Development of Paul's Religious Views

There is a strong analogy between the physical anl the spiritual nature of man. No change can take place in any part of an outward organism without producing a change in every part of that organism. Even so is it in the world of mind. The entrance of a single new idea might be thought to be a very small thing. In reality, however, it is impossible that any single idea can enter the mind without producing a change in every department of thought. The casting of a stone into the water is in itself a merely local occurrence, but its effect is unlimited; it sets in motion circles without end. Even so, the birth of a thought has issues far beyond itself; it wakens eddies which stir all the depths of the spirit and pulsate through every pore of the man’s mental being.

We have seen that in the mind of Paul there was born a new thought. We have seen that his tjiird spiritual struggle had been closed by his awakening to the conviction that he himself had already passed beyond the reach of his earthly cares. He had come to learn something of the luxuries of death without its pains. He had been lifted on this side the grave into an atmosphere above the earth, from which he looked down upon his former self and saw all things changed. It was impossible, indeed, that such a change in his own standpoint could take place with out modifying his view of the whole past. How radical was the transformation he himself declares by describing himself as a new creature to whom old things had passed away. Nevertheless, as we have said, the change in Paul’s view is not to be looked for in the direction of revolution. It was not a development by revolt but by supplement. Things were made new to him not by a destruction of the past, but by a vision of the past from the height of a higher hill. The landscape wears a different aspect from different positions. Paul had reached a radically new position, and his landscape was renewed. The old forms were there, the old substances were there, the old groupings were there; but there was a light playing upon them which did not play before, and the effect of that light was to make all things new.

Let us now go on to see in what respects this new light was likely to modify, and actually did modify, Paul’s previous system of thought. What was likely to be the first direction in which the change in Paul’s mental attitude should begin to manifest its effect? Clearly, its earliest influence would be exhibited in supplementing his view of the doctrine of resurrection. I do not say that in every case such would have been the first result, but in Paul’s case it not only was so but could not have been otherwise. We have already indicated that Paul was pre-eminently and essentially the apostle of the resurrection. He was distinguished from all the other primitive disciples in this, that he alone came to the knowledge of Christ after the visible form of Christ had passed away. His earliest association with the Master had been the association with one who had triumphed over death. He had not even been drawn to Him by any human traditions of His earthly life and ministry: these all came to him subsequently. His first sight had been the sight of the unearthly Christ, of the Christ who had been great in spite of earth. It is not surprising, therefore, that the earliest note of Paul’s gospel should have been the note of resurrection. That it was the earliest note of his gospel is abundantly evident from his epistles to the Thessalonians, where from beginning to end the mind of the reader is made to centre on the hope of the coming Lord and the accompanying transformation of all things. But the point for us to observe is the fact that in the epistles to the Thessalonians this is still only a hope. The resurrection from death, the abolition of the old system, the translation of the soul into a higher life, is as yet with Paul merely something which is to come, an event which is to be consummated at the end of the days. But with the close of what I have called the Galatian struggle there comes a change of thought. At the close of that struggle we have found Paul permeated by a new consciousness — the sense of being actually and at this moment in union with Christ. The effect of such a consciousness upon the old belief in resurrection was inevitable. It was not destructive but reconstructive; it brought the idea from the future into the present. The resurrection from the dead ceased to be regarded as a mere event; it came to be viewed as a process — a process whose consummation was, indeed, in other worlds, but whose beginning and development were here. If Paul had already been translated into the life of Christ, if his own consciousness told him that he had passed even now beyond the bounds of death, was it not clear that henceforth the idea of resurrection must itself change its aspect, that the rising from the dead must here after be regarded, not as a mere catastrophe taking place at the end of all things, but as a process of upward development, whose beginnings are in the world below and whose consummation alone is in the world above?

