The Completed Journey

I have said that the epistle to Philemon forms the transition line into Paul’s final period. That period embraces what are called the pastoral epistles — those to Timothy and Titus. The figure of the apostle which has been long hid from view within the walls of the prison-house suddenly and for a brief space emerges once more into the light, and resumes its missionary journeys. It is but a temporary return of the working day, and is followed ere long by a reclosing of the prison wall to be opened only by the hand of death. But, momentary as is the apparition, it is long enough to give us a glimpse of the man. What does that glimpse reveal? Is it the same Paul on whom our eyes rested previous to the first Roman captivity? We have seen the sun before it entered into the cloud; we have lost sight of it for a few hours, and now, almost on the borders of evening, it comes once more into view. Is the sun on the borders of evening the same as that which entered into the cloud? To drop the metaphor, is the Paul who writes the epistles to Timothy and Titus identical with the Paul who wrote the epistles to Galatia and Corinth?

Let us imagine for a moment that all the writings of Paul had been lost with the exception of the epistle to the Galatians and the three pastoral epistles. Let us suppose that when his figure was hid from the eye his voice also had been hid from the ear, and that during the whole time of his Roman captivity there had disappeared all record of his thoughts and actions. Let us conceive, therefore, that when he emerged from his captivity his friends had no other standard by which to compare him than the memory of those old days when they had seen him brandishing the sword against the false Judaisers; what would have been the conclusion to which they must have come? Would it not have been the great sense of contrast which was presented between the Paul of the present and the Paul of the past? Undoubtedly. For no man can read the pastoral epistles over against the epistle to the Galatians without perceiving that he is in the presence of a man in many respects changed. If one were asked to describe the main feature of the change, he would perhaps best express it by saying that in the pastoral epistles the warfare was out of him. In the Galatian letter he is brandishing the sword. We there catch the figure of one who is consciously in the heat of battle, who sees only two sides of the question, and is persuaded that, on the adoption of one or the other, life or death depends. But in the pastoral letters there is no longer a trace of battle. The sword has been put up into its scabbard. The fiery accents of the soldier have been replaced by the calm words of the old man, breathing at every turn “Peace, peace.” There is everywhere the deprecation of strife, everywhere the effort to find a common ground between the two sides of the question. Looking on this picture and on that, and seeing no intermediate picture, one would naturally be tempted to ask whether the glow of Christian enthusiasm had not itself subsided, and whether the diminution of early fire did not owe its origin to the cessation of early zeal.

Such, I say, might have been our impression, had we possessed no intermediate record between the Galatian and the pastoral epistles. But we do pos sess such a record, and this makes all the difference. We have a series of letters intervening between the days of the fiery soldier and the days of the peaceful old man, and these do not only intervene between them — they connect them. They show us that the change in the demeanour of Paul is the result not of a diminished but of an expanded energy. They reveal to us the fact that the production of this change has been itself the very plan of development on which his life was all along designed to move. They tell us that the plan of this development was the descent of a mountain. When he wrote the epistle to the Galatians he was at the top of the mountain; when he wrote the pastoral epistles he was at the foot; his intermediate life was the passage between the extremes. The top of the mountain was the heavenly side. His spiritual history had begun with the vision of the resurrection Christ; the glory of the world to come had extinguished for a time the sense of this world’s possible glory. It was the age in which the life of the spirit was naturally and very properly suspicious of all interference on the part of the flesh, suspicious even of the influence of those things which on the surface seemed to be indifferent. Yet clearly it was impossible, undesirable, that such isolation should be maintained. If Christianity was to be a life for the world, it must be a life in the world; it must conquer the mountain not by keeping at the top of it but by traversing its slopes. It was inevitable that, if Paul was to be a complete man, he must be able to take his stand on what now to him was the opposite side of the question. Accordingly, we expect to find, and we do find, that the course of his subsequent development is the history of a descending process, in which he is ever stepping further down from heaven to earth, and ever drawing nearer to the appropriation of that secular field which had originally been the barrier to the advance of the spiritual life.

