Studies of Christianity; Or, Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers

Chapter 15

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and the music been flung from the harp of David? and the burdens of inspiration been treasured on the Prophet"s scroll? Who could quote a word that G.o.d had ever spoken in any other language? It was the one sacred idiom, from which all others are divergent corruptions, and to which, when the world"s confusion is over, they must again return.

However few in these decadent ages might understand it still, it was intrinsically fitted to be universal. And who could call _that_ speech provincial, at whose sound the heavens and earth arose? or esteem it temporary, when it persevered through the dispersion at Babel, and was present on the world before the Flood? So there must be nothing else allowed in the liturgies of the Synagogue, in the reading of Scripture, or in any intercourse between _man and G.o.d_. Only when men began to converse _with one another_, to compare their human thoughts, and descend from prophetic to didactic gifts, might they resort to the media of profaner life. The language of Worship was but one; though the jargons of Opinion were many. And so the Scribes and the Rabbis of the written Word supposed themselves to hold the only key of life.

But the Holy Spirit goes into no one"s keeping, and is no respecter of tongues. Free as the wind to blow where it listeth, it sweeps wherever souls are genial to its breath, and will yield to it their gifts, of love, of lips, of life. It seemed to have had enough of Hebrew, ever since it had gone into the hands of the philologists, and been made a sacred language, and begun to drone. It had long been feeling its way in other directions, tempting men to pray out of the fresh heart, and never mind the words, till now at last the secret broke, that on any native tongue by which souls most freely flow together, may all pa.s.s out to G.o.d; that the home-sounds are the devoutest too; that the speech into which men are born, and which has become to them as a stringed instrument answering to the faintest touch of their affections, is the true vehicle by which "the Spirit giveth utterance." The prayer of faith, ascending in the idioms of every lat.i.tude, converges into one in heaven. And G.o.d"s truth, descending to this world, breaks into all the moulds of expression native to our various race.

_One Gospel in many dialects_,--that is the great Pentecost lesson, construe the miracle as we may. And there are dialects of _Thought_ as well as speech,--natural differences of temperament and character,--to which the Gospel, still without prejudice to its unity, adapts itself with the same divine flexibility. What private observer--still more what student of history--can doubt that we are not all made in the same mould,--that the proportions of our humanity are variously mixed,--that not only do we individually differ in moral susceptibility and spiritual depth, but fall into permanent groups marked by distinct and ineradicable characters, and reproducing the same religious tendencies from age to age? Transpose the souls of Plato and Pascal into the right place and time, and do you suppose they would turn up as _Lat.i.tudinarian Divines_? Deal as you will with the lot of Priestley and Belsham, and could you ever enroll them among the _Christian Mystics_? Close in the fires of Augustine"s nature with what damps you may, and could you ever find him peace in a Gospel of _Good Works_? No; we touch here on differences deeper than accident, and irremovable by culture,--differences that vindicate their reality by crossing the lines of dissimilar religions and reappearing in all times. They necessarily give us differing wants and experiences; they set into differing shapes of faith; and on souls equally faithful they fix very differing expressions. They are so many _vernacular idioms of the inner mind_: all have divine right to be: no one of them is ent.i.tled to call itself the sacred language alone intelligible between man and G.o.d; and the pretension of any to supersede the rest, and reign alone, is not less vain than the complaints of ignorance against foreign dialects, and the ambition to exchange the many running waters of local literature into the huge tank of a universal language. They may not be able to understand each other, or even with the key of outward comparison always bear translation into idioms other than their own. But let them speak in their own way, and pray their own prayer. Not only are they all clear to Him that readeth the heart; there will thus be _more heart for Him to read_: for faith and love, large as they may be, are ever deepest in their special tones; and the prayer, the hymn, which is touched with the spirit"s local coloring, comes to us like the aroma of native fields, and a.s.suages our thirst like the sweet waters of some well given to our fathers and made sacred by a Saviour"s noonday rest.

On this principle,--that different types of natural genius in men cannot but throw their Christianity into different forms,--we may not only justify the divisions of Christendom, but even cease to wish that they should disappear. Unity no doubt there must be: G.o.d is one; Truth is one; the Gospel is one; and a mind that could take in the whole, and spread its insight and affections in all dimensions at once, would reach the Divine equilibrium, in which nothing partial preponderates.

But from our watch-tower we can look through only one window at once; the blind walls of our mental chamber shut out all the rest; and as we kneel, like Daniel, at the open light, the breeze upon our face seems sacred, because it comes from our Jerusalem. The question is not, whether there is such a thing as truth, rounded off, self-balanced, and complete; in the mind of G.o.d,--the final seat of reality,--of course there is. Nor is it a question, whether each individual man can attain a faith consistent in its parts, agreeable to fact, and adequate to his nature. This also is possible. But when he has attained it, on what terms is it to co-exist with other faiths presenting parallel pretensions? Is he in his heart to identify his own with the absolute truth, sufficient for _all_ as for himself? Is he to expect them to come round to it, and altogether throw away their own? Or is he to confess to himself his own limitations, to suspect that he may have his blind sides, and reverently to seek something he has missed in that which others persist in seeing? In which direction is he to seek unity? By antipathy to all beliefs save one?--or by inviting all of them to live their life and show their place in human nature? It is the genius of Romanism to seek unity by _suppression_; of Protestantism, by free _development_;--of the former, to protect the consistency it has; of the latter, to press forward to one that it has not. Are we taunted with our "Protestant variations"? Why, the more they are, the richer is our field of experience, the finer our points of comparison; provided, however, that we hold fast to the n.o.ble trust in a Gospel of ident.i.ty at bottom, and seek it rather in the religious heart of all the churches, than in the theologic wisdom of our own. No man can proclaim the principle of "_One Gospel in many dialects_," unless he is prepared to admit that his own faith is _one of the dialects, and nothing more_; to presume a meaning in the others, however hid from him; and while they remain to him a mere inarticulate jargon, to ascribe it sooner to his own incapacity than to their insignificance. When G.o.d"s truth, refracted on its entrance into our nature, shall emerge into the white light again, not one of these tinted beams can be spared. Let us for a moment arrest and examine them. Let us look at the chief varieties which Christianity a.s.sumes as it penetrates the soul; at once recognizing our own place, and appreciating that of others.

