Paul the Illuminated

In the chapters on Barnabas, Mark, and Timothy I have alluded to many of the outward incidents in the life of Paul. I do not intend to traverse these lines again. I do not intend to traverse any historical lines. And for this reason: The difference between Paul and the other figures of the Gallery is not an outward difference. If you look at him merely in the external acts of his life, you will find nothing that marks him out as a man of unique experience. I do not know of any historical fact in Paul’s experience which I am not prepared to parallel with the experience of those already considered. Did Paul reject Christ; so, for a moment, did Peter. Did Paul miraculously escape from prison; so also did Peter. Did

Paul suffer shipwreck; so, to an equal extent, 329 did Peter. Did Paul turn a somersault; so did John. Did Paul write compositions of the most divers kinds; so did John. Did Paul receive a vision of heavenly things; so did John. Was Paul suddenly convinced of the power of Jesus; so was Thomas. I could multiply parallels almost indefinitely to show that the outward life of the Gentile apostle is not essentially distinct from the lives of his fellow-Christians. What distinguishes Paul is an experience from within — an illumination from the spirit, the rising of an inner sun. It is the fact that this man after conversion did the same kind of work which he had been doing before, and that yet by an added light in his soul he found it to be wholly new. His work as Saul of Tarsus was the building of a temple; his work as Paul the Apostle was the building of a temple too. Yet, what he felt was not uniformity but difference, contrast, revolution. Outwardly he was engaged in the old things; but in the very act he was constrained to cry, Old things are passed away. ‘Whence came this paradox? From what he himself calls a shining in the heart. The change was in the region of the spirit. Sun and moon and stars remained the same; mountain, river, and stream abode in their wonted place; but within his soul a new presence had arisen, and by its potency and power every object of his past was transformed and glorified.

The crisis hour of Paul’s life was his transition from Judaism into Christianity. What was that transition.’’ We are so familiar with the fact that we are apt to forget what it represents. What is the spiritual difference between the Jew and the Christian.’’ It is easy to state the doctrinal difference; but that of the spirit lies deeper. Let me try to exhibit the contrast in the iorm of a little parable.

A certain father had two boys whom he was very desirous to bring up good. He thought this would best be accomplished by inuring them to a habit of life. Accordingly, he made a proposal to them. He promised to give each of them a penny for every hour of the day in which they should abstain from doing any bad action. As the sleeping hours were inevitably included in such a bargain, it was really an offer to each of two shillings a day for total abstinence from wicked deeds. The elder brother accepted the proposal with alacrity; the younger refused — he preferred his freedom. The elder brother got the name of being virtuous. He did not, indeed, uniformly make his two shillings, for there was always some hour of some day in which he transgressed; but out of each day he always gathered something. The younger, on the other hand, was deemed reckless, careless, godless; hardly an hour passed in which he had not his hand in something wrong. The one brother was called the man of God, the other the man of Satan.

But in process of time a thing happened which made one section of the community change its mind. The brothers chanced one day to pass a picture in a shop window — it was that of a man walking through the scenes of a malignant pestilence in the sheer hope of alleviating human pain. The elder brother looked at the picture with indifference. The younger gazed, lifted up his hands and cried, ‘I believe in that man; that is the man I should like to serve, should like to follow, should like to imitate.’ And the bystander said: * It is this younger brother that deserves the prize. Incorrect as his life comparatively is, though there is not an hour in which he does not commit faults to which his brother is a stranger, he has yet reached in one thought, in one aspiration, in one admiring look, a height which through all the laborious days that brother has never climbed.’

Now, the elder brother of this parable is the Jew; the younger is the Christian. The former makes the attempt to count his deeds of abstinence. The latter keeps no reckoning of his deeds; but in his room there hangs a picture of surpassing beauty — a picture he has bought and on which he gazes continually; it is the description of an act of love by which a Divine spirit gave his life for the world. The difference between the Jew and the Christian is the difference between the tied hand and the winged mind. It is quite possible that the force of outward law may keep a man all his life from injuring his neighbour; yet such a man will be no nearer to the beauties of holiness than had he been living in a state of open war. But suppose that, instead of tying his hands, you liberated his heart, suppose that, instead of paralysing him with fear, you quickened him with a sense of beauty, suppose that you confronted him, not with the penalties of doing harm, but with a picture of doing good, you would give him in a moment the door of access into a purity which all the years of his mere moral abstinence have failed to reveal to his sight. The picture on which he would look would be beyond his present strength; and he would .jnow it to be so. But none the less it would be the true measure of the man, the prophecy of his coming self, the foreshadowing of that height which he is destined to win.