The pastoral epistles are confessedly the completion of this descent. In the letter which he wrote during his second captivity, he takes a retrospect of his whole career, and as the result of the final view he declares that he had reached that point of perfected ripeness which had been the object of his journey. “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith,” are the words in which he sums up the history of his spirit ual experience. And certainly, if the order of Paul’s development has been such as we have described, these pastoral epistles furnish for his life a consistent and appropriate close. If the progress of his pilgrimage has been a descent from the sacred to the secular, the climax of that progress has assuredly been reached here. Nowhere has the spirit of Paul entered so thoroughly and so pronouncedly into the sphere of secularism. If the first part of his life was the period in which he was called to defend the spirit against the encroachments of the flesh, it might almost be said that this closing period was the time in which he was called to defend the flesh against the encroachments of the spirit. Standing at the foot of the mountain, he stands on the basis of pure humanity and recognises the essential sacredness of what once to him had been merely mundane. The key-note of his life in this period is struck in the suggestive words i i the man Christ Jesus.”1 Yery singular is it that Paul’s final gaze on Christ should have been distinctively and preeminently the gaze on His humanity. In the for mer days his eyes had centred chiefly on that which was Divine; he had begun with the vision of the Christ of resurrection and for a time he could look on nothing but the resurrection light. Yet his ripest hour was to be that in which his eyes were to be transfixed by the vision of the man. The sight which came to him latest was the sight which had come to the other disciples earliest — the full revelation of the human Jesus, the completed view of the Christ of Nazareth. Therefore it is that in his final utterances he emphasises in the Messiah, above all things, the man. The resurrection light

i 1 Tim. 11. 5.

fades into the background and the image of human nature in its perfect form appears. And, because the image of human nature appears, humanity itself, and for its own sake, becomes the object of his solicitude. Religion takes a wider sweep; the temple expands to embrace the outer courts of the sanctuary. The interests of man as man rise to the surface. Secular life receives a value of its own, and Divine grace, which in former days was limited to the preparation for a world to come, is found to have its im mediate mission in the purifying of the present age.

It seems to me that, viewed from this standpoint, the pastoral epistles embrace two great ideas. The first is the recognition of the truth that the Church of Christ must be an incorporative body — a body whose essential bond of union shall be purity of life, and which, where that essential bond exists, shall consent to tolerate minor differences. The second is the recognition of the truth that the purity of the life itself ought to be allowed a wider sphere of operation, that it should not be narrowed down to the observance of a few ceremonies or the performance of a few religious duties, but should be permitted to range at will over the whole length and breadth of human nature. These, as it appears to me, arc the distinctive features of these epistles so far as they bear on the subject of Paul’s development, and I shall proceed as briefly as possible to exhibit each of them in turn.

And first. If I were asked to characterise the pastoral letters as distinguished from the other

TltUS 11. 11, 12.

letters of St. Paul, I should call them the broad-church epistles. It is here that distinctively and peculiarly the spirit of the apostle broadens into the recognition of a life which is capable of subsisting beneath theological differences. One of the most remarkable instances of this is afforded in the latest of all the epistles. Heresies had been springing up within the Church of Ephesus. Two leaders of advanced thought had appeared — Hymenaeus and Philctus. With the special form of their heterodoxy we have here nothing to do; speaking generally, they may be described as in a very mild way the forerunners of the mythical theory of Strauss, the anticipators of that school which seeks to transform the fact into the idea. Naturally, the enunciation of such novel views had created a great commotion. Reading between the lines, it is not difficult to see that the orthodox party in the Church was clamour ing for the expulsion of the heretics, and that the apostle was besieged with solicitations to have the sentence of excommunication pronounced. How does Paul act under these circumstances? Does he enjoin his delegate, Timothy, to appease the ecclesiastical clamour by giving immediate effect to the prayers of the faithful? Not at all; he tenders him very different advice. He says, l The foundation of Christian membership is not theological but moral, God Almighty alone can tell to what extent this mental aberration has its root in a perversion of the heart; man must be content to wait till the fruit shall reveal the character of the tree: “The foundai a Tim. 11. 17-30.

