Introductory

I intend to make an attempt to write thejjmer biography of Paul the Apostle. I shall try to trace the course of his spiritual history from the day of his conversion to Christianity until the day when he declared himself “ready to be offered.” It is a task not of great length, but of great magnitude. It does not need a multitude of pages like the record of his outward biography. It requires no maps nor charts, no study of contemporary men and manners, no consultation of references foreign to his own actual writings. To write a man’s inward biography demands before all things the undergoing of a kindred experience and the living of a common life. But if in this respect the task is comparatively easy, it is in another aspect supremely arduous. The difficulty of writing St. Paul’s in ward biography is not the difficulty of statement, but of discovery. The historian of his outward life has the facts already made to his hand, but he who would record the history of his spiritual experience must begin by interpreting the facts. The outward historian has the narrative of the Acts before him, and he has simply, with intelligence and observation, to follow the course of the stream. But the historian of the inner life has before him only a series of letters, written at different times and dictated to different readers; and before he can even enter on his labours, he requires to arrange and to examine the order of those spiritual sentiments whose historical unfolding is to be the subject of his narrative. There is a preliminary difficulty which meets us at the very door. I have spoken of arranging and examining the order of Paul’s spiritual experience. I shall be asked at the outset what right I have to assume the existence of such an order. Was not this man inspired, and does not inspiration imply the denial of any such development? In the case of an ordinary man, it is legitimate to consult his correspondence’with a view to determine the gradual unfolding of his mental life. It is legitimate in such cases to refer a certain utterance to a certain period, and to explain a particular view by its congruity with a particular stage of progress. But is such a process admissible in the case of one who, by supposition, was struck by the light of heaven — who was lifted by a Divine inspiration from out the com mon level on which moved his country and his age, and translated by a seemingly instantaneous act into a height of heavenly illumination? That is the question which meets us on the threshold, and for the present bars the threshold. It is by reason of this question that the inward biography of St. Paul has remained to this day one of the most untrodden fields in history. Volumes have been written on his outward life, pages have been expended on his missionary journeys, sermons have been multiplied on the lessons of his perils and his trials, — but the history of the man himself, the record of his inward experience, the study of his spiritual development from day to day, has as yet occupied little attention. We have a series of letters, professedly written by his hand, extending in chronological order from the First Epistle to the Thessalonians to the Second Epistle to Timothy, but it has rarely occurred to us to imagine that the chronological order of these letters marks a mental order too. It has rarely occurred to us to inquire why the Epistle to the Thessalonians should have had an earlier date than the Epistle to the Romans, or why the Epistle to the Romans should have occupied a previous place to the letter inscribed to the Ephesians. It has commonly been taken for granted that the teaching in these respective documents exhibits no other mark of progress than that of an earlier and a later note of time. And the reason of this is not hard

to find. Is has been assumed that Paul, being an inspired man, ought not to be a creature of flesh and blood; that, being a recipient of the Divine life, he should be freed from the conditions of human development,

He may write to Thessalonica in the year 52, and to Timothy in the year 68, but we are not allowed to believe that these sixteen years covered a growth ef experience. It is deemed irreverent to suppose that a man might put his hand upon any of St. Paul’s letters and determine its age by the degree of its maturity. Such a permission would be the confession of a progress from the imperfect to the perfect, and the admission of such a progress is held to be incompatible with the claim to be an inspired soul. The question is — Is it so? Is the idea of inspiration incompatible with the idea of progress? If we were dealing with any other religion than Christianity, I would without hesitation answer Yes! The peculiarity of all other religions consists, to my mind, in this — that they regard the inspiration of a human soul as something which lifts that soul outside of its humanity, something which raises it beyond the conditions of progress and places it in an atmosphere from which it can never be moved. But the Christian idea of inspiration is distinguished from the heathen or Gentile idea precisely by the negation of this belief. Christianity in its very key-note strikes upon a new conception; it declares that the inspiration of a human soul is no longer to be regarded as an abolition of its human growth or a transcending of its human development. The life of the Christian Founder is introduced into the world as a divinely inspired life, but the Divine inspiration is allowed to unfold through the stages of the infant, the child, the youth, and the man. It is represented as a growth in wisdom and in knowledge and in Divine favour. Each stage is full up to the measure of its capacity, but the capacity is in no case transcended before the time. The childhood is perfect, but it is the perfection of a child — a perfection which consists in a will subject to authority and a mind inquiring in the temple oitruth. The youth is perfect, but it is the perfection of obedience in the path of youth — of consenting to abide in obscurity until the fulness of the time be come, and submitting to support its way by the result of daily toil. The dawn of manhood is per feet, but it is the perfection peculiar to the dawn — the perfection which can stand upon the mount of temptation and choose between the alternatives of right and wrong.

