genuineness has rightly been called in question. All that we know else of the apostle is the very opposite of anxious timidity. The Christian may associate fearlessly with sinners as long as his conscience does not suffer hurt.

We have thus examined the Christian’s position towards the world from every point of view. On its progress from the little villages round about the Sea of Galilee, out into the great world and into the great cities, Christianity encountered a number of new tasks and problems, the solution of which tested the power of Jesus' spirit. St. Paul was the first great leader in this forward march. The new religion is indebted to him for its boldness, for its undaunted faith, for its energy in saving the good seed and in pulling out the weeds in every new ground that was sown.

The second principal task which St. Paul had to take in hand was the regulation of the care of the community. Jesus had not founded any organized community, and had given His commandment of love of one’s neighbour the widest possible extension by especially including one’s enemies. The brotherhood of believers became the real sphere for the exercise of this love of one’s neighbour, both 209for the first Christian society and for St. Paul. Thereby, no doubt, the commandment of Christ was narrowed. The aim of the Christian mission is, it is true, ever more and more to include the whole world in the community. But, as a matter of fact, there is a clearly defined boundary line between the world and the community, and this is often only too plainly visible. The love of one’s brother no longer means the love for every human being, who is my brother, but love for the Christian alone. The word φιλαδελφια is used amongst Christians since St. Paul’s time in this narrower sense, but so it had already been used in the Jewish congregations. There is indeed an approximation on the part of the Christian to the Jewish communities, for in both alike, sanctification and love of the brethren are accounted the highest virtues. But this concentration was again necessary and beneficial for Christianity. If words and feelings were to be turned into deeds, then this vague and undefined love had to crystallize into love of the community—the love, e.g., of a Corinthian convert for all his townsmen was in any case an empty phrase, that for his fellow Christians might at least be genuine; and, besides, St. Paul was always careful to see that the duty of love beyond the limits of the congregation was brought home to his disciples.

Every single congregation was always to consider itself a member of the whole body—the Church of the Christian brotherhood, and never as a self-existent unit. Did not the apostles, the prophets, and the teachers, belong to the whole Church? Jerusalem was the Mother Church of all these congregations. The most palpable external sign of this connection was the 210collection for the poor at Jerusalem, which St Paul set on foot and carried through with a truly amazing energy, in spite of his often strained relations with the heads of that Church. But this was by no means all. Either the apostle himself or his fellow-workers brought each congregation news of the other congregations as they travelled about from place to place, thus awakening feelings of shame, resentment, emulation, and ambition. Each congregation felt that it was observed, and possibly also criticised, by all other congregations throughout the whole world. Besides this, there was the link formed by united prayer for the apostle and with him for congregations in distress. And finally, the exercise of a generous hospitality was regarded as a duty towards all missionaries and brethren on their travels, and they in their turn again strengthened the feelings of union between each and all. In this manner St. Paul created an organization so closely pieced together that no single link could fall out of the chain, but that each felt that it was kept in its place by the united efforts of all the rest; and in so doing he afforded Christian love a wide and varied sphere wherein to realize itself.

But its chief domain was after all that which lay nearest home—the individual congregation. Just like Jesus, St. Paul esteemed that love highest which did not go forth in search of distant and extraordinary deeds, but proved its strength in the ordinary and everyday life. A man might give all that he had to the poor and yet be without the right kind of love. It is this prosaic, everyday love—no sentimental enthusiasm—that St. Paul commends to the Corinthians, 211in the celebrated chapter, as the greatest thing in the world, as that which abideth forever when speaking with tongues, prophecy, and knowledge have passed away; yea, which is even greater than faith and hope. There is indeed nothing simpler than to exercise patience and goodness, and not to boast or envy, not to offend against good manners nor seek one’s own, and not to bear a grudge; and therefore of course nothing harder. By all that he did and said St. Paul strove that the Christians should pursue this simple ideal. And yet what difficulties were placed in his path by this very system of separate congregations! Parties and factions seemed forever to be forming, and celebrated teachers to be founding schools. The strong looked down with contempt upon the weak, and these in their turn condemned the strong. There were lawsuits about property which brought the brethren into evil repute amongst their heathen neighbours. The apostle intervened in each case with a peremptory yet friendly admonition to live in unity and practise mutual concession, modesty and humility. He came in course of time to attach the highest value to this congregational life as the most important school for the training of the individual. Here frequent occasions occur for the individual to forget himself, to become of no reputation, to retain the self-mastery by concession and patient endurance, to allow freedom of conscience to be ruled by love, and to further a brother’s best interests in all things. But then the consequence of this is that each no longer has to fight his own battle, but feels himself supported, comforted and strengthened by the whole community. St. Paul revives the old picture of the 212body and the members, where each member is of importance for the body, and gives it a new and magnificent application and meaning. When one member suffers all suffer; when one is honoured all are glad; it is a duty to rejoice with them that do rejoice and to weep with them that weep. Who can complain any longer that love has been narrowed? Surely it is Jesus Himself who imparts to this brotherhood this unexampled capacity for active love? St. Paul merely caught up this love that issued from Jesus, assigned to it a narrower sphere, and then multiplied it in the congregations which he founded.