There are three great types of natural mind on which the Spirit of Christ may fall; and each, touched and awakened by him, "utters the wonderful works of G.o.d" in a language of its own.

(1.) There is the _Ethical_ mind, calm, level, and clear; chiefly intent on the good-ordering of this life; judging all things by their tendency to this end; and impatient of every oscillation of our nature that swings beyond it. There is nothing low or unworthy in the attachment which keeps this spirit close to the present world, and watchful for its affairs. It is not a selfish feeling, but often one intensely social and humane; not any mean fascination with mere material interests, but a devotion to justice and right, and an a.s.sertion of the sacred authority of human duties and affections. A man thus tempered deals chiefly with this visible life and his comrades in it, because, as nearest to him, they are the better known.

He plants his standard on the present, as on a vantage-ground, where he can survey his field, and manuvre all his force, and compute the battle he is to fight. Whatever his bearing towards fervors beyond his range, he has no insensibility to the claims that fall within his acknowledged province, and that appeal to him in the native speech of his humanity. He so reverences veracity, honor, and good faith, as to _expect them_ like the daylight, and hear of their violation with a flush of scorn. His word is a rock, and he expects that yours will not be a quicksand. If you are lax, you cannot hope for his trust; but if you are in trouble, you easily move his pity. And the sight of a real oppression, though the sufferer be no ornamental hero, but black, unsightly, and disreputable, suffices perhaps to set him to work for life, that he may expunge the disgrace from the records of mankind.

Such men as he const.i.tute for our world its moral centre of gravity; and whoever would compute the path of improvement that has brought it thus far on its way, or trace its sweep into a brighter future, must take account of their steady ma.s.s.

The effect of this style of thought and taste on the _religion_ of its possessor is not difficult to trace. It _may_, no doubt, stop short of avowed and conscious religion altogether; its basis being simply moral, and its scene temporal, its conditions may be imagined as complete, without any acknowledgment of higher relations. But, practically, this is an exceptional case. A deep and reverential sense of Moral Authority pa.s.ses irresistibly into Faith in a Moral Governor; and Conscience, as it rises, culminates in Worship. And to such natural religion, the hearty reception of the revealed Gospel is so congenial a sequel, that Christianity has enlisted its chief body-guard--its band of Immortals--from the writers of this school. In the _form_ which they give to the faith, they are true to themselves, still keeping close to the human, and, except to sanction and glorify this, not apt to dwell upon the Divine. The second table of commandment has more reality to them than the first; and the whole of religion presents itself to their mind under the idea of _Law_. G.o.d in Christ teaches us his Will; publishes the punishment and the reward; and requires our obedience; aiding us in it by the perfect example of Christ, and rea.s.suring us under failure by the offer of pardon on repentance. Now this is a true Gospel; not a proposition of it can be gainsaid; and whoever from his heart can repeat this creed;--G.o.d is holy; morality, divine; penitence, availing; goodness, immortal; guilt, secure of retribution; and Christ, our pattern for both lives,--is not far from the kingdom of Heaven, and has a faith as much beyond the practice, as it is short of the professions, of the great ma.s.s of Christians. If he has an equable, rational, and balanced nature; if he can depend on himself, and reduce his will to the discipline of rules; if he have affections temperate enough to follow reason instead of lead it, and to love G.o.d by sense of fitness and word of command; if moral prudence is so strong in him that he can bear the idea of "doing good for the sake of everlasting happiness"; if no wing ever beats in his soul that takes him off his feet;--his wants are provided; he has guidance for the problems that will meet him on his way,--indications of duty,--grounds of trust,--and a path traced through every Gethsemane and Calvary of this world, to the saintly peace of another.

But while this is a _true Gospel_, is it the _whole_ Gospel? Not so; unless the voice of the Saviour is to reach only a part of our humanity, and in response draw but a "little flock." For not many of our race are made of this even and unfermenting clay. Who can deny that there abound,--and among the greatest names of Christian history,--