Such is the leading idea of Christian inspiration — the growth of the Divine through the capacities of the human. Appearing at the very outset in the life of the Christian Founder, it is designed to be repeated in the lives of all His followers. For it must not be forgotten that Christianity in its original manifestation is not the reception of a system of doctrines, but the assimilation to a particular type of life. It is the leading thought of the New Testament, and it is the specially prominent thought in the writings of St. Paul, that the life of the Christian Founder is repeated in the lives of His followers, that the stages of each Christian’s experience are designed to be a reproduction of those stages by which the Son of man passed from Bethlehem to Calvary. Paul has himself declared l that

1 3 Coy, U|. 18, the process of Christian development is a process whereby the follower of Christ is l i transformed into the same image from glory to glory.” No words can more adequately express his view of the nature of this new spiritual order. It is a transformation not only into the image of the Master, but into that progressive form in which the image of the Master unfolded itself. The Christian is to ascend by the steps of the same ladder on which the life of the Son of man climbed to its goal; he is to proceed “from glory to glory.” He, too, is to have his childhood, his youth, and his manhood; his period of subjection to outward authority; his time of temptation in the wilderness; his experience of burden-bearing in the haunts of the great city. He is to have his time of growth and his age of maturity, his season of inquiry in the temple of truth, and his day for imparting the fruits of his ripened mind. No man can read Paul’s epistles without being impressed on every page with the predominance of this thought. The key-note of his whole teaching is “Christ in you.” He tells us that there is a stage in which Christ is only formed within the soul — a period which is no more than the process of being born. He tells us that there is a time in which the religious life is, like the beginning oj* all other life, so much under the dominion of sense that it can only be fed by the sensuous.* He tells us that the manifestations of each Christian period must be proportionate to the capacities of that period — that the child must speak as a child, imder-

Gal. iv. 19, a i cor. W, 1. & stand as a child, think as a child. He tells us that the goal of Christian manhood, which is the goal of perfect understanding, is only to be reached in that day when the soul shall have completed its stages of rooting and grounding, and shall have attained the stature of universal love.2

Is it to be supposed that Paul himself was an exception to this rule? Is it to be thought for a moment that the man who, of all others, lays such stress on the progressive nature of the Divine life should have been, or should have believed himself to be, exempt from that progress? We have thirteen letters professedly written by his hand — letters distinguished from most of such public documents by their intense humanness. Seldom have men in their private epistles exhibited such an utter absence of self-consciousness as does the apostle of the Gentiles in these exhortations to the Christian public. He seems to be writing off his guard. He makes us feel that his letters are a revelation of himself — that he is not directing his thoughts, but being borne along by them. We feel that his ideas are too rapid for his pen, and that the machinery of writing is an encumbrance. We seem to be in the presence, not of a scribe, but of a conversationalist, a man who is pouring out his whole soul through the vehicle of words, regardless of sequence and regardless of grammar. We are impressed with the conviction that, if ever the mind of man was revealed to his fellow-man, it has been so revealed in these epistolary documents, — documents whose eloquence is greatest in their

1 1 Cor. xili. 11. Bphee. Hi. 17.

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

The problem which lies before us is not merely one of personal interest. It is not simply worthy of investigation as a study of individual experience; it is interesting as a study of the Church’s historical movement. The inward history of St. Paul is an epitome of the inward history of the Church universal. The life of the Gentile apostle exhibits in his own experience the successive and progressive stages through which the development of the Christian commonwealth passed during its first hundred years. Any man who wishes to study the religious history of that century can find no better key to the lock than an intelligent perusal of St. Paul’s epistles; for in these epistles he will find a mirror of those successive phases of thought through which the life of the Church was unfolded, from its dawning on the plains of Galilee till the beginning of its spiritual empire in the city of the seven hills.

The history of the Christian Church during its first hundred years is a talc of three cities — Jerusalem, Antioch, and Rome. Whosoever desires to master the philosophy of that history should keep constantly and carefully in his mind the names of these three cities. They mark at once the phases of Christianity’s outward fortunes, and the stages of its inward development. The beginning of the new religion is Jerusalem. Christianity appeared in the world as a consummation and fulfilment of Judaism. The first disciples of the faith never dreamed that they were the founders of a new. religion, did not even regard themselves as the inaugurators of a distinct party. They no more meant to separate from the Church of Judea than John Wesley meant to separate from the Church of England. Singularly enough, the earliest name by which they were called was just that of Methodists, or “men of the way.”1 They looked upon themselves not as innovators upon the religion of their fathers, but as those who had

i Acts ix, 2.

