Autobiographical Reminiscences (Continued)

In the previous chapter we arrived at the boundary-line between the life of Saul of Tarsus and the life of Paul the apostle. At the opening of the present chapter we shall require to step over that line. I have already said that the record of life’s beginning does not lie within the history of development. Shall any man put his hand upon the exact spot which forms the point of transition from one stage into an other? I may set up a wall between two countries, two provinces, two fields, and I may say that this wall is the boundary-line between them. Yet, philosophically speaking, which here means strictly speaking, I have not by such a process reached any point of transition. The point of transition lies somewhere within the breadth of the wall; that is all the knowledge which I can profess to have attained. Now, what is true in geography is true also in human history. I cannot put my hand upon the spot which forms the immediate boundary-line between any two periods of man’s existence, — cannot say, ’ here youth ends, and here manhood begins. ’

I can go to either edge of the stream, can distinguish on either side the colour of the soil, can mark on either bank the size and number of the pebbles, but the stream itself eludes me; it belongs to a transcendental region which the eye is unable to explore. One thing is certain, — wherever the point of transition lies between the old life and the new, it lies not without but within the life. No external circumstances, however striking, would be adequate in themselves to explain that transition. If we were writing the outward history of St. Paul, we would be expected to begin with the narrative in the ninth chapter of Acts. We would be expected to follow the man of Tarsus in his march from Jerusalem to Damascus, to mark the sudden arrest of his journey, to witness the light from heaven which confronted him, and to tell how, in the presence of that light, the persecutor fell prostrate to the earth. But even when we had done all this, we should not be one step nearer to the discovery of the real point of transition. The writer of the Acts himself confesses that he has not put his hand upon the boundary line between Saul and Paul. The words, “it is hard for thee to kick against the goads,” are very suggestive. They carry us back to something behind the light. They tell us that in the heart of the man of Tarsus there had been a’ previous struggle — that the very vehemence of his opposition to Christianity had part of its foundation in a desire to stifle thought. They tell us that the outward light had set fire to already existing material, had kindled into a blaze the accumulated product of years, and had effected its seemingly sudden transformation by its contact with elements that had long and silently been gathering in the soul.

And if we turn to Paul’s own testimony, we shall find this view of the subject marvellously confirmed. In one of his letters in later life he thus expresses his consciousness of a boundary-line between the old and the new, i ‘It pleased God who separated me from my mother’s womb” — i.e., set me apart from the moment of my birth — “to reveal His Son in me.” * There are two things to be observed in this passage. The one is, that Paul is not himself prepared to lay his hand upon an ultimate point of transition. It seems indeed to him that in one sense he had always been a Christian. He felt as if God had set him apart even from his birth, had caused him from the very first hour of his being to be surrounded with influences which had made it possible for him at some time to see a light from heaven. The other is, that to the retrospective consciousness of Paul the point of transition from the old into the new was not without but within. “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me. “Looking to the circumstances of the light from heaven, we should have expected him to have said “to me.” We should have expected that Paul would have attributed to the outward catastrophe that change in his nature which at all events it accelerated and manifested. But Paul knew better. He knew that a revelation from without is a contradiction in terms — that no external manifestation, however striking, could possibly reveal God to the soul. He insists upon this fact constantly, pertinaciously, at times even polemi cally. He says elsewhere, u God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” * He declares in language more pronounced still, ll Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit.” ‘No words could express in stronger terms Paul’s repudiation of the thought that any mere material mechanism could be the source of Divine revelation. He does not mean, as is popularly thought, that the sights and sounds of heaven are grander than the sights and sounds of earth, but rather that in its deepest essence “heaven is not sight and sound, — that no outward light, even though above the brightness of the sun, could for a moment illuminate a human spirit, unless that spirit had elsewhere been illuminated by an inward glow.