tion of God standeth sure, having this seal, the Lord knoweth them that are His. And, let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.” Meantime, the Church of Christ, just by reason of its vastness, should be free from all exclusiveness: “In a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honour and some to dishonour.” A house whose position is not established may insist on admitting nothing which is not golden, or, at the very least, silver; but an institution which has made its mark can afford to let in the wood and earth also. The Church should be distinguished from the world not by its narrowness but by its power of incorporation. It should have a place not merely for the vessels of honour but for the vessels of dishonour too — a place for those commonplace minds which have been unable as yet to rise into the full recognition of truth, and whose duties must meantime be limited to the hewing of wood and the drawing of water. ‘Such is the broadly tolerant expression of religious thought with which Paul closes his apostolical career, and it runs like a thread of gold through all the pastoral letters. If a man wishes to call himself by the name of Christ, Paul will give him that name; he will allow the epithet of Christian to be borne by any one who claims it. Whether that claim be well or ill founded he will leave to be determined by another tribunal, but he insists that this tribunal shall be the life and not the presbytery. He will not have the character of the tree prejudged by the seeming frailty of his branches: to speak without metaphor, he will not have a man expelled from Church membership by the apparent incongruity of his creed with interpretations previously given. He will wait for the future to tell whether the professing Christian be a real Christian; by his fruits shall he be known. If his subsequent life be a departure from iniquity, Paul shall decide that his foundation was sure; if his subsequent life shall belie his profession, Paul shall decide that his profession was but a name. Meantime, Paul shall believe for him the best, shall assume the existence of the coming fruit, shall hope all things. He tells Timothy in the very opening of his episcopal charge that the Alpha and the Omega of that charge is charity. He tells him, and he tells the world, that the end of all his development, the completion of all his ripeness, has been the perfected revelation of Christ’s long-suffering patience.3 As the night draws on, the brightest gem in the Messiah’s crown has become to him its attribute most human. In the morning his eye had rested on the power of the Lord from heaven; in the evening his gaze is fixed on that restraint of power which constitutes the glory of the man Christ Jesus. And yet, we are far from having exhausted the breadth of that humanitarian sympathy which makes the light of Paul’s evening time. He has been telling Timothy to be very slow in expelling from the membership of Christ; he reminds him that in one sense, in a very deep sense, such expulsion is im possible. We have seen how in the first Roman captivity the mind of the apostle had been stirred by

i 1 Tim. 1. 5. 1 Tim. i. 16, the thought that there was an outer as well as an inner membership in the body of Christ, that He was not only the head of those who circled around the communion-table but the head of all principalities and powers. Here, in these final letters, the same thought asserts itself, but with a far more pronounced emphasis and in a far more definite form. With a boldness which is almost startling in its directness and its unqualifiedness Paul declares of Christ that He “is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.” * The statement is not accidental nor isolated. In his charge to Titus, in a passage already referred to, he declares in similar terms that there is a Divine grace which l i has appeared unto all men” — a grace which has revealed itself to the world as a world, and the burden of whose teaching is the observance of those duties common to the day and hour. Can any one fail to perceive in such language the presence in Paul’s mind of the thought that Christianity has exerted an influence even over those who have not accepted it? He looks abroad upon the world of his day; it is still for the most part a pagan world. But it is no longer the paganism of yesterday. It has not yet received the light, but it has caught the heat. The spirit of the new religion is in the air, and with a subtle influence it has begun to work underground. The atmosphere of the Caesars has been impregnated with the atmosphere of the Messiah. Unconsciously to themselves, men have turned the corner and are moving on a higher plane. The spirit of the new faith has run in advance of the faith itself. Christianity has penetrated into the secular institutions of the empire and imparted to them a fresh glow. Just as the sense of life in the individual precedes the exercise of vision, so in the pagan world the feeling of a new vitality had come in advance of the power to perceive its cause; like John the Baptist in the wilderness, it had gone forth as the forerunner to prepare the way of the Lord.