! been privileged to discover the method in which that religion was to become the faith of tho world. Accordingly, it never occurred to them that they ought to do anything to indicate their separateness; it was their constant aim and study to convey the contrary impression. They instituted no new rites, they inaugurated no new ceremonies. They made no effort to congregate themselves in places of worship distinct from the common resorts of their countrymen. They met in the same temple where the Pharisees and the Sadducees were wont to assemble; they observed the same hours of prayer which from time immemorial had been prescribed to the Jewish people. They would have stared with astonishment if they had been called disloyal Churchmen, or even broad Churchmen. They professed to be religious conservatives, propagators of the old, defenders of the ancient regime. If they had any quarrel it was with innovators, with those who had grafted a subsequent tradition upon the original faith of their fathers. They desired to go back, and the only liberty they claimed was the right to go back to the beginning. They professed to find the warrant for their special mode of preaching, not in the descent of new spiritual revelations, but in the study of those early oracles which had constituted at once the foundation and the glory of the Church of the Jewish nation.

The second stage of Christianity’s ancient history was Antloch.2 The curtain here rose upon a ne* scene. It was here that for the first time, accord

i 8ee Acts ill. 2 Acte si. 26.

Introductory. 1 L

ing to our earliest historian, the disciples of the Christian faith received the Christian name. Hitherto they had borne only the Jewish name, had been undistinguished by the spectator from the creed and customs of their countrymen. But here, in this Syrian capital, the differences which the home atmosphere had failed to reveal were brought clearly into view. It began to break upon the minds of men, to break upon the minds of the first disciples themselves, that although Judaism might be regarded as a germinal Christianity, Christianity was far more than a developed Judaism. I may climb to the top of a hill by an old familiar road, and to this extent I am entitled to say that the hill-top is the goal of that road. But when I have reached the top of the hill, I am certain to find that it could have been reached by many other avenues than the one through which I approached it — that I have no right to regard this summit of my climbing as the exclusive or peculiar goal of the old familiar road. Now this was precisely the discovery to which the Church of the first Christian century attained in the city of Antioch. It had reached the top of a hill, had reached it by an old familiar road which hitherto it had believed to be the only road. But from the vantage-ground of the summit it found that this belief had been a delusion. It found that the height which had been now attained through the steps of the old regime was susceptible of being discovered through totally different steps. For the first time in the history of the movement, the Christian religion presented to its friends and to its contemporaries the appearance of a novelty. Its novelty lay in its very aspect of universality. Hitherto it had believed itself to be simply the flower of Judaism, but at Antioch it discovered that it was the flower of the religious spirit itself. Hitherto it had imagined that men could only approach it through the gate of the temple, but at Antioch it discovered that the gate of the temple was only one of a multitude of avenues. Accordingly, for the first time, Christianity exhibited the appearance of a broken unity. Its votaries were no longer seen following one common track. They approached it from all directions; they came to it by the most opposite roads. The Jew still sought it by the old familiar portal, still professed to hold that it lay through the gate of his own national worship. But the representatives of Gentile nations claimed each his own gate, and refused to pass through the ancient avenue. Antioch was the beginning of religious strife, because it was the beginning of religious freedom: the first-fruit of private judgment is ever unripe. As the mother-city of Jerusalem receded, there was no longer any central tribunal. Each man fell back upon the authority of his own experience, and the variety of experience produced a variety of schools. The river was parted and became four heads — the same four which appeared simultaneously in the Church of Corinth,1 and reappeared persistently in the churches of the Greek republics. It was the inevitable result of that moment of transition in which Christianity ceased to be the immediate privilege

i 1 Cor. i. 12.

of a race and passed into the possession of universal man.