And this view of the subject clearly appears in that remarkable passage of St. Paul’s epistles which, more than any other, represents his doctrine of resurrection — the fifteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians. Let us look for a moment at that verse, which is the nucleus of the whole passage, “So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: it is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” * There are two questions which arise in connection with these words, — What is that which is sown? and What is the nature of the sowing? To each of these we would briefly advert.

And first, when Paul says, “It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: “of what is he speaking? What is the “it”? Most people will answer spontaneously, ’ l The human body, of course. “And yet, the context of the passage does not grammatically bear out this view. The subject of the sentence is not the body but the resurrection itself, “so is the resurrection of the dead.” Paul is not speaking of the gradations through which the body passes, but of the gradations through which the resurrection passes. He wants to emphasise his be lief that the resurrection is itself a process in which the incipient stage is sowing and the final stage reaping, in which the beginning is weakness and the consummation power, in which the opening scenes are in dishonour and the ultimate sights in glory. This is unmistakably his meaning, and it is in strict harmony with the whole previous context. In that context he has been labouring to show that the quickening of the seed is, even in physical nature, not an act but a process. A necessary part of the seed’s development is that stage of dishonour which marks its incorporation with the soil. Its resurrection begins, not with that morning in which it appears in fruit or flower, but with the day in which it is laid beneath the ground: its burial is the first step in its rising. Paul says that in this respect the resurrection of the human spirit bears a striking analogy to that of the physical seed. To the human spirit as to the physical seed, there comes a time of fruit and flower, a morning in which old things have passed away and all things are made new. But with the spirit, as with the seed, this is not the beginning but the end of resurrection. Here, too, we behold, not a sudden catastrophe, but only the last stage of a great process of development whose earliest stage was underground. The spirit, like the seed, had to climb a ladder of resurrection — a ladder whose summit, indeed, was in the heavens, but whose base was planted underneath the earth. The birth of the risen life was not in the world above but in the world below.

It may be asked why we should speak of the first stage of resurrection as a stage of the human spirit; why not regard it as having found its inauguration in the planting of the body within the ground? The answer to this question is really the answer to the second of those inquiries involved in this passage of St. Paul. If the first question is, “What is that which is sown?” the second is, “What is the nature of the sowing?” The popular view is, that when Paul says, “it is sown in corruption,” he is speaking of the process of burial, is alluding to the humiliation of that moment in which the once vigorous human body is sent to mingle with the dust. A little reflection will convince us that this is not Paul’s meaning. We in modern times are so familiar with the disposal of the dead by interment, that we forget how comparatively rare was this practice in the ancient world. We forget that cremation, and not burial, was the mode of sepulture most widely prevalent in the thought of those lands out side of Judea. We must remember that the epistle in which the reference occurs was written to the

Church of Corinth — a city in the very heart of Gen tiles, and permeated by Gentile associations. Is it conceivable that, when Paul wished to describe to them the humiliating nature of that first stage in which resurrection had its birth, he should have adopted a metaphor which, however familiar to the modern ear, was to those to whom he was speaking an association of ideas unknown in fact?

We conclude, then, that when Paul speaks of the seed being sown in corruption, he is not alluding to the modern practice of interring the body in the ground. He is not, in fact, alluding to the body at all. He is speaking of the principle of Divine life. He is trying to emphasise his belief that the life of Christ in the soul has its beginnings in great humility. He means to say that this life, instead of waiting for the purification of the natural man, descends into the natural man in his present unpurified condition. It does not tarry until the house has been emptied, swept, and garnished; it comes down into the house while it is yet full of corruption, uncleansed, unbeautified. It comes as the light comes into the physical world. It rises in a special corner of the soul while all other corners are as yet in night. The hour in which the Divine life first enters into the heart of man is precisely that hour in which the heart of man is in its deepest and darkest gloom. The seed which is sown in it is doubtless a principle of vitality, but it is a principle of vitality which has emptied itself into humiliation, which has condescended to dwell amid conditions that are foreign to its own nature and natural barriers to its own

Development of Pan Ts Eeligivus Views. 159

development. It has done in the soul what the Son of man did in the world, — poured out its native glory and assumed a servant’s form.