(2.) _Pa.s.sionate_ natures, that cannot thus work out _their own salvation_, but ever pray to be taken whither of themselves they cannot go? It is not that they are necessarily weak of will, deficient in self-control, and unequal to the human moralities. Rather is it, that they get through all these, and yet can find no peace. Duty, as men measure it, may be satisfied; but still the face of G.o.d does not lift up its light. For want of that answering look, it is all as the tillage of the black desert; digging by night without a heaven above, and sowing in sands which no dew shall fertilize. Intense and effectuating resolve was certainly not wanting in Luther; what his young conscience imposed, his will achieved,--wasting asceticism, persevering devotion, humble charities; yet the shadow of death brooded around his irreproachable obedience. Is it not that the same sorrow which, in more level minds, is brought by a fall of the will, arises in these men from the ascent of their aspirations? Haunted by the image of G.o.d"s _Holiness_, drawn to it, yet fluttering helplessly at immeasurable depths below it, they strain after an obedience they cannot reach, and never lose the sense of infinite failure. Measured by their aims, their power is nothing. Did the law of Christ require nothing but works which the hand could do, its conditions would be finite, and might be satisfied. But its claims sweep through the affections of the soul; and who can _make himself love_ where he is cold? who set himself behind his own thoughts, and keep guilty intruders outside the door of his nature? Impossible! the inner life, which is the special seat of our divine concerns, evades our laboring prudence, and tortures conscience without obeying it. How then do these sufferers find their emanc.i.p.ation? They have a Gospel, according to which Christ is not given as the Teacher of Law, but set up as the personal object of pure Trust and Love. G.o.d sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, to mitigate the Divine into gentleness, to elevate the Human into holiness, and show how there is one moral perfection for both; surrendered him to humiliation and self-sacrifice; placed him in heaven; and offered to accept pure _faith and love towards him_ as the reconciling term for the human soul,--as the subst.i.tute for an unattainable ideal of obedience. Here then is the salvation of these pa.s.sionate natures. This simple trust, this intense affection, is precisely what they have to give. They cannot direct themselves; but only fix their love, and you may lead them as a child. Self-discipline is impossible; self-escape triumphant. Try from within to hold the struggling winds of their nature with iron bands of law, and you do but stir the sleeping storms. Set in the heavens without an orb of divine attraction,--a new star in the East,--and you carry their whole atmosphere away. Engage their faith; and for the first time they will prevail over their work. Let there be an appeal of Grace to their enthusiasm,--a whispered word, "_Lovest thou me?_"--and the very burden that was too heavy to be borne loses all its weight; and the drudging mill of habit, that seemed so servile once, they pace with songs and joy. There are men who so need to be thus carried out of themselves, that without it their nature runs to waste, or burns away with self-consuming fires. They are like one who, in a dream, should set himself to climb a far-off mountain-top; if he tries to run, he cannot even creep, and only wakes himself to find that he lies still on the bed of nature. But if the thought of his mind should be, that an overmastering power--chariot of fire and horses of fire--lifts him away, he floats through the clear s.p.a.ce, till, without effort, his feet stand upon the visionary hills.

Here then, again,--in this doctrine of Faith,--we have a true Gospel, speaking to many hearts impenetrable by the doctrine of Works. But have we even yet the _whole_ Gospel? Has the Good Shepherd, in these two words, made his voice known to all that are his? Or are there other sheep still to be gathered that are not of these folds? I believe _there are_. For thus far we have looked only at the _moral_ side of Christian doctrine,--at its different answers to the problem of Sin,--at the conditions of ultimate acceptance with G.o.d, notwithstanding deep unworthiness. Whether you say, Patiently obey, and you shall grow into perfection of faith and love; or, Fling yourself on faith and love, and you will find grace for patient obedience;--in either case you are prescribing terms of salvation; you have the _future life_ specially in mind, and are anxious to make ready the soul _there_ to meet her G.o.d. But there are persons who cannot fix any particular solicitude upon that crisis, as if all before were probation, and all after were judgment,--as if here were only faith in an absent, and there sight of a present G.o.d;--who cannot dramatically divide existence into a two-act piece, first Time, then Eternity, and wait for the Infinite Presence, till the curtain rises between them; but are haunted by the feeling that, as Time is in Eternity, so is Man already shut up in G.o.d. This is the indigenous sentiment of another natural type of mind, which may be called,--

(3.) The _Spiritual_. G.o.d is a Spirit; man has a spirit; both, _Now_; both, _Here_; and shall they never meet? shall they remain without exchange of looks? shall nothing break the seal of eternal silence? is there really love between them, and thought, and purpose, and yet all recognition dumb? Why tell us of G.o.d"s Omniscience, if it only sleeps around us like dead s.p.a.ce, or at most lies watching, like a sentinel of the universe, not free to stir? Who could ever pray to this motionless Immensity? who weep his griefs to rest on a Pity so secret and reserved? Surely if He is a Living Mind, he not merely remains over from a Divine Past to appear again in a Divine Future, but moves through the immediate hours, and awakens a thousand sanct.i.ties to-day.

Urged by such questionings as these, men of meditative piety have thirsted for conscious communion with the All-holy;--communion _both ways_: appeal and response; a crossing line of light from eye to eye; a quiet walk with G.o.d, where all the dust of life turns, at his approach, into the green meadow, and its flat pools into the gliding waters. They have retired _within_ to meet him; have believed that all is not ours that it is ours to feel; that there is Grace of his mingling with the inner fibres of our nature, and flinging in, across the constant warp of our personality, flying tints of deeper beauty, and hints of a pattern more divine. And all have agreed, that, in order to reach this Holy Spirit, and through its vivifying touch be born again, the one thing needful is a stripping off of self, an abandonment of personal desire and will, a return to simplicity, and a docile listening to the whispers spontaneous from G.o.d. They find all sin to be a rising up of self; all return to holiness and peace a sinking down from self, a free surrender of the soul,--that asks nothing, possesses nothing, that relaxes every rigid strain, and is pliant to go whither the highest Will may lead. Nature, of her own foolishness, ever goes astray in her quest of divine things; wandering away in flights of laboring Reason to find her G.o.d; panting with over-plied resolve to do her work; scheming rules, and artifices, and bonds of union for forming her individuals into a Church. Reverse all this, and fall back on the centre of the Spirit, instead of pressing out in all radii of your own. Let Intellect droop her ambitious wing, and come home; there, in the inmost room of conscience, G.o.d seeks you all the while. Lash your wearied strength no more; sit low and weak upon the ground, with loving readiness. .h.i.therward or thitherward, and you shall be taken through your work with a sevenfold strength that has no effort in it. Leave yourself awhile in utter solitude, shut out all thoughts of other men, yield up whatever intervenes, though it be the thinnest film, between your soul and G.o.d; and in this absolute loneliness, the germ of a holy society will of itself appear, a temper of sympathy and mercy, trustful and gentle, suffuses itself through the whole mind: though you have seen no one, you have met all; and are girt for any errand of service that love may find. So then, if there were twenty or a thousand in this case, their wills would flow together of their own accord, and find themselves in brotherhood without a plan at all.

