Arabia: Autobiographical Reminiscences (Concluded)

Paul has now arrived at what may be called a state of double consciousness. He has for the first time come into the possession of two natures, and from this time forth the sense of these two natures is continually present to him. His entrance into Christianity was, by his own admission, an entrance into internecine war. His experience as Saul of Tarsus had been an experience remote from struggle; his struggle began with the first presentation of Christianity. I have already said that in the moment of his revelation he was exposed to two opposite influences — an influence which exalted, and an influence which depressed. On the one hand, his first vision of Christ was the vision not of one who was crucified, but of one who, in spite of crucifixion, was alive. His earliest meeting with Christianity was a meeting not with its cross but with its crown. Unlike the first disciples, he began at the top of the hill and was called thence to descend into the valleys. On the other hand, his very sense of

Of. Rom. vii. 9 and sequel.
(60)

Christ’s living power was awakened by a personal humiliation. It came to him by an arrestment of his own will — an arrestment which prostrated him, humbled him, blinded him. The avenue by which he reached the conviction of Christianity’s glory was an avenue of individual pain; its central figure was not a flower but a thorn. Here, then, at one and the same moment there were two opposite impulses in the mind 01 Paul, — the one enlarging, the other depressing; the one opening up boundless prospects, the other rendering the man cribbed, cabined, and confined. Each of these influences must be carefully weighed. We have arrived at a period ot Paul’s life in which the two tendencies were so equally balanced that the man was brought for a few years into a position of equilibrium, in which the motive on either side was so strong that he was unable to decide in what direction he should turn, and was compelled for a space to lie inactive and unoccupied. Let us proceed to consider separately the opposite effects of these conflicting movements.

And let us begin with the effect of Paul’s revelation. I have said that it came to him with the inspiration of a sense of boundlessness. He himself always connects the moment of his conversion to Christianity with the conviction of his having re ceived a call to labour in a missionary field of unprecedented dimensions. In the passage from Galatians i. 16, already quoted, he says, “it pleased God to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles. “l In these words he asserts in

i Cf. Ephes. ill. 8.

the most explicit terms, that his call to be a Christian was, at the same time, his call to be a missionary on a new and a very gigantic scale. No previous apostle, no previous disciple of the Master, had ever, in the initial hour of his discipleship, been privileged to see such a wide field before him. All the predecessors of Paul had believed themselves to be missionaries, but to all of them it was a matter of course that they should begin at Jerusalem. The man of Tarsus alone, the latest comer of all the band, and the disciple who, at his coming, had seen least of the personal life of the Master, had a view of the religious scope and destiny to which the first Christians were strangers. And can any one fail to perceive the reason of the difference? Is it not manifest that Paul’s advantage in this matter came from the very circumstance which was otherwise a disadvantage — the fact that he had not known the personal Christ? It was a great privation to him that he had not lived in the earthly presence of the Master, had not come into contact with the outward and local life of Jesus. Yet it was precisely through this privation that he was enabled to assign to Jesus a wider field of missionary enterprise in the work of the immediate present. Christ had first been revealed to him, not as the man of Galilee, but as the spirit of Olivet. His earliest vision of the Master had been the vision of one circumscribed by no time nor space. To the early disciples the Christ had been born at Bethlehem; to the soul of Paul He was born at Damascus. His sense of His living presence was, from the very outset, the sense of a universal presence. It was associated with no land, it was linked with no atmosphere, it was bound up with no environment. We have Paul’s own words for the assertion that the impression created by the belief in Christ’s resurrection was the vision of one who had risen far above all principalities and powers, and beyond every name which denotes simply a local designation. And as the impression of the risen Christ was the earliest sense Paul had of His presence, we can readily see why to him the hour of revelation was the hour of a missionary call. In the very sight of One whose theatre was the universe, and whose empire was unlimited by earthly boundaries, the apostle recognised the obligation to go and teach all nations. In the very sense that he was in the presence of a Being who had risen above local distinctions, there came to his mind the conviction that in the field of missionary labour local distinctions must lose their power.