Such is here Paul’s view of that great process of resurrection which was at one time regarded by him as a mere sudden catastrophe taking place at the end of all things. What led him to change his thought was his consciousness of a change in himself. He felt that there had come into him a new life — that very life of which he had been dreaming in his epistles to the Thessalonians. He felt that it had come to him without waiting for his purification, that it had descended upon him while yet he was encompassed by the frailty of the flesh, that it had been sown in corruption, in weakness, in dishonour. And because he felt this in himself, he felt it to be a possibility for all men. The resurrection from the dead ceased any more to be to him a mere final catastrophe; it became a part of human life itself. It came to be regarded as a great process of development — a process which has its beginnings amid the miry clay of earth, and which finds its initial movement amid the things which are seen and temporal. It was by him to be looked upon henceforth not as something whose coming would follow the dissolution of body and soul, but as a life whose advent would begin while the soul was yet in the body, and which would enable a man, even in the presence of worldly forms, to feel that he had passed already 11 from death unto life.”

I come now to the second of those phases of thought in which Paul’s new experience exercised a modifying influence upon his former opinions. If the first and immediate change was that produced upon his view of resurrection, the second was that effected upon his view of revelation. It would perhaps be more correct to say that Paul’s sense of personal elevation into the Divine life for the first time developed the idea of revelation. The first idea of every religion is not that of revelation but of inspiration. When the question first occurred to the mind of man, 1 1 How can God commune with the human soul?” the answer which immediately suggested itself was that of a communication from with out. Some thought of God as speaking audibly in the thunder-cloud and in the other voices of nature. Some thought of Him as sending messages to the soul through the ministry of angels. Some conceived Him as making His will known by a dream or a vision. Some figured Him as creating within the heart a state of ecstatic rhapsody which, for the time, made the man cease to be human, and caused him to become a mere passive organ of the Divine will. This last form is the idea of inspiration proper, and constitutes the earliest mode of prophetic illumination. The man is lifted out of himself, raised beyond his own consciousness, and deprived of his individual personality. He is made, for the time being, a breath of the Infinite Mind, and is compelled to become the recipient of a message which he does not understand. But this inspiration is the opposite of revelation. It is distinctly different from a communication between the Divine and the human; it is the sublimation of the human into the Divine. It is really an

Development of PauT s Religious Views. 161

erasure of the individual life of the creature. It is not a mode whereby the thoughts of God are made the thoughts of man; it is a device by which the thoughts of man are annulled and God becomes all in all. Revelation is precisely the reverse of this. Instead of being a depression, it is an elevation of the human. Instead of being an annihilation of the creature to make room for the Creator, it is a lifting up of the creature to a spiritual level with the Creator. However startling the assertion may sound, it is literally true. No mind can reveal itself to another mind unless they meet on a common bridge. The point in which you reveal yourself to me is not the point in which you are my superior, but the point in which you are my equal. It is through a community of experience that I receive the revelation. It is precisely because I have found a spot in which my mind is not different from yours, precisely because I have experienced a feeling which corresponds and responds to the feeling of your heart, that I am able to recognise in your words a revelation to my soul.