St. Paul’s third and last task, the regulation of public worship, is almost entirely a part of the second. For Jesus there was naturally no such thing as a Christian public worship, for the simple reason that He founded no Church. He taught His disciples to pray both by themselves and together; and it is at least the beginning of such worship that one liturgical prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, is ascribed to Him. The necessity of a special separate Christian form of worship made itself felt in the first congregation, otherwise there had been no continuance of the corporate life of the Church. Its two principal component parts—Baptism and the Lord’s Supper—are signs of this very corporate life, intended to mark, the one the reception of the member into the community, the other the public meetings of the brethren. We must be careful to remember this when we come to examine St Paul’s regulations.

In regard to both sacraments St. Paul is no longer a creator. He simply accepts the tradition. The 213public worship of the Church was likewise in all probability modelled after the pattern of the Jewish synagogues. This much we may safely infer from the use of Aramaic words; only the enthusiasm of the congregations generate, at any rate at first, a far greater freedom and variety of forms. When an exaggerated, and at the same time selfish, form of pietism availed itself at Corinth of this freedom, to the destruction of all decency and order, St. Paul introduced a liturgical form of worship, and thereby also checked the desire of the women for emancipation. And for the same reason he was compelled to turn his attention to the common meals, which at times degenerated into pious drinking bouts, and to issue strict regulations as to the right and wrong way of partaking of the Supper of the Lord. In both cases we see how the good order of the life of the congregation, the edification of all instead of merely a few, the participation of the poorer brethren in the meals—all of them social considerations—were really decisive. It is more important that all should profit than that one or two should be caught up into the seventh heaven for a few moments. His digression on love, while treating of ceremonial regulations, is his grandest and completest statement of this truth.

So far all is simple. The Church must have its outward symbols and its means of edification, and these things must be so regulated that they really conduce to the Church’s benefit. And though we have here much that is new and that goes beyond what Jesus taught, yet the purely moral character of His Gospel is left inviolate. But through St. Paul a new value 214comes to be attached to acts of worship which cannot be harmonized with the teaching of Christ. At Corinth Christians suffered themselves to be baptized a second time for their deceased relations, and St. Paul refers to this in his defence of the resurrection. That is a heathen conception of baptism which turns it into an ‘opus operatum,’ and as such a guarantee for blessedness. Whilst in this case St. Paul simply accepts the superstitious view without saying any thing, he is himself actually the cause of it in the case of the Lord’s Supper. To please his Greek converts he compares it to the Greek and Jewish sacrificial feasts. He is the first to contrast the holy food there consecrated with all other that is profane, and bids us see in the sickness and death of many Christians the judgment upon their profane participation in the holy meal. Now, that was an accommodation to Greek superstition which led to the establishment of a religion of a lower, less spiritual, nature as a direct consequence. But the mere fact that an extraordinary value is attached to ceremonial acts is in itself fatal. The conception of what constitutes a Christian is here enlarged in a very ominous fashion.

The apostle, however, knew full well that besides participation in acts of ritual there is an altogether different manner in which Christians can have communion with God. Like Jesus, he exhorts his hearers and readers to offer up prayer and thanksgiving, to place their trust in God, to commit all their cares to Him, to accept everything, even affliction and suffering, as from His hand, to fear Him and to long for Him. The prayer of thanksgiving is above 215all else the sign of a genuine Christian for him: he that thus prays stands in a right relation to God. And the true sacrifice that is well pleasing to God is not any participation in worship, but the devotion of body and soul to His service. All those superstitious statements to which allusion has been made are in St. Paul’s hands means to an end: in the one case, that of baptism, to prove the Christian hope; in the other, that of the Lord’s Supper, to secure decency and good order in the congregation. It is not for St. Paul himself, but for the future history of his congregation, that the seeds of mischief have been sown. Henceforth participation in divine worship takes its place side by side with trust in God, and two kinds of religion, of communion with God, begin to compete with each other.