This was what Paul saw in his old age. He was inclined to say of Christianity what the Psalmist had said of God, “Whither can I flee from Thy presence.” He felt that, however much a man might be expelled from the inner membership of Christ, it was no longer possible to put him beyond the range of Christ’s outer influence. The outer influence of Christ had become Roman, and therefore potentially it had become universal. It had impregnated the breath of the world. It had come into contact with institutions which had been reared for the support of paganism, and it was exerting already a power even over lives which professed to oppose it. It was a view of this fact which prompted Paul to say that Christ was in one sense the Saviour of all men. He had received gifts even for the rebellious, and the outer court of the tabernacle had caught a glow from the fire of the inner sanctuary. It may be, I think it highly probable, that the eye of the apostle saw the vision nearer than it was in reality. Old man as he was, he had, like the dying Moses, the spirit of youth in him, and the spirit of youth always sees the end already at the door. Doubtless to the imagination of Paul the process of Christian civilisation was accelerated, doubtless he expected it to be more rapid than it actually proved. The value of his utterance is not the statement of a historical fact but the revelation of a moral charity. As a Jew, he had been able to see only two sides of the question — to be or not to be; as a Christian, with ever-increasing intensity there had come to him the perception of a third and middle way — the stage of becoming. He stood in old age on the bank of the river, and between him and the other shore he watched the waters roll. He saw as yet no intervening bridge of doctrine by which the two banks could be united. But he felt that light could cross the river independently of any bridge, and that the men on the other side could be united by a common life even while they were separated by a diverse doctrine. Therefore it was that he stretched forth a hand of fellowship into the outer court. He had realised the fact that the new light which had risen must sooner or later exert an elevating influence even over those forms which had been constructed in the night, and in the view of this prospect he was not afraid already to say of Christ, “He is the Saviour of all men.”

I come now to the second of those characteristics which seem to me to mark the pastoral epistles. The first was the recognition of the truth that the Christian life is more than the Christian system; the second consists in a broader view of the Christian life itself. Not only is the influence of Christianity seen extending to the outer court, but within its own inner court there is observed a process of enlargement. Nowhere is Judaism so thoroughly transcended as in these last letters, nowhere does the type of Christian practice so completely outrun the type of Old Testament morality. Judaism had sought to make men virtuous by putting a label upon the different acts of life, by writing on this 1 1 good “and on that bad.” Into the centre of this morality Paul sends a thunderbolt. He declares that it is impossible to reach morality by means of a label, that the same act may be good to-day and bad to-morrow, that the motive of the life alone determines the worth or worthlessness of what we do. He declares that, if a man be a Christian, he can tear down the labels of prohibition, can claim the right, without trespassing, to tread in every field, — “unto the pure all things are pure.”1 It is no longer a question of what we shall do or where we shall go, but of why we shall do and how we shall go. The act is to be determined by its motive, and according to its motive its label is to be. The Church and the world are no longer to be separated by a line which is geographical; the geographical lines are to be obliterated, and the spiritual boundary is alone to rule. The man who in the secular world manifests the Christian principle, is to be recognised as performing a deed of sacred service. Every moral act is to be esteemed a religious act, every honest day a Sabbath-day, every place of duty a place of worship, every work for man a work for God. Accordingly, it will not surprise us to find that in

i Titus 1. 15.