But we must now advance a step further. How ever inward the beginning of the new life be, how ever subtle in its working, however inscrutable in its immediate point of transition, there is yet a definite moment in which its possession begins to be realised. The sun has actually risen before the eye perceives its rising, but the eye can detect the time when it does perceive its rising. So is it in the spiritual world. No man can point to the precise moment of

i i Cor. lv. 6. 2 1 Cor. 11. 9, 10.

transition between the old life and the new, but every man may photograph the moment when the new life was first realised by him as a part of his being. Now, in the spiritual experience of Paul there was clearly such a moment of realisation. He is himself quite conscious that he is standing on an opposite bank of the stream to that which he occupied yesterday; yesterday he was a persecutor, to day he is a friend. What has led him to this realisation? It is a question perfectly legitimate and purely scientific. The origin of a change is one thing, the realising of a change is another and a very different thing. There must have been a time when Paul became conscious in himself of an altered attitude towards Christianity — a time from which it became impossible for him to be a persecutor any more. Have we any clue to the circumstances in which this experience was realised? Have we any indication, from the writings of Paul himself, of the nature of that influence which first led him to recognise the fact that he had, from the hour of birth, been dedicated to Christ?

I think we have. One thing is quite clear, that to the mind of Paul the first conscious transition did not present itself as a voluntary one. In speaking of that transition, he says, “by the grace of God, I am what I am.”1 Now, let it be remembered that in the New Testament the word “grace” has always a definite meaning. It always implies something opposed to the natural will. It is the opposite of “glory.” It is the direct antithesis of our English word “grace,” which means a naturalised beauty, a symmetry which has become indigenous to the life. Scriptural grace, on the other hand, implies the revelation of something which is not natural to the life, not symmetrical with its proportions, not consonant with its aims. It is the beginning of struggle, the presentation of a point of resistance, the first sense of an impersonal obstacle which has put itself in the way of the development of my own will. When Paul refers his moment of realisation to an act of grace, he really means to refer it to the encountering of an antagonistic experience.

In another passage he himself gives very clear expression to this view. He says, ’ i lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me.“1 The act of grace which arrested him on his road to persecution is here more strictly defined; it is said to have consisted in the impartation of a thorn to the flesh. It is the same thought to which he has already given utterance in speaking of the inward light which has illumined his heart, “we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”2 He means to say that the recognition of Christianity’s truth could to him be no subject of personal boasting. He had not arrived at that knowledge by an act of his own will; he had been driven into it. It had come to him through an arrest of his own will, through an impediment which had been thrown

1 2 Cor. xii. 7. 2 2 Cor. iv. 7.

across his path, through the encountering of a hostile force which had struck him to the ground. His illumination had entered through the gate of his humiliation; his treasure had been conveyed to him in earthen vessels; his heavenly vision had been communicated through the medium of an earthly thorn.

What, then, was this thorn? It has been a subject of much dispute amongst commentators. Was it of the nature of a physical calamity, or did it bear the character of a moral stain? Each of these views has been advocated on grounds which I think irrelevant. On the one hand, it is urged that when Paul designates his calamity “a thorn in the flesh,” he clearly points to some physical privation; but every student knows that in the vocabulary of St. Paul the fleshly is by no means necessarily synonymous with the material. On the other hand, it has been urged that, when Paul styles his thorn l a messenger of Satan,” he cannot be speaking of a merely physical calamity. If Paul had been an Englishman, such an argument would have been unanswerable. But Paul was a Jew, and, being a Jew, he used the language of his nation. In the language of that nation all the sorrows of life were the messengers of Satan. No matter from what source they came, whether from without or from within, whether from the body or from the soul, they were regarded by the pious Israelite as the enemies of his peace and the penalties of his sin. To the mind of a son of Israel the loss of sight was as much the buffeting of Satan as the loss of temper. Who sinned, this man or his parents?” was the question which spontaneously arose in the view of every physical calamity. There were spirits which struggled to rise above it; there were minds which, like the patriarch of Uz, had glimpses of a higher and holier destination of human sorrow; but the very strength of their opposition proved the tenacity of the national belief. The tenacity of that belief was broken by Christianity alone. Only in the religion of Christ could even such a one as Paul recognise the glory of a cross; to the initial stage of his Christian experience the calamity of his life still remained “a messenger of Satan to buflet” him.