Let us return for a moment to the parable of the two boys. I have indicated that the bystanders take different sides. Some go with the elder brother who keeps the laborious hours; others adhere to the younger who gazes on the beautiful picture. Now, Paul at first sided with the former class. He thought that the promised sum ought to be given to the boy who made himself a drudge. He was very angry with the seductive picture which had seemed to open up a short and easy way. He was so angry that he could not keep away from it. He wanted to see where its power of seduction lay — to study it that he might refute it. So he went daily to look at the picture, and gazed on it with an adverse eye. But, as he looked, there happened a strange thing — the picture crept into his soul. He had sought to find the secret of its power with the view of refuting it. He did find the secret of its power; but it refuted him. The gaze of anger was transmuted into a gaze of rapture. He was conquered by the spectacle of moral purity. He saw a spotless soul walking amid the dread pestilence of sin — treading the infected streets, touching the unclean garments, breathing the deadly vapours, nursing the stricken patients, haunting the scenes of horror from which the world had fled, and at last sinking exhausted by the wayside and purchasing the life of others by the sacrifice of his own. All this Paul saw, and for the first time there woke within him a sense of what sin really was, what purity really was, what the service of God really was. In one instant he rose far above all the steps he had been climbing for years. By one thought, by one vision, by one sight of an ideal man, he reached a height which a thousand acts had failed to win. He said: * I believe in that man — he expresses all that I should like to be. Will not this be God’s measure of me, God’s estimate of me, the standard of judgment by which God will see my capacities for good! Will He not test me for the time to come, not by what I am, but by what I wish to be! ’

This was the moment of Paul’s illumination. It was the moment in which there entered into his soul the one love of his life — the only passion which ever stirred his heart. Christ has appealed to men in many ways — sometimes in fear, sometimes in reverence, sometimes in spec- ■ulation, sometimes in the sense of protection. To Paul He is exclusively an object of love. Every other phase of thought is absorbed in that one. He tells us so himself. In that magnificent hymn of his which will live as long as the Christian ages, he sings not only the everlastingness but the predominance of love. He sings how in his own experience all virtues have 7nelted into love — how faith has faded into its certainty, how prophecy has died in its fulfilment, how knowledge has yielded to its light. The inward history of Paul is the history of his love — the history of that process by which love filled all things.’ This, from an artistic point of view, is the real interest of the apostle’s life. His missionary journeys interest the evangelist, his doctrinal system attracts the theologian; but what distinguishes him to the eye of the artist is that gradual process of illumination through which, step by step and sphere by sphere, every part of the universe was lit up, until the world became to him ’ the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.’

I have spoken of Paul’s illumination as a gradual process. I should like to explain what I mean by this. I do not think that after his

‘Love came to Paul as self-enlightenment, to John as self-surrender; Paul never needed self -surrender — at no time did he live for himself. 22 conversion Paul ever changed his mind on a matter of doctrine — his faith in Christ was as strong at the beginning as it was at the end. Nor do I think that Paul’s actual love for Christ went through any modification; it began perhaps unconsciously, and was revealed to himself suddenly, but from that time I think it never varied. When I speak, however, of a gradual process in Paul, I mean, not an enlargement of his love, but an enlargement of its sphere. These two things are quite distinct. A child’s love for his father may be perfect without being perfectly illuminating. It may be an isolated and isolating love — may keep him from seeing the beauty and acknowledging the real attractions of the other persons around him. Illumination is not the heating but the lighting process. Paul’s love to Christ was as perfect when he wrote to the Thessalonians as when he penned his letters to Timothy; but it was less far-seeing, or, to speak more accurately, it shed less light upon surrounding things. The triumph of love is not the amount of its passion; it is the number of things which it irradiates. The development of Paul is not a deepening of conviction, not a progress in doctrine, not an intensifying of emotion, not a growth in the spirit of sacrifice; it is an enlargement of the sphere of love. He says himself that his Christ was destined to fill all things within his universe. And so He was; but the process was not an instantaneous one. Paul did not at once see all things subject to Him. At first his Christ seemed to dwell apart from the world and to be sharply divided from the world. Step by step the barriers were broken down, and, as each barrier fell, the light ran over. Field was added to field where the Divine Presence could walk in the cool of the day, till, in the fulness of Paul’s experience, the world on every side was ’ bound by gold chains about the feet of God. ’

What is the common process of love’s enlargement? Take a human love; take what we generally term romantic love. What are the stages through which it is wont to pass.-* I think there are four. At first it is a hope — something to be realised to-morrow. Then it is a present possession, but reserved as yet only for garden hours when we are free from the bustle of the crowd. By and by its range is widened — it becomes a stimulus for the great duties of life; it comes out from the garden into the city; it nerves to do and to bear. At last it reaches its climax — it comes down to trifles. It glorifies the commonplace; it finds sermons in stones and sonnets in the dust. Little things are magnified; unromantic things are glorified. We do prosaic work. We perform menial duties. We go through cheerful drudgery. We pluck thorns instead of flowers, and smile at the pain. The latest stage of love’s enlargement is when it touches the things on the ground.