I shall hereafter show that in the mind of Paul this sense of a universal missionary obligation by no means presented itself as a revolt from the Old Testament; that, on the contrary, his original ideal of a Christian missionary was based purely upon a Hebrew type of thought. In the meantime, how ever, I wish to direct attention to the fact that, from the very outset of his Christian experience, he was impressed with the greatness of his privilege in comparison with his predecessors and contemporaries. There is a very striking passage which seems to me to express, in the most direct terms,

i Ephes. 1. 20, 21.

Paul’s conviction of having a unique and original position. Speaking of the appearances of the risen Christ, he says, l i last of all He was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.” * What is the meaning of the expression, ’ l one born out of due time “? There are two possible ways in which a man may be born out of due time; he may come into the world too soon, or he may come into the world too late. Which is Paul’s case? So far as I know, the universal interpretation has been hitherto in favour of the latter view. Paul is popularly supposed to be uttering a complaint that he had not been privileged to behold the earliest dawn, — that his had not been the joy of looking upon the earthly face of the Master; he had been born too late for that. And yet, is it not evident, from Paul’s own writings, that he himself would have repudiated such an interpretation? He would have denied the truth of the statement on which it is based. He is never weary of insisting on the perfect equality of privilege between his vision of the risen Christ and that vision of the Christ which the first disciples beheld. It is precisely on this ground that he claims an equal apostleship, and asserts his right to exert the same authority. Moreover, if the Greek word be pressed out to its legitimate meaning, it will bear no other sense than that of” one born too soon.” The figure is that of a premature birth. It seeks to describe one who has come into the world at a stage earlier than his legitimate time. The truth is, so far is Paul from looking upon himself as behind the age, that he is impressed, beyond all things, with that sense of solitude which comes from being advanced beyond one’s day. He feels himself to be an anachronism, not on the ground of being in the rear, but on the ground of being in the van. His first vision of the Master has been an altogether different vision from that which greeted the eyes of his contemporaries. He has seen the Christ, not as a local personality, not as a historical man environed by a particular age and circumscribed by a special soil, but as a life risen above all principalities and powers and transcending all temporal conditions. And the effect of that vision has been to widen his own view of the missionary field; it has been to him equivalent to a Gentile call. Can we fail to see how such a perception must have been to Paul, itself a sense of solitude? He felt that he had been privileged to see what others had not seen, what others even yet did not believe. The final apparition of the Son of man had placed him out side the gates of Judaism — not indeed as yet very far beyond them, as we shall hereafter see, nevertheless clearly and distinctively on the other side. He felt that he was standing in advance of his fellows, on a plain which hitherto had been unfrequented, and where he found himself alone. He had been called to a solitary privilege — the privilege of recognising the fact that the Gentile was equal to the Jew; and he expressed at once the dignity and the loneliness of the position by declaring that Christ had been revealed to him as to l ’ one born out of due time.”

Why, then, does not Paul rush instantaneously to the fulfilment of his mission? He has received a revelation that Christianity is a religion for man as man; why does he not hasten to proclaim his discovery? He has recognised the truth that the Gentile has an equal right with the Jew; why does he not forthwith become the apostle of the Gentile? That he does not do so is transparent on the very surface of the narrative. The very obscurity that hangs over this part of his life is a proof that during this period his life had undergone a temporary relapse. Instead of the moment of Christian conviction being followed instantaneously by a career of Christian action, we are confronted by a spectacle which appears, at first sight, like a falling asleep again. The man introduced to our notice as a percipient of Christ’s exaltation is almost immediately afterwards utterly withdrawn from view. We see him on the Jewish bank of the river as a defender of the old world; we see him on the Christian bank as a promised defender of the new; but almost the next instant he disappears from both banks. We seek him and he is not found, or at least is only found as the result of his own confession. If Paul had not himself told us where he was during this interval, we never should have gathered it from history. The man has in the meantime degenerated into a cipher, and the course which promised to be a triumphal march has been arrested by an hour of lethargy. How are we to explain this anomaly of human nature?