these pastoral epistles Paul’s first spirit of asceticism is almost extinct. It is no longer the same man who stood in the deserts of Arabia and sought to realise the presence of God alone. It is a man who has exchanged the desert for the city, and who has replaced the cares of the individual soul with the cares of the struggling multitude. As we read these letters of his old age we are impressed at every turn by the sharp point of the contrast. In the solitudes of Arabia he had seen none but God; in the streets of licentious Corinth he had separated himself from the world; in the heart of metropolitan Rome he appropriates the world as his own. It is true that he had told the Colossians to set their affections upon heavenly as distinguished from earthly things; but he had told them before this that the larger measure of the things which they had attributed to the earth were really the tilings of heaven, that Christ was the head of all principalities and powers. Here, in these latest letters, almost the last trace of asceticism disappears, and the world is at once possessed and sanctified in the words, l ‘Every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused.” * Here, in nearly every sentence, the reader is confronted by the opposite side of that problem which had dominated his earlier days; it is no longer the defence of the spirit against the encroachments of the flesh, but the vindication of the flesh against the intolerance of the spirit. In Arabia, by his own admission, he had “conferred not with flesh and blood “; in Corinth he had borne this testimony to his spiritual need, ‘I keep my body under”; in the latest stage of all he declares that such a need has been removed and that the power of asceticism has yielded to a higher power, 1 1 the exercise of bodily restraint is of little advantage;1 but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life which now is, and of that which is to come.” He wants a religion which shall beautify not only the prospect of heaven but the objects of earth, which shall invest with glory not merely the thought of a world to come but the common life of every day and hour. He feels that such a religion must not be one which perpetually forbids, which ever says uthou shalt not.” It must be a positive and not a negative principle, an impelling and not a restraining force, a power which moves the world not by the mere abstinence of the body but mainly and pre-eminently by the joy of the soul.

But perhaps the sharpest point of contrast between Paul’s earlier and later experience is to be found in his attitude towards marriage. As we have said, his attitude towards marriage was at no time antagonistic; yet his feeling regarding it exhibits a progress from negative toleration to positive favour. He tells the Corinthians that marriage, although not unlawful, is yet a state of fleshly tribulation from which man and woman would do well to be free. He tells the Ephesians that marriage, when once contracted, is a sacramental state in which the living sacrifice of the great Head of the Church is repeated and mirrored in the world. He tells Timothy that for the life of a young woman marriage is in his

i This Is the real meaning of 1 Tim. iv. 8.

opinion the most desirable goal,1 and that the man who makes it a subject of prohibition is to be esteemed a heretic and a schismatic.2 In all this there is contrast but no contradiction. The first voice is different from the last, but each is a true voice and beautiful in its time. The voices are not addressed to the same world. The first voice was addressed to the world which preceded the second advent; the second was spoken to an age in which the second advent had begun to dawn. When Paul came to Rome he felt that his coming was the beginning of Christ’s coming. He felt that a new hour had struck in the history of mankind, and that he himself was designed at once to inaugurate and proclaim it. In bringing Christianity into the metropolis of the world he was really bringing Christ into the world, and to bring Christ into the world was to make all things new. The commands which served for an age outside the gospel influence were no longer applicable to a generation which had been touched by the sacred fire. It was one thing to contemplate the life of common day while yet the headship of Christ was seen only in its relation to a body of believers; it was another thing to contemplate it when He appeared as the head of all principalities and powers. In the first instance the life of common day was a life which had no significance and no glory; it was not worth preserving; it simply stood in the way. But when Christ appeared as the head even of this commonplace secular world, it received to the eye of Paul an immeasurable value. It was

* 1 Tim. v. 14. 1 Tim. iv. 3.

to him no longer the old world; it was already the scene of the second advent. So far from existing in order to vanish, it had in it an element of permanence. It was not only worth preserving, but its preservation was the main duty of man. All that ministered to its continuance became henceforth an object of interest. The marriage tie, the family relation, the social intercourse of man with man, the progress of civilisation, the diffusion of knowledge, the spread of commerce, the interchange of brotherhood from land to land, became in the light of the broader revelation the opening of so many gates for the advance of the kingdom of God.