And this is the order in the enlargement of Pauls love. How do we know this.? Because we have in our possession a copy of his love-letters. They form a series stretching over some fifteen or sixteen years. If we cannot always point to their exact date, we can tell at least the order in which they come. And as we study them in this light we make a discovery. We find that the series is a series of milestones. The letters of Paul are a progressive history. They describe the onward march of his love — and none the less effectively because they do it unconsciously. You may not trace landmarks in his theology. As you travel from the Thessalonians to the Corinthians, from the Corinthians to the Ephesians, from the Ephesians to the Pastorals, you may not be able to point to a spot in which a new doctrine has taken the place of the old. But there is one thing you can see — the bird is flying over a larger field. The bird is love. Its wings have not increased in strength, its plumage is not more beautiful, its flight is not more high; but its range is wider over the earthly plain. The history of love’s enlargement in Paul is identical with the history of its enlargement in you. He reaches the goal of freedom by the same road. There are no two kinds of love where love is pure. Paul’s devotion to his Christ was not different in essence from your devotion to an earthly friend; and the enlargement of his devotion to his Christ followed the same steps which enlarge the compass of your human devotion. Christ is to him first the object who is coming, then the object that is already in the soul, then the object that gives strength for the world, and lastly the object which has glorified the things once deemed insignificant and trivial. Let us glance at each of these.

When Paul’s love for Christ first rose, it rose as a hope. Like romantic love, it presented itself as the prospect of to-morrow. Christ was coming — He would change all things, would beautify all things. This present system did not represent Him; but this present system was ready to vanish away. ‘It is not here, ’ he cries to the Thessalonians, ’ that you can expect to see Christ’s glory; His glory can only appear in the transformation of the world. He is coming to transform, to purify, to brighten. It is true, some of you are expecting Him too soon. The world has not yet thoroughly revealed its badness; it is kept in check by the laws of the Roman empire. But the time is coming when that empire shall be crushed and broken; then the passions of men shall be loosed and you will learn your need of God’s morning.

Your hope is in the future; your sun is in to-morrow’s sky; your dawn is in the coming day.’

Remember, the Christ whom Paul first saw was the Christ in heaven. He never gazed upon the man of Galilee. His earliest vision was the vision of a Jesus glorified. Not on the road to the cross did Christ meet him; He came to him panoplied in heavenly splendour. What his inner eye beheld was the Christ of the future — a Christ of majesty, a Christ of power, a Christ who came clothed in the lightning and wreathed in the conqueror’s robe. That was the first Christian image in Paul’s soul. Is it wonderful that it should have been the first Christian image in his writings! Is it wonderful that his earliest note of missionary music should be ‘Jesus and the Resurrection ‘! Is it wonderful that at first his love should look forward instead of either back or around — should begin, neither with memory nor with fruition, but with an act of hope! The being whom he loved had come to him as a prospect, not as a possession. He had flashed before him as an object to strive for, as a prize which to-morrow was to win; and therefore within the folds of to-morrow lay all his salvation and all his desire.

But a second stage was coming; you will find it in the transition from Athens to Corinth. Up to the time when he reached the summit of Mars Hill he had preached Christ and the Resurrection — the Christ behind the veil. But after his descent from Mars Hill his love found a new sphere. He began to think, not of the Christ in the heavens, but of the Christ in the soul. There broke upon him the conviction that even in this world there might be a little green spot where he could meet with Jesus. There was a garden plot on earth which was not of earth — the region of the human spirit. Thither he might retire betimes and be at peace. Within the scene of turmoil there might be a moment of supreme joy, a place of placid rest, a bower in whose sweet retirement the burden and the heat might be forgotten and where the soul could revel in communion with the object of its love.