We are not entitled, then, to draw any argument from either expression. The “thorn in the flesh” does not necessarily imply materialism; the “messenger of Satan” does not necessarily imply the presence of a moral stain. There is, however, one argument which, so far as I know, has not been hitherto advanced, and which seems to me to bear conclusively on the decision of this question. In the sequel of that passage in which Paul speaks of his thorn, he makes his calamity a subject of prayer, ’ l for this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And He said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”1 I shall hereafter return to’ these words in another connection; they belong to a later stage in Paul’s spiritual biography, and I only notice them now in their bearing upon the nature of that calamity which marked his conscious transii 2 Oor. xli. 8, 9.

tion into the kingdom of Christ. Looking at them, however, in this light, it seems to me that they decide the question as to whether the nature of that calamity was moral or physical. Is it conceivable that any man, struggling with a moral defect, and earnestly praying for the removal of that defect, should have either received, or imagined that he received, a denial of that prayer? Is it conceivable that one under the influence of a heated temper, or a jealous disposition, or a lustful passion, should have thought for a moment that the preventive or restraining grace of God would be equivalent to the removal of such a tendency, or that the strength of God could find its perfect manifestation in the effort to struggle with such a weakness? The truth is, in any such case as this, the grace of God is not sufficient for us, does not profess nor desire to be sufficient for us. The climax of the moral life is not grace, but glory; not the struggle with a new atmosphere, but the assimilation of the nature to that atmosphere. The strength of God in the moral world is perfected, not by its restraining influence, but by the removal of all necessity to exert such an influence. It is perfected in that hour in which my will has ceased to choose, in which the element of temptation is no longer present to my heart, and in which the power that used to be restraining has become the impulse of my life.

We must arrive, then, at the conclusion that the thorn in the ijesh was a thorn OF the flesh, — that the calamity against which Paul prayed was a calamity of the physical life. If we go on to ask more specifically what was that calamity, we can no longer speak so determinately. Throughout his epistolary writings, Paul has nowhere given us any direct indication of the precise seat of the malady. One naturally wonders why he should have been so enigmatical. In a man writing familiar letters to his familiar friends, we should have expected that, instead of speaking mysteriously of a thorn in the flesh, he would have told them that he had become subject to some particular form of disease. And yet, to my mind, the reason of his seeming obscurity is not far to seek. At the time when he wrote these words, he had not only ceased to grieve over his thorn, but had come positively to triumph in it. He did not want his fellow-men to think that his had been a special case. He wanted them to feel that they might triumph over their calamities in the same manner as he had conquered his. To accomplish this end, he thought it best that no suffering man should be able to say, when referred to him as an example, ‘Paul had quite a different trial from me. ‘He thought it best that his own particular trial should not be revealed by name, so that each suffering man might have a chance of believing that the apostle’s thorn had been his own. He valued the concealment of his thorn for the same reason that his countrymen had valued the concealment of the body of Moses — lest men should come to attach a special and peculiar reverence to that which was only one of a multitude, and only a single specimen of a mighty whole.

But while Paul makes no direct reference to the nature of his thorn, I agree with those who hold that he has indirectly, and, as it were, unwittingly, revealed its nature. I agree with those who hold that the preponderance of argument lies on the side of Paul’s malady having been an affection of the eyes. The facts, when marshalled together, amount to a moral evidence. He employs an amanuensis — a luxury which would not have been voluntarily appropriated by one in his indigent circumstances. The only part of his letters written by his own hand is the salutation at the end, 1 and the words of that salutation are inscribed in large characters. 3 The largeness of the characters might have had its ground in the desire to emphasise the epistle’s genuineness; but there is a very significant circumstance which, to my mind, shakes that view. Almost immediately after directing the Galatians to the large letters he has written with his own hand, Paul breaks forth into the declaration, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus. “He means to say, l i I have no need to get circumcised with a view to have a wound in the flesh; I have already re ceived a wound in the flesh from another and a higher source than any earthly hand.” One feels it difficult to avoid connecting such a statement with the immediately foregoing direction to the largeness of his handwriting. And the impression is wonderfully confirmed when, only a few paragraphs earlier, we hear him bursting forth into a strain of tender reminiscence, and reminding this very church of the sensitiveness, the delicacy, and

i a Thess. ill. 17. 2 Gal. vl. 11. a Gal. vi. 17.