Now, I have said that to Paul belongs the pre eminence of having first passed over the boundary-line that divides inspiration from -revelation. In him for the first time we find a disparagement of supernatural gifts in comparison with habitual attitudes of mind. Very strikingly is this evinced in the thirteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians. He here declares, in language which to his contemporaries must have appeared very bold, that though he could speak with the tongues of angels, though he had faith that could remove mountains, though he had knowledge that could understand all mysteries, it would profit him nothing without the possession of love. He declares that love is distinguished from the other gifts of God precisely by the fact that it is not supernatural, that it is something which “abidcth.” The possession of prophetic powers, the possession of mystical knowledge, the possession of supernatural tongues, is but a transitory thing, and it is transitory precisely because it is a state of ecstacy in which the man is lifted out of himself and made a passive organ; the moment he returns to his humanity he loses his inspiration. But love is a state of permanent equality between the man and his object. It is a condition which can only exist where there exists already a bridge of connection between two minds. It is founded upon the possession of a common quality. It is built upon the fact that one being is already in sympathy with another. No being can be in sympathy with another unless on the ground of equality: they can only meet in love where they have already met in nature. And therefore it is that in one of his later epistles Paul insists on a community of nature as a preliminary condition to any revelation between God and man. He says that the love of God is beyond the knowledge of every man who has not himself already been * rooted and grounded in love,” that it is only by the possession of this kindred mental state that one is able to comprehend the Divine nature in its fulness. The thought is very

i Eph. ill. 17-19.

close to the standpoint of the fourth Gospel. Paul, like John, sees in love the very nature of God — the length and the breadth, the height and the depth of His being. Like John also he sees that, to comprehend this love, a man must himself be loving, that, to catch a beatific vision of the Divine life, he must already be partaker in his own heart of that which constitutes the essence of Divinity. The latest utterance of the Christian consciousness is here but a re-echo of the Gospel’s initial word, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.”

And this explains the meaning of one of the most remarkable passages in Paul’s epistles — the second chapter of 1st Corinthians. The idea of that chapter clearly is that a man can only understand God by being already recipient of the life of God. The thought is strikingly brought out in verse 11, “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.” What Paul says is this: In the human world none but a man can know a man. A dog cannot know a man; it can see, and even imitate his outward actions, but it cannot know himself. Even so, in the spiritual world none but God can know God. The recognition of the Divine demands the possession of Divinity, or, which is the same thing, necessitates a participation in the Spirit of God. In order to understand a description of any earthly object it is necessary that the object in some form should have already passed through our experience; the eye must have seen it, or the ear must have heard it, or the heart must have conceived it. If the object has been foreign to the soul, it can never be revealed to the soul until a faculty has been created whereby it can be imagined. So is it with the spiritual world. Originally, it is foreign to the natural mind; eye has not seen it, ear has not heard it, and therefore the imagination cannot reproduce it — heart has not conceived it. Its nature is love, and love is unintelligible to the loveless. No words can make it intelligible; you can print it in four letters, but to print it is not to reveal it. You can only reveal it by imparting it. If you would communicate to any heart a revelation of the love of the Father, you must first create within that heart the idea of fatherhood and the sense of a father’s love, must first inspire the soul to whom you speak with a spirit kindred to the message which you bring, and render luminous the narrative ot Divine affection by implanting in the heart the feeling of human tenderness.

I pass now to the third of those doctrines which received a fresh development from Paul’s new stand point; I mean his view of that relation in which Christ stands to the human soul. The starting-point of this inquiry is the fifth chapter of Romans. The key-note of that chapter is struck in two words, “much more.” It is a key-note of conscious progress. Paul distinctly implies that at the time when he was writing that epistle he was quite aware of having taken a step in upward development. He says, in verse 10, “For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” Can any one fail to perceive that Paul is here recording an autobiographical experience, that he is describing precisely those phases of the spiritual life through which he himself is conscious of having passed? Can any one fail to see that he is drawing a contrast between the height which he had then and there attained, and the valley which he had inhabited in the days of old? He tells us that there was a time in which Christ was to him simply a reconciler, a time in which he valued Christianity only as a source of peace to the conscience that had outraged God. He goes back in thought to the days o! the Arabian desert, when he stood under the shadow of Sinai, and felt, for the first time, the sense of his own unworthiness. He remembers how, under that shadow, there had come to him a comfort in the thought that the justification of man in the sight of God had always lain in God’s sight of a coming sacrifice, had always consisted in the Divine vision of a perfect offering yet to be. He remembers how, at that time, the beauty of the Christ derived to him its power from the fact that it stood between himself and the blaze of the Divine purity, that it interposed a mediating veil between his own miserable rags and the spotless vesture of the Eternal. But now Paul had transcended that position. He had not, indeed, contradicted it; it was still as true to him as ever. But it was no longer the whole truth. Christ was still his reconciler, but He was something more;