The reason in plain language is simply this, Paul was not ready for his destiny. He recognised it clearly, at least he recognised what it ought to be, but he experienced the same sense of diffidence which had characterised the call of his ancestor Moses. For this brings us to consider the second of those influences which at this period acted on the apostle’s mind. We have seen that his first vision of the Messiah was the vision of an exalted Christ, and that to this extent the moment of his conscious conversion was a moment of spiritual elevation. But from another side it was also a moment of depression; the vision had come to him through an outward cloud, — the light had shone “out of darkness.” He had purchased his recognition of Christ by the experience of a physical thorn — a thorn which had come to him as a process of crucifixion. But Paul himself declares that there are two kinds or degrees of crucifixion; the world may be crucified to me, or, I may be crucified to the world. He says, in a passage which I think certainly autobiographical, * that he himself has passed in succession through each of these. He did not all at once reach the stage of being crucified to the world, — of having his heart resigned to the calamity which had befallen him. His original experience was simply that of having the world crucified to him, of being conscious of a sense of loss and deprivation. There was a time, he tells us, in which his attitude under the chastening hand of God was merely a passive attitude; he bowed beneath it, but he did not acquiesce in it. It brought to him a feeling of numbi Gal. vi. 14.

ness, a sense of utter prostration. The old man within him was dead, but the new man was not yet alive; Egypt had been torn from his sight, but Canaan had not yet appeared. His was no abnormal experience; there is not a spiritual mind which has not passed through it. There is all the difference in the world between a passive and an active resignation, between a mind that is dumb and unmurmuring, and a mind that is acquiescent and alive. It is one thing to accept a thorn as some thing which comes from a mysterious and incom prehensible Will; it is another thing to accept it, and to wear it as a flower. The former state is the condition in which the world is crucified to us; the latter is the condition in which we are crucified to the world. Paul was as yet only in the first state. He had received his calamity, and he was dumb before its presence, but he had not yet accepted his calamity as a possible road to glory. That stage awaited him in the future, but the time was not yet; he was for the present simply in the position of one who is astounded and paralysed.

Does it seem strange to us that a man like Paul should have been in this position? Does it seem unworthy of his moral greatness, that even for a moment he should have bent beneath the weight of a physical thorn? It would undoubtedly have been so if Paul had been a Gentile. But Paul was a Jew, and he was none the less a Jew because he had become a Christian. To the mind of a Jew physical calamity was inseparable from moral delinquency. What Paul said, at an after date, of death, he would have said now of his physical thorn: its sting to him was sin. I do not indeed believe that at this period his conscience had awakened to the full sense of the struggle between the old life and the new; it is only through the ripeness of the new life that the barrenness of the old can be discerned. But although the conscience of the man was as yet comparatively dormant, the conscience of the missionary was already on fire. Let us remember what it was to be a missionary, or, as men then called it, an apostle. It was to join the order of a new priesthood. Now it was of the very essence of the Jewish religion that a priesthood should be physically unblemished; any defect in the corporeal frame was an immediate disqualification for such a ministry. It was no admiration of Greek symmetry which led the son of Israel to such a conclusion: Greek symmetry was the furthest thing in the world from his sympathy and from his heart. His abhorrence of corporeal blemish came from his abhorrence of mental defect. It was because to him the body and the soul were one man that in any blemish of the body he beheld a blemish of the moral nature. He desired that the priests and ministers of his religion should be free from outward stain, simply and entirely from his conviction that the presence of an outward stain implied the presence of an inward deformity; and he valued the spotlessness of matter because he believed it to be an index of the spotlessness of mind. Now Paul had no doubt in his own heart that his physical thorn was the result of a moral defor-TO Spiritual Development of St. Paul.

mity. However much in after-years he recognised it as a grace, it had come to him in the meantime as a barrier to the progress of his life. It had pre sented itself to him as an arrest of his own will, — a prohibitory fence which said, l i hitherto shalt thou go, and no further.” It had marked him out as an object of Divine reprobation; it had revealed him to the world as one who bore in his own body the sign of God’s displeasure. Under these circumstances, what right had he to be a missionary? There had come to him, through his intellectual nature, a wider and grander view of the immediate destiny of Christianity than had ever been possessed by the eye of mortal man; but was it to him any thing more than that vision from the top of Nebo which his ancestor had been permitted to see, but in whose realisation he was not allowed to share? There had been revealed to him a new gospel, or rather that hidden wisdom which had slept eternally in the old; but how could he, with a blemished, tarnished name, presume to be the prophet of this evangel? Did he not carry in his own person the credentials of failure? did he not bear in his physical weakness the proof that his mission was not real?