Here, then, Paul’s love has reached a higher stage of illumination; it has found a place within the present world. But the world itself to the eye of Paul has not yet been illuminated — it only contains a spot where illumination is possible. That spot is thoroughly fenced in; the common round of life enters not within its precincts. What is Paul’s attitude towards the world at this time? It has been described as an adverse one. I would define it rather as one of indifference. He is in that stage of love in which everything is ignored but the garden — the place of meeting with its object. His language towards the outside is not that of enmity but simply of uninterestedness. He does not condemn marriage; he says it is a matter of no consequence whether one is married or single. He does not condemn merchandise; he says that buying and selling are things of no religious moment. He does not condemn the use of life’s good things; he says that he has entered into a joy which to him personally would make the using of them or the refraining from them a question of absolute unimportance

—these things have lost their glory by reason of an all-excelling glory. A young woman of my acquaintance asked a revival preacher if he thought there was any harm in dancing; the answer was, * I do not see how you can find time.’ I think that at this period such would have been Paul’s reply to any one asking whether in the light of Christ he was entitled to take part in worldly pleasures; he would have said, ‘The time is short.’ To his mind it was not so much that Christ opposed anything as that He dwarfed everything. He eclipsed to Paul even the glories of nature. Men have wondered at his silence on physical beauty; some have explained it by the theory that the thorn in his flesh was blindness. It may have been. But, to account for Paul’s silence about physical beauty, we need no thorn. It came from his flower. There was a presence in the air which to him put out sun and moon and star. It struck him blind, not by darkness, but by light. It dimmed the skies by its glory. It withered the flowers by its radiance. It lowered the mountains by its majesty. It supplanted eye and ear, and reigned in their stead. The world’s beauty to Paul was crucified in Jesus.

I come to the third stage in the illumination of Paul’s love. Its birthplace was Caesarea and within the walls of a prison.’ Strange that a prison should have been the scene of Paul’s enlargement! Yet, paradoxical as it seems, it was in prison that the world expanded to his view. Here, for the first time, he saw Christianity through a telescope; and things which he had deemed so far off as to be outside the pale of Christ were brought so nigh as to be recognised as parts of His kingdom. Christ had already been recognised by Paul as the head of the Church; but in that prison at Caesarea He became more — the head of the state, the head of all states. Within the walls of that prison the Christian world burst the boundaries Paul had assigned to it. The secular became sacred in its greater manifestations — its appearance through the telescope. Hith-

‘I have here followed the view of Meyer that the Epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians belong to the Caesarean rather than to the Roman Captivity — though, unlike him, I assign to Rome Philippians and Philemon.

erto in the apostle’s mind the kingdom of Christ had been limited to the sitters at the communion-table. But here, as if by an opening in the heavens, there was revealed a wider empire of the Son of Man. He was no longer merely the king of saints; He was the king of kings — the head of principalities and powers. The Church was no more a little garden walled in from the outside world; the outside world was itself the vestibule into the Church. All kingdoms were Christ’s kingdom; all history was Church-history; all events among the nations were events in the sphere of religion. Paul began to see his Christ outside the limits of Eden and apart from the trees of the Garden. He had traced His hand in the breaking of communion bread; he began to trace it in the powers called natural — in the field of politics, in the field of war, in the field of literature, in the field of human eloquence. There dawned upon him the conviction that salvation might enter the soul by a secular door. If Christ was the head of the state, if the state as well as the Church was His embodiment, then, in the service of the state, a man might well feel that he was performing mission labour. The politician in the very pursuit of his politics, the senator in the very exercise of his art, the soldier in the very act of defending his country, might claim to be evangelists. In the light of such a thought as that, Paul might well realise that his own profession was taken by violence, and that the secular heroes of every age could claim him as a brother.

Such was the illumination of Paul’s love in the sphere of the telescope. But what of its illumination in the sphere of the microscope. He had seen the sacredness of the state with its mighty principalities and powers. But there was an opposite to the state and its principalities — the home and its commonplaces. This is the last stage in the progress of romantic love. It reaches every spot before that. It begins with the future; then it finds in the present a secret place where the world cannot come; then it wreathes itself round the great things of the world. All these Paul had passed through. But the final stage remained — love’s illumination of those things of the world which were Ttot great — the gilding of the commonplaces of home. That also was coming. Already in the latest sections of what I consider the Caesarean Epistles we find traces of the idealising of home; yet it does not there get the first place. It is in Paul’s last missionary journey that there strikes the final hour of his spiritual pilgrimage. There, in his epistle to Titus, his love reaches its final glory by reaching the ground. There, for the first time, the subject from beginning to end is the secular home-life of the Christian congregation. To the eye of youthful romance it is a most wingless letter. There are no flights in the air, no speculations about futurity, no expositions of Christian doctrine. Their place is taken by home precepts — precepts for the hearth, precepts for the household, precepts for the unity of the family bond. Each generation is addressed in turn — the grandfather and grandmother, the son and daughter, the children of the son and the children of the daughter; while even their relation to the domestic servants is not forgotten. Yet, wingless as the letter seems, it is really a proof that love’s wings are perfected. In the illumination of home’s prosaic duties the spirit of romance has reached its utmost stretch of pinion. Its climax is not the mount but the vale; its glory is not the diamond but the dust. When Paul’s love had illuminated the commonplaces of home, it might well break into the cry, * I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of glory. ’