So speaks this doctrine of the Spirit. It matters not now under which of its many theologic forms we conceive it; simplest perhaps, that the Indwelling G.o.d, who in Christ was the Word, is in us the Comforter. But surely, this also is not altogether a false Gospel. It rescues the conception of direct communion between the human spirit and the Divine,--a conception essential to the Christian life,--which an Ethical Gospel does not adequately secure: for communion must be between like and like, while obedience may be from slave to lord, nay, in some sense, from machine to maker. Nor is it a slight thing to take the scales from our eyes that hide from us the sanct.i.ties of our _immediate_ life; to abolish the postponement of eternity; and, wayfarers as we are, make us feel, as we rise from our stony pillow and pa.s.s on, that here is the abode of G.o.d, and here does the angel-ladder touch the ground! Yet this too is not the _whole_ Gospel. It absorbs too much in G.o.d. It scarcely saves human personality and responsibility. It does no justice to nature, which it regards as the negative of G.o.d. It melts away Law in Love, and hides the rocky structure of this moral world in a sunny haze that confuses earth and air.

What, then, shall we say of these three types of Christian faith? Do you doubt their reality? It is demonstrated within the century which we close this day. For while our forefathers were dedicating this house of prayer to the first, the Gospel of Christian Duty, Wesley had already become the prophet of the last,--the new birth of the Spirit; and erelong Evangelicism started up, and proclaimed the second,--the Salvation by Faith. Do you doubt their durability and permanence? It is proved by eighteen centuries" experience, for the New Testament is not older. _There_, within the group of sacred books themselves, do they all lie; the Jewish Gospels represent the first; the Gentile Apostle"s letters, the second; the writings of the beloved disciple, the third. Matthew, as every reader must remark, is for the Law; Paul, for Faith; and John, for the Spirit. And, in every age, the great ma.s.s of Christian tendencies break themselves into these three forms:--Ebionite, Pauline, and contemplative Gnostic; Pelagian, Augustinian, and Mystic; Jesuit, Jansenist, and Quietist; Arminian, Lutheran, and Quaker; all proclaim the perseverance of the same essential types, wherever the spirit of Christ alights upon the various heart of man.

Is Christ then divided? Is he not equal to the _whole_ of our humanity? Rather let us say, that we are small and weak for the measure of his heavenly wisdom. Doubtless, if we take what we can hold, and put it to faithful application, we have grace enough for every personal exigency. But there is, surely, an evil inseparable from all _partial_ developments of religion, which only satisfy the immediate cravings of the mind, and leave parts of our nature--asleep perhaps at the moment--liable to wake and thirst again. Such _separate growths_ run out their resources and exhaust themselves in a few generations. At first, they answer to some felt want; they collect a congenial mult.i.tude, and open to them a spiritual refuge that ends their wanderings. But the sentiment, once brought into a contented state, ceases to be importunate and prominent; and by its abatement gives opportunity for other feelings to vindicate their existence.

When the wound is bound up and has lost its smart, the natural hunger begins to tell. The children grow up other than the fathers, perhaps quite as limited, only in different ways,--with affections pressing into just the vacant places of an earlier age. Meanwhile, the imperfection of the original basis has provoked reactions equally of narrow scope,--equally incapable of permanently filling the capacities of the Christian mind. Hence the danger, if the separate veins of thought be still worked on as they thin away, that the sects should degenerate into poor theological egotisms, and wear themselves insensibly out. It cannot be denied that all the three religious movements of the last century--represented by Taylor, by Wesley, by Cowper--exhibit the symptoms of spent strength, and are little likely to play again the part they have played before.

Yet every one of their Gospels is _true at heart_; and the tree that holds that pith is a tree of life, which the Eternal husbandman hath planted; and if he prune it, it is only that it may bear more fruit.

The weakness of these faiths is in their isolation; and if their sap could but mingle, if no element were lost which they can draw from the root of the vine, a young frondescent life would show itself again.

Those who think that the future can only repeat the past, will deem this impossible; though least of all should it appear so to _us_ who profess ourselves "_Christians and only Christians_," pledged to nothing but to lie open to all G.o.d"s truth. For myself I indulge a joyful hope that the next century of Christendom will be n.o.bler than the last; that the great Faiths which have struggled separately into the light of the one, will flow together on the broader and less broken surface of the other. If, however, this is to be, it will arise from no mere _intellectual_ scrutiny, whose function will ever be to _distinguish_, and not to _unite_, and, in proportion as it dominates alone, to trace ever-new lines of critical divergency. When the problem of Christendom is, to deliver the individual mind from the operation of an overwhelming social power, then it is seasonable to insist on the principle of free inquiry; because then you have a dead ma.s.s to disintegrate, ere any young and living force can urge its way.