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

1 See Clement’s 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, whose date is certainly not later than 95 A.D.

prominence were the features of the East and West blended together. Rome and Jerusalem, in some respects the opposite poles of thought, had yet elements in common which ultimately went far to unite the old faith with the new. Both were based in their social structure on the recognition of a moral code, on a sense of the majesty of law. Both placed in the foreground of that law the idea of justice, the rendering of rights by man to man. Both in a sense were theocratic identifiers of the secular with the sacred; the Jewish king was the Lord’s anointed, the Roman emperor was the head of a priesthood. Both aspired to a universal dominion, a dominion which should radiate from themselves as a centre and embrace in its circumference all ends of the earth. What is more remarkable still, both seem to have entertained one common ideal of the nature of universal dominion. The conception of a kingdom of God sketched out by the writer of the Pentateuch is the idea of a number of relatively in dependent states, bound together into unity by the recognition of a common theocratic centre. Such is precisely the ideal towards the realisation of which the Roman empire aspired. She, too, aimed at the establishment of a kingdom, not upon the ruins of other kingdoms, but upon the consent of other kingdoms to recognise herself as their theocratic head. She never sought to press out the life of the nations she subdued; she was willing not only that they should preserve their lives, but that they should preserve their individual varieties. She only desired that these individual varieties should consent to circle round a common sun, and agree to accept their independent life as a gift of grace from herself. It is not surprising that under these circumstances Rome should have eventually become in a strictly literal sense the New Jerusalem. She actually succeeded in being precisely that form of government which the Jewish commonwealth had aspired to be. If the old Jerusalem had possessed strength equal to her will, she would have anticipated that model of empire which imperial Rome achieved. The old Jerusalem’s ideal was, without collusion and without imitation, an adumbration of that which appeared in the empire of the Caesars. So early as the date of the 122d Psalm, there had floated before the mind of a Hebrew poet the image of a city which was to be the uniting centre of surrounding differences — of a city to which, once a year, the conflicting tribes were to go up, and within whose walls they were to become one family. That was the mode of conquest to which, in its best and purest moments, the Jewish theocracy aspired, — not the subjugation of national peculiarities nor the destruction of tribal differences, but the recognition by different tribes of a common centre in the city of Jerusalem. And that was the mode of conquest to which the Roman empire actually attained. The dream of the old Jerusalem was fulfilled in the New. The city of the seven hills became the central city of the world — the place to which the tribes of the earth went up to claim a common brotherhood. Here, for the first time in wag realised the thought which had been on the very threshold of Jewish literature

—the idea of an empire whose component parts were relatively independent, but which found their union in the recognition of a theocratic head. In imperial Rome, as in ancient Israel, the bond which was designed to join the nations of the world was the acceptance of a central seat of government whose authority was supposed to rest on the immediate will of heaven.

In this brief and necessarily superficial sketch, I have been guilty of no irrelevancy. My sole design has been to show what was that outward history of which the life of St. Paul was a mirror. For, indeed, it will be found that the main value of this life, from a historical point of view, consists in the fact that it is an epitome, an abridgment, a microcosm, of the first Christian century. The life of St. Paul, like the history of his age, is a tale of three cities — Jerusalem, Antioch, and Rome. Alike in the narrative of the Acts, and in the order of his own Epistles, the course of the apostle exhibits a progress from the city of the Jews to the city of the Caesars. His life embraces that period which reaches from the end of the beginning to the beginning of the end. He appears upon the scene precisely at that stage where Christianity has ceased to be a merely individual movement; he disappears from the scene precisely at that moment in which Christianity begins to be the centre of the world. We first meet him on the streets of Jerusalem, incarnating in his own person all the leading characteristics of his nation, and carrying these instincts along with him even beyond the crisis of Damascus. We next meet him on the streets of Antioch, and find him parting with much of his old life, waking into a struggle between the present and the past, and realising a vivid contrast between this world and the world to come. Then we see him once more in a third and final attitude. Even before he has reached the city of Rome he is touched by the culture of the empire, and when he enters that city he is dominated by its culture. There rises before him the image of a new theocracy, wider and more comprehensive than the old, — the image of a kingdom of God on earth which shall realise the gospel figure of the branches and the tree. He sees in anticipation the various races of men, without sacrificing their nationality, consenting to recognise one common head, and united in the acknowledgment of one paramount and sacred sovereignty. His letters henceforth breathe the Roman atmosphere — the atmosphere of reconciliation. His world ceases to be the opposite of the world to come; grace ceases to be the antithesis of nature; Gentile ceases to be the contrary of Jew. The various forms of humanity are beheld as the members of one vast body, each necessary to the other, none adequate in itself; and the bond of union to the whole is a common life of love which enables them, even amidst their varieties, to say, “we being many are one.”

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

The record of a life’s development can only begin at the point where that life has begun. It must take notice of its earliest manifestation, but it has nothing to do with the question how that manifestation arose. The earliest manifestation of man’s physical life is perhaps an infant’s cry, and he who would record the progressive experiences of such a life will require to take notice of the cry. But within the province of this study he is by no means entitled to inquire what was the origin of that sensation which prompted the cry. That is a perfectly legitimate question, but it is a question for the apologist and for the scientist; it is outside the record of the development itself. So is it with the study now before us. To trace the spiritual development of St. Paul we arc required to go back to his initial experience, but no further. We are required to put our hand upon the earliest phase of difference which distinguishes the life of Paul the apostle from the life of Saul of Tarsus, but it is outside our province to ask whence that phase itself arose. To inquire into the origin of the light which marked for him the boundary of transition from the old into the new belongs to the sphere of the apologist, and of the apologist alone. For us it will be enough to trace the course of the light after it has risen, and to mark the stages of its progress from the dawn to the perfect day.