the helpfulness which had marked their recognition of his physical trial, l l my temptation which was in my flesh ye despised not, nor rejected; but received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus. For I bear you record, that, if it had been possible, ye would have plucked out your own eyes, and have given them to me. nl

Now, take these passages together and read them in connection with another passage, which I do not think has hitherto been seen in this light, “the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” 3 If we have attached no weight to the argument of the previous passages, we shall rightly see no significance in this. But if these passages have impressed us already with the conviction that the thorn in Paul’s flesh was connected with an ocular weakness, I think it will be impossible to avoid the recognition of a fresh allusion here. To myself it seems evident that Paul, in this latest passage, is simply making a metaphor of the fact of his own experience, — is transferring into the life of the world at large the analogy of that physical crisis which had marked his transition into the kingdom of God. For what is it that Paul means to affirm when he says that the god of this world is blinding the, natural man to the light of another world? Is it not simply this, that in the sphere of spiritual life a man must be made blind in order to see? The” god of this world “means the ’ l light of this world.”

i Gal. iv. U, 15. 2 2 Cor. iy. 4.

The expression has become obsolete, but it was quite well understood by the men of Paul’s day. There was in that day an incipient belief, which was ere long to become a rampant belief, that the forms of material nature were the work of an inferior deity. Paul does not accept it, but he allegorises it, points out a spiritual sense in which it may be held true. He personifies the spirit of materialism, and calls it the god of this world. He says that to the natural man those things called the objects of sight are really the objects which prevent sight. The light and forms of nature are revealers of the present world, but they are the curtains of another world. They are the shadows which intervene between the eye and a higher and holier light; they intercept and eclipse the rays of a better sun. Before that better sun can be made visible, the intercepting medium must be destroyed. The eye must be blinded to the natural light if it would see “the image of God.” There must be an eclipse of that which eclipses, a blotting out of that which blots out the view. This world stands in the way of the vision of a higher world; therefore before all things this world must be crucified.

Such is Paul’s thought. I submit, however, that it is not a natural thought. It is not an idea which would naturally have occurred to one in Paul’s circumstances. Through the writings of the apostle we have become familiar with the doctrine that the outer world must be crucified to the natural man before he can get a glimpse of the spiritual world. But to the mind of a Jew such a doctrine was the wildest of paradoxes. So far from being self-evident, it was to him the reverse of the truth. The preliminary condition of a higher life was to the Jew not the crucifixion but the expansion of the present world. Instead of believing that a man must have outer forms blotted out in order to see the kingdom of God, it was his distinct doctrine that the kingdom of God could only be seen through the extension and the perfecting of outer forms. The man who had his world crucified was essentially the bad man. He was thereby placed in a condition of spiritual blindness, disqualified for beholding God, and debarred from the vision of Divine realities. The Jew could never regard the revelation of the Sun of righteousness as something which was to be purchased by the obliteration of the sun of nature.

Paul’s thought, then, was not natural to a Jew. What made it natural to Paul, being a Jew? It seems to me that it was suggested to his mind purely by the fact of a personal reminiscence. It was not a simile derived from the theology of his nation; it was directly opposed to that theology. But it was in harmony with a memory of Paul’s own life, and it was that which made it to him the most natural simile in the world. He simply transferred to mankind in general that hour of crisis through which he had passed in his own soul. He remembered a time when he himself had been amply satisfied with the things which are seen and temporal. He remembered a time when the beauty of Christ’s religion was completely eclipsed by these things. So insensible had he been to that beauty, that he regarded Christianity as an obstruction to the world’s real life. He had resolved to put it down with a high hand; he had set forth against it on a course of persecution. Midway he had been arrested, arrested by the greatest of physical calamities. That world which he believed to be the real world had become unreal, — it had been extinguished for him in black darkness. The proximate cause of the calamity is nowhere revealed; to him there was but one cause. If Paul had known to a certainty that the immediate agent in producing his misfortune had been lightning, or sunstroke, or epilepsy, it would have made no difference on his diagnosis; he would still have referred it to one agency, and to one alone. It had come to him as the arresting grace of God, as a Divine hand interposed between himself and his contemplated victim. On the black canvas which had covered the images of the natural day there arose another image — the form of Him who had been the object of his aversion. It filled the vacant space — not yet indeed as an object of love, but as an object of power; Paul said as Julian afterwards said, “O Galilean, thou hast conquered.” Christ was not dead; He was immortal and immortalising. He had proved Himself to be alive by an act of arrestive grace; He had revealed the power of His presence by suppressing all other presences from the apostle’s sight. Doubtless it was this sense of revelation by desolation that prompted Paul to see in his own experience an analogy to the creative work of Genesis, and to say that, in giving to him the knowledge of His glory,