He had become his second self. It was no longer enough for Paul that a daysman should stand between himself and the majesty of the heavenly Father; he must himself be united to that days man. He had reached a point of the hill in which he had ceased to look up to the sunbeam; the sunbeam had flooded him with its own light. He had once been saved by Christ’s work; he was now saved by His life. He had once beheld the image of Christ in the heavens; he had now entered with in those heavens. The spirit of Christ had become his own spirit, the life of Christ his own life. He was no longer a beholder; he was a recipient. He was no longer a man contemplating his deliverance from bondage; he was a man who had forgotten the memory of his former chains in the glad air of a liberty wherewith Christ had made him free.

If now we turn to another passage of this same epistle, we shall find confirmatory evidence that Paul was conscious of a changed relationship between himself and the Master. In Romans viii. 29, 30, he says, — “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son; moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.” Who can fail here again to recognise the notes of Paul’s own biography, the record of his own spiritual experience? He is quite conscious in looking back that he has passed through four distinct stages — predestination, calling, justification, and glorification. And the reader is quite conscious with him that these had hitherto been precisely the stages in which his life had approximated to Christ. In looking back on the course of his spiritual history we see that he had drawn near to the Master just in these four degrees. We see him, according to his own testimony, experiencing at the hour of birth that act of Divine predestination which set him apart for the cause of Jesus, “God separated me from my mother’s womb.” We see him next receiving the call to a ministry, arrested by an act of Divine grace, and compelled against his will to fulfil the destiny of his birth. We see him then under the shadows of Sinai, alone with the contemplation of his past, and solitary in the prospect of his future; yet even amidst his pain recognising the comfort of the truth that his past could be atoned by a perfect righteousness, and his future vindicated by a perfecting life; the age of predestination and the age of calling has been succeeded by the age of justifying. But even yet the development is not complete; he has not yet reached the goal of his predestination — the conformity to the image of Christ. That goal came with the fourth and final stage — glorification. It is the word we habitually use to describe the state of the blessed dead; we speak of such as entering into glory. Paul in a physical sense was not dead, yet he is not afraid to appropriate even on earth the condition of the saints departed. He is not afraid to say that without passing through the valley of the shadow he has entered already into the promised land, has become partaker already of that beatific glory which belongs to the life of those that have fought a good fight and finished their course. He has passed without dying from the Church militant into the Church triumphant, and has exchanged the sense of justification by Christ’s blood for the deeper sense of renovation by Christ’s life.

And what is this sense of renovation by Christ’s life? It is simply that to which Paul had declared himself predestinated from the beginning — conformity to the Master’s image. The goal to which he had been travelling had all along been this goal. I do not say he had all along recognised it; I believe he had not. It is one thing to see the course through which you have come when you have gained the top of a hill; it is another thing to trace that course when you are walking amid the encumbering shadow of the trees. In the period immediately subsequent to his Arabian experience Paul was walking under the shadow of the trees, and the prospect of the hill top was hidden. There was present to him as yet only a sense of his own nothingness, and Christ was realised by him simply as the perfect righteousness that stood between himself and the majesty of heaven. Let us suppose that at this stage it had been told to Paul that a time was coming when he should utter these words, ’ l We, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory,” what would have been his impression? He would have said, l God forbid that I should utter such blasphemy.’ He would have repudiated with horror and indignation the thought that he,- a poor sinner, who owed everything he possessed to an act of Divine clemency, should aspire to be himself on terms of equality with that Divinity which had pardoned him. It would have seemed the wildest, the most daring presumption, that a creature which only yesterday had been dragged from the pit and from the miry clay, should immediately and instantaneously lift his head to claim fellowship with God Himself; if such a thought had entered his mind, he would have rent his clothes and implored forgiveness. But now from the top of the hill all was changed. H3 perceived that all along he had been travelling towards an unseen goal, a goal larger and deeper than his most aspiring dreams. He perceived that the object for which he was destined had been nothing less than a participation in the Divine image, nothing less than conformity to the very nature of God. In former days he would have deemed the dream of such a destiny blasphemous; it had now become essential to his very existence. It was no longer enough for him to be a Christian; he must be a sharer in the life of Christ, a partaker of His image, a member of His body. It was no longer enough for him to be reconciled through Christ’s sacrificial blood; he must him self be inoculated with that blood, must himself be sent forth to fulfil the ministry of reconciliation. He must become the glory which he had gazed upon, must grow into the brightness on which his eyes had rested.