In this new regime, what made the marriage tie to Paul specially sacred was a desire to preserve inviolate the sanctity of home. He desired to preserve that sanctity inviolate not only against the attacks of wickedness, but mainly in these epistles against the encroachments of what used to be deemed the only goodness. The sun of fortune had begun to rise on Christianity. The very fact that recently it had been honoured by a state persecution, showed that it was no longer an object of mere contempt. It was beginning to make itself felt as a worldly influence — as a factor which must be reckoned with in estimating the strength of the empire. If, for those inside its pale, this growing importance was in one sense an advantage, it was in another sense fraught with danger. The fear in former days was that the allurements of the world might seduce the Christian from the service of the Church; the fear in Paul’s mind at this later time was that the attractions of the Church might draw away the Christian from the legitimate service of the world. He was afraid that the increasing popularity of this new mode of life might lead its votaries to sink the citizen in the devotee, to neglect the common cares and duties of the hour for the uncommon cares and duties of the inner sanctuary. It was a sense of this danger which prompted Paul in his old age to stand forth as the protector of the fireside, the guardian of the domestic altar. If in the spring time he had seen the world chiefly in its aspects antagonistic to religion, he amply redeemed himself in the autumn of his days. He came forth as the champion of a secular religiousness, of a service of God which might be given within the walls of an ordinary dwelling. Every note of his latest writings is pervaded by this spirit of secular guardianship — this desire to preserve for its own sake the life of the family and the household. There were hundreds of young men who thought it incumbent on them to desert their domestic duties for the duties of the missionary; Paul says, “If any widow have children or nephews, let them learn first to show piety at home, and to requite their parents.” * There were men who sacrificed the comforts of the family to the claims of Christian liberality; Paul says, ’ * If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” 2 There were domestic servants who, on the ground of their Christian profession, laid claim to a social equality with their

i 1 Tim. v. 4. 2 1 Tim. v. 8.

masters, assumed that the republicanism in the sight of God abolished all distinctions in the grades of man; Paul says, “They that have believing masters, let them not despise them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they are faithful and beloved.”1

Such is the tenor of these pastoral epistles. They are a defence of the secular against the encroachments of the sacred — a vindication of the essential sanctity of the natural rights of man. I cannot but remark how, when viewed in this light, these epistles acquire an entirely new significance. It has been no uncommon thing from a literary point of view to speak of them with disparagement. Even those who have accepted their genuineness have been willing to concede that they indicate a drooping in the apostle’s wing. They tell us that there is a marked contrast between the sublime fire which flashes from the apostle’s eye in the letter to Galatia, and the homely touch of the hand which is laid on the heads of Timothy and Titus. And so, doubtless, there is; but I would rather call it home-like than homely. In the reading of these later epistles we feel that we are no longer breathing mountain-air; yet, if we read them aright, we shall find that we have exchanged the mountain-air for the atmosphere of a more useful environment. We have left the dizzy heights of speculation where the mind dwelt on those transcendental problems in which the spirit of man contemplates his relation to eternity. But if in abandoning these heights we have lost somei 1 Tim. vl. 2.

thing in elevation, we have gained something in breadth. We have descended into a plain which is more prosaic, but which is at the same time more human. The pastoral epistles are home-like simply because their subject is home. If they exhibit a drooping of the wing, it is because they have discovered a region lying beneath the ordinary flight of religion. They have discovered that there belongs to Christianity a world which was once thought to belong to Satan — the world of home-life, the world of the family altar, the world of common secular toil. It is not their greater poverty but their superior riches which makes them prosaic; they are less filled with the transcendental because they are more full of man.

I confess, indeed, that the order of Paul’s experience is here very different from the order of common experience. In the lives of men in general the objects of the outer world lose somewhat of their magnitude as the shadows of old age deepen. Apart altogether from religion, the tendency of advancing years is to deprive the incidents of common day of much of that absorbing interest which constituted their dominion over the years of manhood. But Paul’s experience is entirely the reverse. He is perfectly conscious, indeed, that the snows of age are falling round him; he says so in the epistle to Philemon. But the peculiarity of his case is that the objects of life become interesting just in proportion to the deepening of the snow. The time of his manhood had not been a time of much interest in the present world. He had stood then upon Mount

Nebo and gazed into the prospect of the promised land; his eye was indeed undimmed, yet his natural strength had been abated. The vision of the heavenly Canaan had to some extent paralysed the force of his human nature, and the sight of the Delectable Mountains had dwarfed his view of the plain. But here, standing in the twilight, the picture is reversed. At the approach of night the forms of this world’s life for the first time fully and freely emerge upon his gaze. The noonday of manhood had suppressed them, the fire of youthful enthusiasm had hid them; but the shadows of old age revealed them in all their possibility and power. The time of Paul’s declining earthly day is precisely the time when the earth to him acquires its full significance; in relation to this world the saying was in him fulfilled, “at evening-time it shall be light.”