Let us now review once more the whole of the Christian claim, as it is presented by St Paul, and compare it with that made in the first instance by Jesus, and we shall perceive that a great forward movement has taken place, and on the whole, it has preserved the direction imparted to it by Jesus. The Christian ideal has become richer, more varied and comprehensive, but it has not essentially changed, and it has not deteriorated. This we can best realize when we read all the passages in which St. Paul briefly summarizes the essentials of the new religion. Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of God’s commandments is every thing. In Christ neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails aught, but faith working through love. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, goodness, faith, gentleness, purity. But 216now remaineth faith, love, hope; but love is the greatest of these.

The man who formulates his claim under these main headings understood Jesus better, grasped His meaning more fully, than any other that came after him. And this sympathetic comprehension of that which was essential in Christianity, enabled him to carry the teaching of Jesus from the Jews to the Gentiles, retaining the human and the eternal, while rejecting the merely national. This brilliant definition of the ideal is at the same time the best criticism of all that is imperfect in St. Paul’s work. A great man deserves to be measured by his aims rather than by his achievements. He who would understand St Paul aright should seek to find him at the height of his ideal, and then he will discover that he is not very far distant from Jesus. But to present the claim of Jesus to the Gentiles and to maintain it in its entirety was indeed a very great achievement on the part of St. Paul. His work was assailed by two great enemies, which sought to compel him to descend from the height of his ideal and adapt himself to the imperfections of the uncultured masses: they were, on the one hand, the gross vices, on the other the enthusiasm of his heathen converts. The sinful life that was so often continued after conversion, the instances of incest and fornication, the lawsuits, the factions all seemed to cry with one accord: lower your standard, at least temporarily. On the other hand, the ascetic aberrations of some, the spiritualistic follies of others, the pride of the ‘strong,’ the striving to shake off all control and to cease from all work, appeared to be so many indications of the necessity 217of a law to check this want of discipline and sobriety. It is amazing to notice with what firmness and clearness St. Paul continues to travel along the path indicated to him by Jesus. As a wise educator he took circumstances into account and remembered that “le mieux est souvent l’ennemi du bien.” He insisted on the appointment of Christian judges in order to put an end to the hateful spectacle of law suits between Christians in heathen courts. He excommunicated the immoral members of the Corinthian church and summoned them to repentance in order to cleanse the congregations of the worst stains. When he enumerates the different vices, he seems to say that certain deadly sins exclude a man more than others from the kingdom of God. As a preliminary measure against the enthusiasts he appoints a definite order of service. These examples might be multiplied, but nowhere do we find a single one which does not come under the category of purely educational and provisional measures. As to what constitutes a Christian, St. Paul’s answer is always that of Jesus. He recognizes no subordinate form of Christianity for the masses. He ever reverts—often immediately after making some concession—to Jesus’ whole claim on conduct and on character; the ideal ever remains above the real and yet ever within reach. He that is in Christ Jesus is a new creature: the old is passed away; all things have become new. And in spite of all the danger presented by enthusiasm the Christian stands secure in the freedom with which Christ has made him free.

St. Paul had begun his missionary labours with the preaching of the judgment. He ends as he began. The preaching of the ideal and the lofty Christian claim both call for this conclusion. Whether a man is pressing forward towards the ideal, or lagging behind, is by no means a matter of indifference. It is a question of life and death. The return of Jesus, which all Christians await, will bring with it the judgment, when all, apostles and congregations alike, will have to render an account of the result of their lives, and receive praise or blame in equity and truth.

With a mighty loud voice, just as one of the old Christian prophets, St. Paul cries out to his converts, “Maranatha, the Lord is at hand. Redeem the time. Your salvation is nearer than at first. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Be ye not, brethren, in the darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief in the night. Let us not sleep, but let us be sober. Let us put away the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light.” That is the language of Jesus Himself. Just as in the claim that he makes, so in this message of the judgment, St. Paul has suffered himself to be inspired by his Master. And this is yet one other proof, that in spite of the ecclesiastical transformation which he effected, he wished to bring to the Gentiles Jesus and His Gospel alone.

For us, of course, he has left great and important questions without an answer. What is the meaning of faith and grace and church, if in the last resort it is the word of judgment that decides the faith even of Christians? When St. Paul invited the Gentiles to enter the Christian community he promised them that the road to salvation should be simple and easy. “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord 219Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” When he disputed with the Judaizing party he persistently maintained the position that the believer was sure of his salvation and safe from the wrath that was to come. The Christian’s joy and glory consisted, he declared, in the absence of all fear, and the assurance of God’s everlasting love. That is why the Christian knows himself to be called and elected from all eternity. But the preaching of the judgment, with its alternating notes of fear and hope, and the uncertainty of salvation which it causes to arise in every soul, contradicts the high value attached by St Paul to the Church as well as to the individual’s faith in his election.