And this I take to be the time in which Paul made a remarkable discovery in the field of his spiritual experience. He found that all this time

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he had been unconsciously repeating that very form of suffering through which the Son of man had passed. The discovery is announced in a passage which we have already quoted by anticipation, but whose full light can only be seen from the summit of Paul’s experience; I mean those words which he writes to the Church of Galatia, “God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” He declares in these words that his own personal sorrow has followed exactly the order of that road which the Master had pursued in ascending the Dolorous Way. His own experience had been that of a double crucifixion; the world had first been crucified to him, and then he had been crucified to the world. His first feeling had been that of simple pain, simple privation, simple resignation. The light of the world had gone out from him, and had left him mute and cold. He was dumb, indeed, under the mighty hand of God; he had murmured not at the dispensation. But there is a vast difference between the dumbness of submission and the song of acquiescence, and all the vastness of that difference had not as yet been felt by him; it was only an outward crucifixion. But now the crucifixion itself had been crucified; the muteness had passed into song. His spirit had accepted the thorn — accepted it not as a necessity but as a privilege. He had ceased to receive his calamity merely as a mandate of the Divine Will, beneath which he was bound to bow; he had come to welcome it as itself a gift of God.

Development of Paul’ 8 Religious Views. Itl

The world was not given back to him, but he was made independent of its restoration. He had ceased to value or to regret that which was once a necessity of his life; he was ll crucified to the world.”

Now it was in this twofold experience that Paul discovered the striking analogy between his own cross and the cross of Christ. His mind immediately reverted to the scene in the garden of Gethsemane. He remembered how, on that occasion, the Master too had experienced a double crucifixion. He, like His disciple, had besought the Lord three times. His first prayer was for the removal of His thorn, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” He had cherished a hope that He would be permitted to remain in the world until He should have witnessed the visible establishment of His kingdom. That hope had been dashed by the current of events. The world was passing away from before His eyes, and the figure of death stood in the breach. It was a moment of outward crucifixion, and He felt it, sorrowed over it, prayed against it. Then came the two succeeding prayers, intermediate between the weakness and the strength — the prayers in which the Son of man had asked exemption not from His thorn but from His desire to be rid of it, i l If this cup may not pass from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done.” And then, as a result of this latest prayer, the strength had come. The Son of man had risen erect in the scene of His former sorrow, and had confronted the spectacle of death without a pain. He had accepted His cup as a gift from

i Matt. xxvi. 39-44.

the Father, had accepted it as itself a step in the development of His kingdom. The thorn had not been removed, but He had ceased to desire its removal. The gate of death had not been shut, but He had determined to make it the opening into a wider life; the world had been crucified to Him, but He was now crucified to the world.