And so Paul, like Jonah, fled from his destiny. He felt himself inadequate to meet the weight of responsibility that lay before him. The revelation was clear and unequivocal, but he was evidently not prepared for it. Instead of rushing forward to the prefigured goal, he shrank backward into himself. His first impulse was towards asceticism. By an irresistible instinct he ran into solitude;” when it

Arabia: Autobiographical Reminiscences, tl

pleased God,” he says, “to reveal His Son in me, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood.”1 Writing of the event at a far future day, Paul looks back upon it with a feeling of congratulation; it seems to him that his isolation from the face of his fellow-man had furnished the strongest proof of the originality of his own teaching. So doubtless it had; but that was not Paul’s motive for the asceticism. He was not thinking at the time whether he would or would not be esteemed an original teacher; he was trying to postpone the contingency of being a teacher at all. He felt himself depressed by the weight of a great physical calamity, which was to him a moral weight. He felt himself debarred by a thorn, which had come to him as the penalty of past transgression, and he refused, in the meantime, to force his way through the barrier. He fled from the vision of his destiny that he might survey the vision of his own soul.

Whither, then, was he to go? There is a congruity between the mind of the traveller and the scenes which he naturally seeks. What was the natural scene for Paul under these circumstances? When a man is intent upon the earthly memories of the home of Jesus, he goes to Palestine; where should a man go whose mind is continually dwelling on the memories of Mount Sinai? Clearly to Arabia. Accordingly, we are not surprised when, in the very next sentence of this autobiography, we read the result of this depressing tendency of an overwhelming past, “I went into Arabia.”2 He

i Gal. i. 16. z Gal. i. 17.

T2 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.

went into Arabia because Arabia was already in his heart. He sought to realise, in outward vision, that experience which was present to his soul. If asked to speak more definitely, we should say that he went into Arabia with the hope of expiating his past. He thought that if he could stand in the presence of that awful mountain whose blackness and lightning and tempest had witnessed in days of old the promulgation of the Divine law, that if in that presence he could realise more intensely and feel more bitterly the weight of his own nothingness, there might come to him, as to the prophetess Miriam, a forgiveness of his sin and a removal of his thorn. There was a hope in his heart that, if he could humble himself sufficiently beneath the mighty power of God, the burden of that calamity might be lifted which stood in the meantime as a barrier between himself and his missionary destiny. The burden of the calamity was not what it was, but what it indicated; its sting was sin. Only by a process of Divine reconciliation, only by a penance which could merit Divine forgiveness, did the future apostle of the Gentiles hope to achieve deliverance from nis thorn. That this desire to win forgiveness by personal expiation lay at the root of Paul’s visit to Arabia, is evident to me from the fact that his earlies.t recorded struggle is one which begins almost immediately after his conversion. I shall call this the Arabian struggle, to distinguish it from subsequent moral conflicts. It is to the Arabian period of Paul’s life that I assign the first of these three great strains of mental agony which he has expressed in the words, 1 1 for this thing I besought the Lord thrice that it might depart from me.” I have called it a strain of mental agony, because he himself, in looking back, virtually calls it a stage of his Gethsemane. No man can read the passage without seeing that, at the time when he is recording his three struggles, he has in his mind the scene of the garden. Not that he thought of this when he was passing through this first struggle. I do not believe Gethsemane was yet in his mind. He had begun not with the Christ of the cross, but with the Christ of the crown. His first acquaintance with the Son of man had not been as the crucified, but as the exalted One. His earliest vision of Him had been the vision of His resurrection, of His immortality, of His superiority to the limits of space and time; his missionary call itself had been founded upon that vision. His communion with the cross came later, and will be considered in its due place. But the point for us to observe in the meantime is how great must have been the agony of a struggle the memory of which, long years after, could suggest to Paul’s mind one of the trials in Gethsemane. If, even at that late day, he could use such a simile to describe it, how severe must have been the pain at the actual time of the occurrence! It is not every event which burns itself into the soul in such a way as to be reproduced in middle life with undiminished pain. The Arabian struggle was such an event; it was Paul’s first Christian pain, and first pain is ever the severest. It was the struggle of a soul to emancipate itself, by an act of personal expiation, from the effects of a moral past which had left its impress upon his physical frame. Into the nature of that conflict we are not permitted to gaze; history is silent upon its record, and his own confession has alone revealed it. Doubtless it was a time of watching and fasting, perhaps of those very watchings and fastings which at a future day he catalogued amongst his labours. Earning his bread by making tents for the Bedouins, he probably took little bread, and dwelt beneath few tabernacles. In many vigils under the open sky, in many hours of

prayer amid the storm and rain, in continual self-mortification, in the constant effort to realise his own humility and nothingness, — above all, in the daily crucifixion of that flesh which, because it was the seat of his thorn, had become the memorial of his corruption, he sought to earn the removal of his penalty, and to obtain a liberation from the days of old.