But when you have won this victory, and when individualism ceases to be devout and tends to party self-will, the hour comes to proclaim the converse lesson, and break up the vain reliance on mere liberty of thought. Depend upon it, Unity lies in profounder strata of our nature than any tillage of the mere intellect can reach. Sink deeply into the inmost life of _any_ Christian faith, and you will touch the ground of _all_. Did we do nothing with our religion except live by it; did we forget the presence of doubt and contradiction; did it cease to be a creed about G.o.d and become simply an existence in G.o.d; did we exchange self-a.s.sertion before men for self-surrender to him;--we should find ourselves side by side with unexpected friends, should be astonished at our petulant divisions, and replace the poor charity of mutual forbearance by the free consciousness of inward sympathy. For _us_ especially, who feel the temptations of an exceptional position, is it the prime duty to live and move and have our being in the divine sanct.i.ties that hold us, in that which we have _not_ been obliged to throw away; else might our Gospel be no fruit-bearing branch, drinking from the root of the vine, but a dead residuum, withered and hopeless. Remember that, if Sin be not _original_, all the more must it be _actual_, and the deeper should its shadow lie upon the Conscience, and touch us with the mood of faithfulness and prayer. If, in reconciling man with G.o.d, there is no _vicarious_ sacrifice possible, so much the more remains over for _self-sacrifice_, as the only path of communion and peace. If you will have it that Christ is only _human_, so much the more Divine is your humanity to be; you cannot a.s.sume _that_ as the type of your nature, without at least owning that its essence lies, and its glory is found, not in the natural man, but in the spiritual man; and by this very confession, you renounce the low aims of the worldly mind, and take on yourself the vows of the saintly. Let believers only be true to the grace they have, and more will be given; and enter where they may the many-gated sanctuary of the Christian life, they will tend ever inwards to the same centre, and meet at last in the holiest of all.

Keeping a reverent eye fixed on the person and spirit of Christ, they cannot but find their partial apprehensions corrected and enlarged; for his divine image is complete in its revelation, and rebukes every narrower Gospel. Moral perfectness, divine communion, free self-sacrifice,--all blend in him,--indistinguishable elements of one expression. In that august and holy presence, our divisions sink abashed, and hear, as of old, the word of recall, "Ye know not what spirit ye are of." Or if, through our infirmities, that gracious form, appearing in the midst as we discourse among ourselves and are perplexed and sad, do not suffice to open our eyes and make us less slow of heart to one another and to him, at least in that higher world, whither our forerunners are gone, his living look will perfect the communion of saints. There at length the guests of his bounty will find that, though at separate tables, they have all been fed by the same bread of life, and touched their lips with the same wine of remembrance: there, the voices of the wise, often discordant here,--of Taylor and Wesley, of Enfield and Cowper, of Heber and Channing,--will blend in harmony;--and the notes of the last age will not be the least in that mighty chorus which crowds the steps of eighteen centuries, and, converging to their immortal Head, sings the solemn strain, "Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord G.o.d Almighty! Just and true are all thy ways, thou King of Saints!"

ST. PAUL AND HIS MODERN STUDENTS.

_The Life and Epistles of St. Paul._ By the Rev. W. J. CONYBEARE, M.A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; and the Rev. J.

S. HOWSON, M.A., Princ.i.p.al of the Collegiate Inst.i.tution, Liverpool. 2 vols. 4to. Longmans. 1852.

_The Epistles of St. Paul to the Corinthians: with Critical Notes and Dissertations._ By ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY, M.A., Canon of Canterbury, late Fellow and Tutor of University College, Oxford, &c. 2 vols. 8vo. Murray. 1855.

_The Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans: with Critical Notes and Dissertations._ By BENJAMIN JOWETT, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford. 2 vols. 8vo. Murray.

1855.

These treatises, bearing on their t.i.tle-pages the names of our two ecclesiastical Universities, give happy signs of a new era in English theology. They show how effectually we have escaped from the morbid religious phenomena represented by Simeon at Cambridge, and the counter-irritants applied by John Henry Newman at Oxford; and come as the returning breath of nature to those who have witnessed the fevers of "Evangelical" conversion or the consumptive asceticism of "Anglican" piety. On looking back, from the position now attained, it seems wonderful that we could ever, with St. Paul"s writings in our hands, have been betrayed into either of these opposite extravagances: for anything more absolutely foreign to his breadth and universality than the Genevan dogma, or more at variance with his free spirituality than the sacramental system, it is impossible to conceive. But it is the peculiar fate of sacred writings, that the last thing elicited from them is their own real meaning. The very greatness of their authority puts the reader"s faculties into a false att.i.tude; creates an eagerness,--an inflexible intensity,--that defeats its own end; and, in particular, gives undue ascendency to the uppermost want and feeling that may be craving satisfaction. Hence the tendency of Scriptural interpretation to proceed by action and reaction; an easy ethical Arminianism being succeeded by a severe Calvinism, and the reliance on individual grace giving way before the advance of sacerdotal and Church ideas. When the opposite errors have spent themselves, the requisite repose of mind will be recovered for reading just the thought that lies upon the page: here and there an eye will be found, neither strained with pre-occupying visions, not scared by sceptic shadows, but clear for the apprehension of reality, as G.o.d has shaped it for our perception. At length we have reached this crisis of promise; and critics are found who, instead of interrogating St. Paul on all sorts of modern questions, listen to him on his own; and draw from him, not a fancied verdict on the sixteenth century, but a faithful picture of the first.