Such in my opinion was the striking analogy which led Paul to the conclusion that he had been made conformable to the image of the Master, which led him to see in his own cross a repetition of that form of suffering which had constituted the cross of his Lord. The impression derived from this analogy never forsook him; it remained with him steadfast to the end. Whatever subsequent developments he was called to pass through, he never outgrew nor superseded the vividness of this ex perience: the future might broaden it, but it could not deepen it; it was already full. Hence through all his subsequent epistles there runs one common refrain — “Crucified together with Christ, I live; yet not I, for Christ liveth in me.” From the day when he penned his letter to the Galatians until the day when he finished his course in the Roman capital, there appears, under endless variations, the one perpetual strain — the conviction of membership in a Divine body, and the confidence of fellowship with the sufferings of the Lord.

But Paul could not go so far without going further; the change in his relation to Christ’s person involved a change in his relation to Christ’s work. What was that work? Why was the Son of man called to experience this double process in the bear ing of the cross? Paul answers, “He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” * The idea evidently is that, in order to be the reconciler of fallen humanity, the Son of man had to put Himself in the place of fallen humanity. Before He could forgive, before He could atone, it was necessary that He should clothe Himself in the likeness of that which was naturally adverse to Him.2 It was necessary that He should environ Himself with the circumstances, with the weaknesses, with the difficulties, of those who stood in His way, that He should try to see with their eyes, and, in a measure, to feel with their hearts. He must, in short, become the substitute for humanity, must put Himself in sympathy, even before He put Himself in fact, into the position of those who had violated the Father’s law, and must impute to Himself by an act of Divine imagination the frailty of those lives which had thus been tempted to transgress.

Such was the work of Christ as Paul conceived it. In all this there was to him nothing new. Even before he became a Christian he must have gathered from the later Isaiah that the Messiah, when He came, would be one who should bear the sins and carry the sorrows of His people, one on whom the Lord should lay the iniquities of us all. But the newness of Paul’s present thought consisted not in his knowledge of the fact, but in his mode of applying it to his own practical experience. In the days

i 2 Cor. v. 21. * Rom. vlll. 3.

of old, in the days when he had just emerged from the Arabian solitudes, and recovered from the first overpowering sense of the stern heights of Sinai, his comfort had lain in the reflection that, since Christ had reconciled the world, he too was reconciled. But now such a thought was no longer sufficient for him; it was still true, but it had ceased to be adequate. It was no longer enough for Paul that he should be reconciled; he must be a reconciler. It was no longer a sufficient consolation that he had ceased to stand in a relation of enmity to God; he must himself become partaker of that work by which this enmity had been superseded. Had he not been made conformable to Christ’s image? Ha.d he not received the indwelling of the very life and soul which dwelt in the Son of man? For what had he received it? not surely that he might be a mere passive recipient. Did not the conformity to the Divine image demand a conformity to the Divine life? If he had received the impress of Christ’s person, was it not that he might repeat the form of Christ’s work? Must not he too, like his Master, begin by putting himself in the place of others, and begin by doing so in thought before he did it in fact? Must not he too, by an act of Divine imagination, empty himself into the circumstances of fallen humanity, and endeavour to realise in his experience the frailties and the difficulties of erring souls? He had freely received; must he not now freely give? He had himself been reconciled; was it not henceforth his province and his duty to take up for others the ministry of reconciliation?1 Development oj Paul’s Religious Views. 175