And the result was failure; that, too, helped to render permanently vivid the memory of his pain. A man’s first failure is burned more intensely into his ‘soul than his first success. Paul’s earliest ex perience of Christianity was an experience of defeat — of effort futile, of prayer unanswered. How dp we know that his first effort was futile? The reason for the assertion is well worth considering. When we read the Epistles to the Galatians and to the Romans, we find that, from beginning to end, their burden consists in ringing the -changes on one

Arabia: Autobiographical Reminiscences. T5

thought — the impossibility of being justified by law. Where did Paul get that thought? We commonly think of it as a mere dogma or doctrine of his theology. Be it so; but let us remember, at least, that it was a dogma new to the religious world, and discovered for the first time by Paul himself. Where did Paul discover it? If we were asked where Timothy or Titus discovered it, we would have no difficulty in finding for it, in their case, a purely dogmatic origin; we should say at once that they had derived it from Paul. But whence did Paul derive it? Not from his ancestors; it was contrary to the spirit of his ancestors, — it was the very thought which separated him from the home of his nativity. Is it not clear that it was to him an independent personal experience? However much in after-years it crystallised into a dogma, it was at the beginning a fact of the life. It was not by dogma that Paul arrived at it; he arrived at it by stern practical discipline. I have often remarked that nowhere does he use the singular number so frequently as in referring to the struggle to justify one’s self by the claims of law. i ‘The law of the spirit of life hath made me free from the law of sin and death; ““there is a law in my members warring against the law of my mind;” “0 wretched man that / am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?” Why is this? Is it not because Paul had learned the uselessness of legal penance not from any mere traditional dogma, but from an ex perience of living pain? It was to him not a precept but a memory. It was the memory of that

Arabian struggle in which, for the first time, there strove together in his heart the old life and the new. It was the memory of a struggle in which he had sought by vigils, by fastings, by daily and hourly humiliations, to wash out the dark stain from the record of his past, and to purchase by forgiveness a liberation from its penal thorn. Above all, it was the memory of a struggle in which he had reaped nothing but weariness, in which his vigils had been vain, his fastings powerless, his humiliations abortive, and which, at the end of the day, left him in possession of his weakness still.

Does Paul now return from Arabia? His experiment at the foot of JMount Sinai has been a failure; does he abandon the search in this direction? Not so; the hour of his failure is but the beginning of a new epoch. If I have rightly interpreted the mental reminiscences revealed in his epistles, there are two periods in his Arabian struggle — the period of Mount Sinai, and what may be called the period of the Sinaitic desert. The period of Mount Sinai was the time of abortive penance, the season in which he stood under the shadow of an avenging law, and failed to find rest from its shadow. But just at this moment there came into the mind of Paul a thought which changed the current of his whole after-life. This law, beneath whose majesty he cowered, had only begun with Mount Sinai; what had been the guide of his countrymen before reaching that mountain? That they had possessed a guide and a powerful one, was beyond all question. What had led them within the precincts of Arabia?

What had conducted them beyond the bondage of Egypt? What had been their sustaining power in the patriarchal days before Egypt? The law had not then been given; Mount Sinai was still in visible; the thunderings and the lightnings were as yet unheard. What was in these days the substitute for law? Paul asked the question, and from the Jewish scriptures themselves he received a very surprising answer. They told him that before the days of law there had been days of promise, that previous to the deterring by threats there had been the attracting by rewards. So far was Mount Sinai from being the origin of Jewish worship, it was a mark of the decline of that worship. The giving of the law was an indication, not of spiritual strength, but of spiritual declension; law was * l the child of the bondwoman.” * The true freedom of the Jewish nation had from the beginning lain not in law but in faith, in the prophetic belief of the coming mercies of God. Not Moses but Abraham had been the founder of the Hebrew commonwealth, and the justification of Abraham had been a justification by faith.2 Might not he (Paul) go back to that stand point? Was it necessary that, in becoming a Christian, he should cease to be a Jew? He must, indeed, cease to be a legalist; but was there not a national life behind legalism? was not Abraham older than the law? and was not Abraham justified by faith? Why should he not go back to Abraham? why should not the whole nation go back to Abraham? The law was an excrescence, an after-growth, an

i See Gal. iv. 22, and sequel. 2 See Romans Iv. 16, and sequel.