And for this historical purpose, the writings of the great Gentile Apostle are of paramount value, and justly occupy the inquirer"s first researches. The most considerable of them are of unimpeachable authenticity. They are the very earliest Christian writings we possess. They are the productions of a man more clearly known to us than any of the first missionaries of the Gospel. They are _letters_: abounding in disclosures of personal feelings, of biographical incident, of changing moods of thought, of outward and inward conflict. They are addressed to young communities, scattered over a vast area, and composed of differing elements; and exhibit the whole fermentation of their new life, the scruples, the heart-burnings, the n.o.ble inspirations, the grievous factions, of the Apostolic age. The Gospels and the Book of Acts _treat_ no doubt of a prior period, but _proceed_ from a posterior, of whose state of mind, whose retrospective theories concerning the ministry of Christ, it is of primary importance to the criticism of the Evangelists that we should be informed; and on these points the Pauline Epistles are the indispensable groundwork of all our knowledge or conjecture. In them we catch the Christian doctrine and tradition at an earlier stage than any other canonical book represents throughout. Although the narratives of the New Testament doubtless abound in material drawn faithfully from a more primitive time, they are certainly not free from the touch and tincture of the post-Pauline age. How powerful an instrument the Apostle"s letters may become for either confirming or checking the historical records, may be readily conceived by every reader of Paley"s "Horae Paulinae." In fine, if it be a just principle, in historical criticism, to proceed from the more known to the less known,--to begin from a date that yields contemporary doc.u.ments, and work thence into the subjacent and superjacent strata of events,--the elucidation of Christian antiquity must take its commencement from the Epistles of St. Paul.

Except in its general similarity of subject, the first of the three works mentioned at the head of this article admits of no comparison with the other two. It is rather an ill.u.s.trated guide-book to the Apostle"s world of place and time, than a personal introduction to himself. The authors are highly accomplished and scholarly men, and could not fail, in dealing with an historical theme, to bring together and group with conscientious skill a vast store of archaeological and topographical detail; to weigh chronological difficulties with patient care; to translate with philological precision, and due aim at accuracy of text. They have accordingly produced a truly interesting and instructive book: _so_ instructive, indeed, that by far the greater part of its information would, probably, have been quite new to St. Paul himself. His life seems to us to be injudiciously overlaid with what is wholly foreign to it, and for the sake of picturesque effect to be set upon a stage quite invisible to him. He was not "Princ.i.p.al of a Collegiate Inst.i.tution," accustomed to examine boys in Attic or Latian geography; was not familiar with Thucydides or Grote; was indifferent to the Amphictyonic Council; and, in the vicinity of Salamis and Marathon, probably read the past no more than a Brahmin would in travelling over Edgehill or Marston Moor. The world of each man must be measured from his own spiritual centre, and will take in much less in one direction, much more in another, than is spread beneath his eye. He cannot be reached by geographical approaches. You may determine the elements of his...o...b..t, and yet miss him after all.

It is an illusory process to paint the ancient world as it would look to an h.e.l.lenic gentleman then, or a university scholar now; and then think how St. Paul would feel in pa.s.sing through it to convert it. The indirect influence of this kind of conception seems to us apparent both in Mr. Conybeare"s translation and Mr. Howson"s narrative and descriptions. The outward scene and conditions of the Apostle"s career are elaborately displayed; but more with the modern academic than with the old Hebrew tone of coloring; and the English version, scrupulous and delicate as it is, has, to our taste, a general flavor quite different from the original Greek. Unconsciously entangled in the cla.s.sifications and symbols of the Protestant theology, the authors are detained outside the real genius and feeling of the Apostle.

Of a far higher order are the other two works,--produced, we infer from their numerous correspondences of both form and substance, not without concert between the authors. Indeed, the same explanation of the merits of Lachmann"s text (printed without translation by Mr.

Stanley, and with the adapted authorized version by Mr. Jowett) is made to serve for both. So clearly and compendiously is this explanation drawn, that, in the next edition of Lachmann, Mr. Jowett"s introduction might usefully be annexed to the great critic"s rather tangled and awkward preface. Of the superior fidelity of this recension, we think no habitual reader of the Greek Scriptures can reasonably doubt; and the recognition of its authority fulfils a prior condition of all scientific theology. The text being chosen on grounds purely critical, the notes are written in a spirit purely exegetical; they aim, simply and with rare self-abnegation, to bring out, by every happy change of light and turn of reflective sympathy, the great Apostle"s real thought and feeling. How very far this faithful historic purpose in itself raises the interpreter above the crowd of erudite and commenting divines, can scarcely be understood till it has formed a new generation, and fixed itself as a distinct intellectual type. It is not, however, an affair of mere will and disposition; but, like most of the higher exercises of veracity, comes into operation only as the last result of mental tact and affluence. With the most honest intentions towards St. Paul, a critic without psychological insight and dialectic pliancy, without power of melting down his modern abstractions and redistributing them in the moulds of the old realistic thought,--a critic without entrance into the pa.s.sionate depths of human nature,--a critic pre-occupied by Catholic or Protestant a.s.sumptions, and untrained to imagine the questions and interests of the first age,--_cannot_ surrender himself to the natural impression of the Apostle"s language. The disciple and the master are, in such case, at cross-purposes with one another; the questions put are not the questions answered; the interlocutors do not really meet, but wind in a maze about each other"s _loci_, not to end till the unconscious interpreter has set his fantasies within the shadow of inspiration. No such blind chase is possible to our authors. They have achieved the conditions of fidelity; and bring to a task, in which the truthful and sagacious spirit of Locke had already fixed the standard high, the ampler resources of modern learning, and more practised habit of historic combination. In the distribution of their work, the difference of natural genius between the two authors has perhaps been consulted, and is, at all events, distinctly expressed. Mr. Stanley"s apt.i.tude for reproducing the image of the past, his apprehensive sympathy with the concrete and individual elements of the world, fitly engage themselves with the composite forms of Corinthian society, and the most personal, various, and objective of the Apostle"s letters.