At times this idea of the value of the Church seems to dominate St. Paul to the exclusion of every other. Even in the extreme case of incest at Corinth lie hopes that the man’s soul will be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. If God punishes the thoughtless participation in the Lord’s Supper with sickness and with death, then this punishment is merely a means of chastening lest we be condemned together with the world. He that has built badly upon the foundation of Jesus Christ shall nevertheless be saved “yet so as by fire.” God’s faithfulness is so great that He must complete what He has begun. The meaning of statements such as these appears to be none other than that all Christians should be saved even though, it is true, under different degrees of blessedness. And this is just where St. Paul’s extremely high estimate of the external ecclesiastical organization finds its expression. But passages which point in a contrary 220direction are not wanting. If Israel be the type of the people of God, and if its fate have any typical meaning, then it is clear that church membership does not confer any certainty of salvation. Is it not written that God was not well pleased with many of those that passed through the sea and they were overthrown in the wilderness? The message of the judgment, therefore, when it is addressed to Christians, always takes the possibility of their failing to obtain salvation into account. Like the preaching of Jesus itself, it is meant to be taken seriously.

The contradiction in which St. Paul stands with himself is a necessary one, and arises from his historical position. On the one hand he has to gain converts for the Church, and must exalt it as the only road to salvation, and therefore separates mankind into those within and those without the Church, as the saved and the lost. On the other hand, as a true disciple of Jesus, he is bound to destroy all confidence in the Church—even the Christian Church—and place the individual in the presence of eternity and God’s judgment before everyone that does not do the right. Hence this hesitation and contradiction. St. Paul is an ecclesiastic and a Christian with a living personal faith. All the later teachers of the Church who were at once apologists of the ecclesiastical institutions and disciples of the Gospel, have followed in the apostle’s contradictory footsteps.

Yet this ‘yea’ and ‘nay’ cannot be St. Paul’s last word. Salvation as he understands it is only attained where the individual has reached the certainty that he is God’s child personally and that nothing can separate him from God’s love. This certainty is as 221far removed from confidence in church membership, as it is from the alternating fear and hope inspired by the thought of the day of judgment. It is something purely personal, something that the individual must experience for himself and that none other can give him, because it is only true for himself.

It is experienced as he gazes upon the Cross, the revelation of God’s love; as he places his trust in God’s faithfulness, of which he has made trial in the course of his own life, and as he listens for the voice of God’s Spirit which testifies to our spirit that we are the children of God. It was the final aim of all St Paul’s missionary labours that each convert won over by him should reach the goal to which Jesus had brought the disciples in the Lord’s Prayer, wherein they receive all things as from God’s hand and are safe for time and for eternity in His fatherly love.

St. Paul brought Jesus to the Gentiles as their Redeemer who uplifts them to the new life with God. He attained that which Jesus Himself desired, but in his own, even somewhat abnormal, manner.

In the first place, his aim is so to bring home to his hearers their sinfulness and powerlessness and their liability to the judgment, that every road to safety by their own efforts is cut off and only the way of faith remains open to them. This may be called St. Paul’s methodistic presentment of faith.

In the next place, he does not present Jesus the Redeemer in all His life and suffering as the object of faith, but only the Cross and Resurrection of the Son of God. This is St. Paul’s methodistic presentment of the Cross.

The form which St. Paul’s missionary preaching 222took was the result, in the first instance, of his own personal experience. He himself became a Christian in an altogether abnormal fashion after having been a Rabbi and a persecutor. But the really decisive factor was after all his extraordinarily powerful ecclesiastical interest which impelled him so to narrow the way to salvation that it led through the Church alone, whose mark was faith in the crucified Son of God. But though the methods were changed, the Gospel itself remained as yet the same. Nay, rather, the new machinery proved really effective in bringing Jesus to the heathen. In his representation of the promise, the ideal and the aim of redemption, St. Paul is simply Jesus’ disciple, and indeed the profoundest and most powerful of all.

But St. Paul is likewise the first to have entered into the forms, ideas, and conceptions of the Greeks at innumerable points of his missionary labours. He did not merely bodily transplant the Gospel from one place to another. He saw that the new plant took root and acclimatized itself. There are far more points of contact between the Greeks and St. Paul’s practice than between them and his theology, which is embedded rather in Jewish ideas. But the great achievement is this, that the same man took up that which was Greek and that which was Jewish fused the two elements and then entirely subordinated them to a third, the Christian, in Jesus as he understood Him. For it is not the amalgamation of Hellenism and Judaism, but the conquest of both for Jesus, that assigns St. Paul his high place in the world’s history.