And the explanation of all this we have seen. It is no accident, no freak of history; it is in strict consistency with the whole order of Paul’s development. If the widening of his worldly views at the approach of old age is a somewhat abnormal experience, it is because his conversion to Christianity was itself in its method abnormal. The other leaders of the new religion began, as we have seen, at the base of the triangle and gradually climbed up to its apex; Paul began at the apex and gradually descended to the base. The other leaders received Christianity at first in its most human and worldly aspect; they came to the Son of man for the sake of that earthly bread which was broken by His hand. But Paul received his first knowledge of Christ at the top of the triangle. He caught his earliest vision of Him not as the Son of man but as the Son of God. His eye rested at the beginning on no Galilean plains, on no image of a human form. It rested on a form which had freed itself from the limitations of humanity, which had clothed itself in a superhuman garb. He had begun with the Christ of resurrection; he had started on the heights. It was inevitable that any future development must be a progress downward. It was inevitable that just in proportion as he descended from the height he must reach the breadth of Christianity. The base of the triangle which to his brother apostles was the starting-point was to him the goal. Every stage of his journey was necessarily a stage nearer to the human, nearer to the world of common day. Throughout the course of these pages we have been trying to trace these steps of descent. We have been seeking to indicate that process of gradual broadening which marked the advance of his spiritual life from its apex amid the mountains of Arabia to its base in the heart of the great metropolis. We have endeavoured to distinguish those successive stages of ex perience by which he approached ever nearer to a sympathy with man as man. And we have found that with him the breadth has grown in proportion to the descent. The moment furthest removed from transcendentalism has been the moment most incorporative of the world; the writings least full of systematic theology have been the epistles most filled with man. In Arabia he stood at the highest summit of heavenly vision, but the deepest ground of earthly sympathy was found only in Rome.

There we shall leave him — leave him amid those shadows which brought to him his fullest, latest light. The shades of night were gathering round him; the walls of the prison-house had finally enclosed him; the infirmities of old age had begun to tell on his physical frame. Yet neither the age nor the captivity nor the final martyrdom constitutes the fitting close of such a life as his; its fitting close is its latest breadth of sympathy. It is here that one comes to understand what has often been a puzzle to historians — why the writer of the Acts, after having brought Paul almost to the gates of martyrdom, should have ended his narrative by leaving him unharmed before the gates. The reason lies in the writer’s sense of the true situation. He knew that the hour of Paul’s tragedy was at the same time the hour of his triumph, and the tragedy to his mind was lost in the triumph. He knew that Paul was never so great, never so powerful, never so instrumental to the common-weal, as when he stood amid the declining light and claimed the world for Christ. It furnished to him that climax for his book which he had contemplated from its very beginning. “Ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth,” * are the words in which he expresses its prefatory plan. It is a triangular plan; it follows the course of Christianity from its narrowest point to its broadest base. Jeru

i A6ts L 8.

salem, Judea, Samaria, the far-off parts of the West where stood the great metropolis of the world, — these were the gradations through which the earliest of Church historians proposed to trace Christianity’s progress. Each stage was an expansion, each step was a step nearer to man. He beheld the new religion passing from its narrowest precincts within the walls of Jerusalem into the wider atmosphere of the surrounding Judaic district. He beheld it thence overleaping the walls of orthodox Judaism itself and entering into that region of Samaria which had been long to the Jew a proscribed land. He beheld it, lastly, transcending altogether the limits of Palestine and penetrating with the footsteps of Paul into the very heart of secular paganism. When he had arrived at that climax he felt it time to lay down his pen. He felt that when the apostle had reached the interior of the great metropolis he had reached the beginning of the end, had seen the inauguration of Christianity’s triumph; and that here, accordingly, the curtain ought to fall. We too may be content in imitation of so illustrious an example to let the vision of the triumph eclipse the scene of the martyrdom, and to leave the missionary of the Gentiles in the field of his undying glory.