For the more speculative Epistles to the Galatians and the Romans, there was need of Mr. Jowett"s philosophical depth and subtilty. The strictness with which he restrains these seductive gifts to the proper business of the interpreter, is not less admirable than their occasional happy application. Instead of being employed to force upon the Apostle a logical precision foreign to his habit, they are chiefly engaged in detecting and wiping out false niceties of distinction drawn by later theology, and throwing back each doctrinal statement into its original degree of indeterminateness. It is not in the notes,--which are wholly occupied in recovering St. Paul"s own thought,--but in the interposed disquisitions, which avowedly deal with the theology of to-day, that a certain breadth and balance of statement, and delicate ease in manuvring the forms and ant.i.theses of abstract thought, and fine appreciation of human experience, make us feel the double presence of metaphysical power and historical tact.

The author, accordingly, appears to us, not only to have seized the great Apostle"s att.i.tude of mind more happily than any preceding English critic, but also to have separated the essence from the accidents of the Pauline Christianity, and disengaged its divine elements for transfusion into the organism of our immediate life. Mr.

Stanley appears to have more difficulty in unreservedly adhering to the purely historical view, and clerically flutters, without clear occasion, on the outskirts of "edification";--the critic in his notes, the preacher in his paraphrase; conceding in act more readily than in name, and apologizing for finding human ingredients in the Apostles and their doctrines, as if it were he, and not _G.o.d_, that would have them there. This tendency to blur the lines which he himself draws between the temporary and the permanent in the Scriptures with which he deals, is the only fault we can find with Mr. Stanley; whose a.s.sociate, clinging less to the past, in effect preserves more for the present. To learn the external scene of the Apostle"s career, we would refer our readers to Messrs. Conybeare and Howson; to appreciate his moral surroundings, and the problems it presented, especially on the ethnic side, they may take Mr. Stanley as their guide; but for insight into the Apostle himself, and outlook on the world as it seemed to him, they must resort to Mr. Jowett.

The Pauline Epistles are interesting, apart from all a.s.sumption of inspired authority, because the elements are seen fermenting there of the greatest known revolution both in the history of the world and in the spiritual consciousness of individual man. Judaism was the narrowest (that is, the most _special_) of religions; Christianity, the most human and comprehensive. Within a few years, the latter was evolved out of the former; taking all its intensity and durability, without resort to any of its limitations. This marvellous expansion of the national into the universal was not achieved without a process and a conflict. Divine though the work was, it had to be wrought upon men, and through men, whose character, interests, convictions, habits, and inst.i.tutions furnished the data conditioning the problem, and whose remodelled affections and will supplied the instruments for its solution. The laws of human nature, therefore, and the action of human events, necessarily enter into the study of this great revolution; and it cannot be detained out of the hands of the historian by any exclusive rights of the divine.

When we endeavor to trace the successive steps of faith from Mount Zion to the Vatican, many parts of the progress appear to have left but scanty vestige. We know the beginning, in the doctrine of the Hebrew Messiah; we know the end, in the recognition of a Saviour of the world.

We know the intermediate fact,--that Judaism did not surrender its own without a struggle, or readily give away the keys of its enclosure just when it was pa.s.sing from a prison of affliction into a palace of "the kingdom." But within this general fact lies a world of mysterious detail,--nay, almost the whole life of the early Church. Who began the open breach between Messiah and the Law? how, and to what extent, did the parties divide? what was their relative magnitude at different times and in different places? and by what process was the difference terminated, and the two extremes--Marcion on the one hand and the Ebionites on the other--removed outside as heretics? The Christianity of the third century is so little like the doctrine of Matthew"s Gospel as to perplex our sense of ident.i.ty. No one can bring the two into direct comparison, without feeling how much must have happened to shape the earlier into the form of the later. Could we trace the flow and estimate the sources of this change, the most wonderful of the world"s experiences would be resolved. The continuity, however, of visible causation is often broken; there are everywhere many missing links in the chain, and a chasm extending through a large part of the second century. But a generation earlier we meet with materials of the richest value in the Epistles of St. Paul; and by their aid the general direction may be found by which thought and events must have advanced.

Otherwise, the change would seem as violent and inconceivable as a convulsion that should mingle the Jordan and the Tiber.

No doubt, the germ of the Gospel"s universality is to be found in the personal characteristics of its Author,--in the whole spirit of his life, and the direct tendency of his teachings. He who found in the love of G.o.d and love of man the very springs of eternal life; who measured good and evil, not by the act, but by the affection whence they come; who placed his ideal for man in likeness to the perfection of G.o.d,--had already proclaimed a religion transcending all local limits. Nay, if he opposed the "true worship" to the services at Gerizim and Jerusalem, and could wish the Temple away, that obstructed his direct dealing with the human soul and suppressed the inner shrine "not made with hands," he must even have placed himself in an att.i.tude of open alienation towards the ritual of his people. At the same time, his words seem to have left not unfrequently an opposite impression.