That this experience in the heart ol Paul came to him not at the very beginning but by a process of after development, is to my mind borne out by the fact that the later tone of his writings is much more mild than the earlier. If we take this middle group of his epistles, and consider that to the Galatians as standing at the beginning, and that to the Romans at the close, we shall be struck with the comparative mellowness of the latter fruit. The epistle to the Galatians is like the primrose after winter. It rises with fresh life — life prophetic of a warmer day, yet it is itself still struggling with the cold, and still impeded by the survivals of a more primitive culture. It is an epistle of storms, where in the mind of the apostle reveals at every turn that it is in the presence of his enemies, and betrays in every expression how little it has yet learned to bear. But it may be said that this is the last blast of Paul’s winter; every after-stage of the day is increasingly mild. Even ere the epistle closes, we have a hint of warmer weather, “Henceforth let no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” The words indicate that the mind ot Paul is already conscious of getting beyond its trouble, already awakening to the sense that the worst is over. What is it that mitigates his pain? It is the gradual dawning of the knowledge that he has a higher ordination than the laying on of visible hands, that the marks of Christ’s own hand have been imprinted on his frame. He feels that he has become partaker of Christ’s own nature, and that, being partaker of His nature, it is too late in the day to disturb himself as to whether he has received a genuine visible ordination. He feels something more than that. If he is partaker of Christ’s nature, is he not thereby precluded from asserting himself thus violently against the follies of his weak brother? Does not the possession ot Christ’s image demand the participation in Christ’s work, and does not that work consist in bearing the sins and weaknesses of those who are still in the valley? Is it not incumbent on him, as one who has received the spirit of the Master, to put himself in the place of those who occupy an opposite standpoint from his own, to throw himself into sympathy with their difficulties, and seek to reproduce in his experience that very view of the controversy which has set them in the mean time in antagonism to his work and teaching?

And when we come to the epistle to the Romans, we find that Paul has already put in practice this new vision of the crucified Christ. In his letter to the Galatians, he had written amid storm and stress, amid the sense of injured honour, and the contempt of a mind which had come to look down upon the mean and beggarly elements of former days. But when he took up his pen to write to the Church of the great metropolis, it would almost seem as if the reconciliatory spirit of that metropolis had already affected his soul. It would almost seem as if, in the presence of that vast capital which had gathered together the various types of man as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, the individual differences between him and his adversaries were lost and overshadowed in the perception of a

Development of Paul’s Religious Views. 177

mightier underlying unity, in the vision of a bond of humanity which made all men one. Be this as it may, it is certain that in this epistle to the Romans the mind ot the apostle has overleapt its earlier bitterness, has passed beyond that middle wall of partition which in days of yore divided him from Judaic Christianity. He had begun under the shadows of Mount Sinai, and then he had revolted from these shadows; he now goes back to incorporate the shadows with the sunlight. It is not that he had ceased to recognise the existence of a middle wall; it is present to his eye as clearly and as opposingly as ever. What he does recognise is something above the wall, beneath the wall, and running through the wall. What is that some thing? Is it the vision of Christ’s atoning work? In one sense, that had been known to Paul from the beginning, — known to him even while he remained in the faith of his fathers. The knowledge of that fact had not been sufficient to free him from polemical bitterness, nor to prevent him from applying to his adversaries his scourge of small cords. But what lifted Paul out of his bitterness was the knowledge of an additional fact which had only recently burst upon his view. It was the vision of the truth that, if he were a follower of Christ, he must himself be a sharer in Christ’s atoning work. It was not enough to be reconciled; he must be a reconciler. And what did this mean? Was it anything less than the identification of himself with his adversaries, the putting himself in the place of those who had maligned him? Hitherto he had only felt that

1Y8 Spiritual Development of St. Paul.

he was right and that they were wrong. He felt that still; he was as conscious as ever of the meanness and the poverty of their religious views. But now the meanness and the poverty of these views became to him a source not of repulsion but of attraction. He felt that they constituted the very cross which he was called to bear. He felt that without them he would be denuded of his participation in Christ’s atoning work. How could he empty himself into the lives of others unless he were impressed with their emptiness? Was not his very aversion to the narrow and limited creed of his countrymen a ground for entering into sympathy with that creed? Was it not the very opportunity given him to take up the cross of his Lord, to put himself in the place of his opponents, and to impute to these opponents in the days of their broadened life the place he had himself acquired? Such was the thought of Paul, such was the germ of his later mellowness. He had received the spirit of the Master, and therefore he felt bound to receive the Master’s ministry of reconciliation. Henceforth his work as an iconoclast was over, and his work as a reconstructor had begun. The gate was already ajar whose full opening was to reveal the length and the breadth of his developed Christianity. To the consideration of this process of subsequent expansion it will now be our province to turn.