accommodation to passing needs; the original thing was the promised mercy and the faith in that mercy. Would not the return to this primitive standpoint, instead of being an innovation, be in reality a conservative movement, in which his country would purchase national freedom by retracing her steps into the golden past?

And Paul did go back. His conflict under the shadow of Mount Sinai was the crisis hour between the old life and the new. At the close of that hour he was already loosed from the bonds of Mosaism. But in being loosed from Mosaism he did not all at once pass into Gentilism. There was an intermediate stage between the followers of Moses and the sons of the Gentiles; it was the stage of the children of Abraham. Paul’s first Christianity after leaving Mount Sinai, was a Christianity which had indeed ceased to be Judaic, but only by becoming Hebraic. It was still grounded on the Old Testament, only it was on the Old Testament in its patriarchal age. He accepted justification by faith, instead of justification by law, but his faith was as yet only the faith of Abraham. It was not yet a receptive faculty by which he had communion with Christ; it was simply a prophetic belief in the promised mercy of God through Christ. He said to himself, ‘May not God’s strength be perfected in my weakness? He has called me to be a missionary, and, morally, I am unfit to be a missionary. I bear about in my body the penalty of a great transgression, and this is itself sufficient to constitute my failure. But was not Abraham himself called to be a missionary when he was physically inadequate? Did not the glory of his call simply consist in this, that he could only accept it through faith in God’s almighty power? Why should not mine be a similar experience? Why should not God’s power to me be manifested in bear ing my moral weakness, just as it was manifested to Abraham in bearing his physical weakness? If, in spite of his thorn, God made him the instrument in the construction of a great spiritual dominion, why should not His glory be magnified by making me, in spite of my thorn, an instrument in the construction of the kingdom of Christ?’

Such I believe to have been Paul’s thought — the thought which marked the conclusion of his Arabian struggle. Nay, I believe it was even more pointed than this. I think it was at this stage that there entered into his mind an idea which moulded largely his whole after-life. Might not the strength of God be manifested in his weakness not merely negatively but positively, not simply in spite of his thorn, but through his thorn? Might he not cherish the faith that the mercy of God in Christ would not merely forgive his past, but atone for his past? Might not the Divine power reveal itself, just by lifting up his own dark deeds into the spiritual order of events, by transmuting his crosses into gold? He had left on the wayside impediments to the development of the gospel; why should not Divine grace manifest itself by transforming these impediments into the steps of an ascending ladder? Was it not conceivable that, in the plan and purpose of the Highest, his past bad actions should be made to work together for good?

They were bad before leaving his hands, but the moment they left his hands, were they not part of God’s universe? Had they not ceased to be his after he had done them? How could these deeds of his exist in eternal dualism with the works and ways of God? Must not they too be gathered into the Divine mosaic?