God had ( ’ commanded the light to shine out of darkness.”

And is it any other thought which is expressed in these other words of Paul, i i our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, when we look not to the things which are seen, but to the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”1 Paul is speaking of two worlds — the world without and the world within. He says that to any man whose gaze is riveted with admiration on the seen and temporal, such a calamity as overtook him must have been indeed appalling. But to one who has recognised that there is a world behind the visible world, — to one who has arrived at the con viction that there is a spiritual glory which, to the natural heart, is eclipsed by the material form, the vision of his calamity cannot appear as an uncompensated evil. It had in reality worked out for him a glory far greater than that which it took away, had revealed a brighter sunshine than the light which it had put out. It had extinguished the seen and temporal, but in the very act of doing so, it had broken down a wall. The veil of the temple had been rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and through the aperture had appeared the images of a higher life.

We are not, of course, bound to assume that the calamity which overtook Paul remained permanently in its acute stage. The testimony of his epistles,

i 2 Cor. lv. 17, 18.

with their record of laborious work and incessant outward struggle, would suggest an opposite inference. I have spoken of Paul as having passed through an hour of physical crisis, in which he experienced a total eclipse of the outward visible world; I have been led to take this view by the very strong simile he used. But if we regard this hour of crisis as having amounted to a total eclipse, we shall require to adopt the view of the later historian that there came a partial recovery. The tenor of Paul’s epistles is compatible with a man who has a thorn, and is consistent with the notion that his thorn was defective vision, but it is irreconcilable with the belief that he was entirely deprived of sight. The truth is, as we piece together from purely internal sources the features of this picture, as we strive by a combination of the man’s own scattered reminiscences to reconstruct his figure into its probable height and proportions, we are more and more impressed with the likeness which that figure presents to the Paul of historical tradition. We have woven together colours derived from no professed history, but simply from the incidental notices which he gives of himself; and yet, as the result of the whole, we must confess that hitherto the Paul of the Epistles has been identical with the Paul of the Acts. We see the man of the Pharisees animated by an antagonism to the dead Christ, simply on the ground that He was dead, incapable of being made a follower except by the belief that death had to Him been annulled. We see the movement toi 2 Cor. iv. 3, i.

wards persecution arrested midway by what Paul himself terms an act of restraining grace. We see the images of external nature extinguished for him in a stroke of blindness, and on the J)lack canvas left by his privation we see the imprinting of another image, destined to surpass for him the brightness of the sun. We have only to add the supposition that the full weight of the calamity was subsequently lightened, and we shall have reached, by an independent process, a portrait which, in all its essential features, is identical with the old familiar figure of historical tradition.

We have now come to a point in which the historic tradition must for a time desert us. We are approaching that period of Paul’s life in which the record of the Acts becomes almost a total blank, and in which we can have nothing outside of Paul’s own reminiscences with which to compare our picture. We cannot regard this as a disadvantage, because we have all along professed to reconstruct the picture from purely internal sources. Nevertheless, the very fact that we have here lost sight of historical tradition has made the region on which we are entering an almost untrodden field. It is a field which we cannot tread with dogmatic footsteps, nor appropriate with confident claims; we must be content to walk warily, and to speak with reticence. The mine from which we gather is still the same. It is a collection of biographical reminiscences scattered up and down throughout the epistles, yet revealing their richest vein in the letter to the Galatians — reminiscences often incidental, sometimes rather implied than expressed, but always opening up glimpses of perspective, and not seldom suggesting more than they declare. A consideration of this new fielt2 oi study will engage us in the following chapter.