What relation in the mind of Paul this hope had to the person of Christ is a question which I shall consider in the next chapter. In the meantime I am simply emphasising the fact that it was a hope, and the first personal hope which Paul had experienced in his new life. The vision of the risen* Messiah had revealed to him the prospect of the Christian kingdom; here for the first time he re ceived a prospect for himself. I do not say he had reached the stage of crucifixion to the world which he afterwards attained; that stage is only perfected when a man enters into a new freedom. As yet Paul did not feel free; his only safety lay in an absolute and implicit surrender of his own will to the power of the Highest. His personal life was rather overshadowed and controlled than strengthened and invigorated by its contact with the Divine. Nevertheless, if his strength as a man had not yet come, his strength as a missionary had. That strength was displayed in what may be called his incipient Calvinism — his determination to put the will of God in the foreground, and his own will in the back ground. Rising up from his Arabian struggle, he prepares to prosecute his missionary calling, and it is a very remarkable fact that he seeks to prosecute that calling precisely in those places to which his nature is most repugnant. As we read his autobiographical narrative of the events which followed the Arabian sojourn, we cannot fail to be impressed with the conviction that Paul successively chooses for evangelistic enterprise precisely those three districts where he did not wish to go. His immediate transition is back to Damascus. * It was a voluntary choice of humiliation — a crucifixion of the natural man. Damascus had been the scene of his prostration — the scene in which his old life had been humbled by the arrestive grace of God; it required Calvinistic courage to begin there. There was a stern justice in the criminal being led back to the scene of his crime, that on the very spot he might undo it — a justice which Paul appreciated, and which, doubtless, dictated his first missionary course. He felt it incumbent on him to bear the heat he had himself created, — to experience the first torture of that fire which he had been the means of kindling. Damascus was the fitting beginning for such a life as Paul’s, the just commencement for a heart weighed down with a remorseful past, and struggling by word and deed to have that past undone.

And so Paul goes to Damascus, and begins there to preach that faith which he had formerly sought to destroy. By-and-by Damascus casts him out2 — a strong testimony to the intensity of his preaching. The next time the curtain rises there is a change of scene — he has passed from Damascus into Jerusalem.8 It is a second and a deeper humiliation. If Damas-

* Gal. 1. 17. 2 2 cor. xi. 32, 38. Gal. i. 18.

cus had been the scene of his crime, Jerusalem had been the scene of his dignity. It was associated with the memories of his Jewish greatness, of that greatness which had come to him from his support of the national faith. It recalled the days when he had been a Pharisee of the Pharisees, a leader of the patriotic instincts of his country. It was a hard thing to go back there — to go back as a representative of that very party whom he had gained his reputation by decrying. A spirit of self-calculation would have prompted Paul to have delayed such a missionary journey until he had made a new reputation to counterbalance the loss of the old. But the very difficulty of the situation was Paul’s motive for accepting it. Its attractiveness was its humiliation. He placed Jerusalem in the foreground, just that he might taste the full penalty of his past. He went there in the days of his deepest contrast with his former self, just that the outward humiliation of the contrast might be apparent to his Jewish brethren. It was an act of social expiation, and as such it was courted, not shunned.

Then the curtain falls once more, and when it rises again we are in yet another scene. Jerusalem has faded from our view, and we are standing with Paul in the province of Cilicia. It is the deepest humiliation of all. If Damascus was the scene of his crime, if Jerusalem was the scene of his dignity, Cilicia, according to universal tradition, was the scene of his nativity. Here had been his home-life; here had been passed the days of his early development; here had been formed and ventilated those opinions of Jewish exclusiveness which had characterised his after-career. The opinions of youth are ever expressed with the greatest vehemence, and it is of all things the most difficult to confess that these have been wrong. Paul had left Cilicia burning with the zeal of his first convictions, and conscious that these convictions were a matter of notoriety to the companions of his home-life. It was a hard thing, a humiliating thing, to come back after a few years and tell these companions not only that his convictions were burnt out, but that they had been replaced by contrary fires. It was a hard thing to be pointed at as an instance of mental instability, as one who had falsified the expectations of his youth, and reversed the estimate which the comrades of his youth had formed. It was the hardness of the trial that prompted Paul to seek it. He owed this humiliation to a past which called for atonement, and he was eager to prostrate his old life before the feet of infinite justice.

Such is the framework of the first period of Paul’s Christian history; but it is only the framework. What is the picture? We see the man moving successively through the missionary spheres of Damascus, Jerusalem, and Cilicia: what is, during this time, the character of the man himself? What is the nature of that first gospel which marks the opening of his missionary career? What is his mental attitude towards the old faith in his earliest experience of the new? We have seen that the moment of his conversion was not immediately accompanied by a sense of moral courage; still less should we expect that it would be accompanied by a fulness of intellectual inspiration. The translation of Paul into Christianity was the translation into a new order of thought; but here, as everywhere else, the stage of initiation must precede the stage of completion. What was Paul’s stage of intellectual initiation? What was the earliest form in which the objects of Christian thought presented them selves to his gaze, and what was that process of education by which he first arrived at a knowledge of these forms? These are questions which I shall endeavour to answer in the next chapter.