He comes, "not to destroy the Law and the prophets, but to fulfil"

them; "not a jot or a t.i.ttle is to fail." His most spiritual truths and sentiments, instead of being announced as novelties grounding themselves on his personal authority, are drawn out of the old Hebrew Scriptures; and even the life beyond death he finds lurking in patriarchal idioms and phrases heard at the burning bush. His intensest polemic against the sacerdotal party goes on within the limits of the system which they represent and yet corrupt; and his bitterest reproach against them is that there is no reverence for it in their hearts, since they hugely violate and trivially obey it. Far from ever launching out against law _as_ law, or setting up faith as a rival principle excluding it, he extends _precept_ to the last heights of religion, _enjoins_ the divinest affections, as if _there also_ obedience was possible, and duty and volition had their place. It was not in a nature holy and harmonious as his,--type of heavenly peace rather than of earthly conflict,--that the schism would be exhibited between Will and Love; where both are at their height, there is no rent between them. Nor was there need, in that meek, reverential soul, to break with the past, in order to find a sanct.i.ty for the present, and leave an inspiration for the future. Some things, once given for the hardness of men"s hearts, might be dropped, and fall behind; but G.o.d had ever lived, and left the trace of his perfectness upon the elder times as on the newest manifestations of the hour. There was enough in the Law, if only its fruitful seeds were warmed into life, to furnish forth the Gospel. And so Christ presents himself as the disciple of Moses, and in the Sermon on the Mount does but open out the tables of Sinai. It was not, therefore, without honest ground that his immediate disciples could defend him from the charge of being unfaithful to the religion of his native land. And yet the instinct of the priests and rabbis told them truly that he and they could not co-exist, that his doctrine reduced their work to naught, and that, whencesoever he might draw it, there was no doubt whither he must carry it. The "witnesses" were not altogether "false" which they brought to show his inner hostility to the altar ceremonial; and perhaps his enemies, with apprehension sharpened by fear, more correctly interpreted his tendency in this direction than his followers, entangled in the cloud of a Judaic love. It was quite natural that the real ant.i.thesis between the Law and the Gospel should thus be first felt by his antagonists, whilst as yet it slept undeveloped in the minds of his followers and in the habitual expression of his own thought; and that its earliest proclamation should be _their_ act, _their_ defiance, the cross on Calvary!

This terrible challenge, fiercely protesting that the Law would hold no parley with the Gospel, the Apostles, however, refused to accept.

They still denied their Lord"s apostasy or their own; they had always been, and with his encouragement, the best of Jews: nor did they contemplate, so far, any change. The crucifixion was a Jewish mistake, meant for the nation"s enemy, but alighting on its representative; a mistake, however, which G.o.d had counteracted by a glorious rescue, in the resurrection of the crucified. The mischief being thus undone, the day of Hebrew opportunity was resumed; the ministry of Jesus was not closed; he yet lived and preached to them as before;--no longer, indeed, in person till their better mind should re-a.s.sert itself, but by "faithful witnesses";--no longer too in tentative disguise, but now identified as Messiah by his exaltation above this world. Whatever conflicts of mind the disciples suffered in the mysterious period following the crucifixion, the operation of the resurrection and the Spirit was at first simply to reinstate them in their prior faith,--that the kingdom would soon be restored to Israel, and be brought in by no other than their Master, already waiting for the crisis in a higher world till G.o.d"s hour should come. There is no evidence to show that, on the transference of their Lord"s life from earth to heaven, they were carried into any greater comprehensiveness or spirituality of faith: their convictions were more intense, but held on in the same direction, being all included in one great theme,--the speedy coming of Messiah"s kingdom and the end of the world. Nay, of so little consequence, in comparison with this _general_ picture of expectation, was even the appearance in it of the person of Jesus as its central figure, that Apollos, more than twenty years afterwards, was making and baptizing converts, without having ever heard of any later prophet than John the Baptist; and these people are already recognized as "disciples," and then informed, as needful complement to their faith, that, besides the crisis being near, the person is appointed.[58] Here had evidently been, for some quarter of a century, two independent streams of Messianic faith, one from a rather earlier source than the other, but pursuing their own separate way, till thus partially confluent at Ephesus. And what is the relation between them? One of them baptizes into an impersonal and anonymous hope, the other into the same hope with the name attached.

And when these two states of mind are set side by side, they are regarded as the same in their essence, and differing only in completeness. Nor is there anything in their mutual feeling to hinder their instant coalescence. This fact defines in the clearest way the position of the early Church; the ordinary Jew believed that Messiah would _some time_ come, and bring in "the last days"; Apollos, that he would come _erelong_; the Christians, that already _the person_ was indicated, and would prove to be Jesus of Nazareth. All three co-existed within the Hebrew pale, and the two last fall under the common category of "disciples."

It was impossible, however, that the contemplation of a Messiah risen and reserved in heaven should affect all the believers in a precisely similar manner. His personal attendants it would take up just where the crucifixion had let them down; would give new force to their previous impressions, new sacredness to their recollections, new significance to his words and example, new reluctance to venture where he had not led. The whole effect would be conservative, and tend to fix them, with an inspired rigor, within the limits of the Master"s lot and life. Quite otherwise was it with the new disciples, who had no such restraining memories of the human Teacher. _They_ began with Christ above, and were tied down by no concrete biographical images, no scruples of tender retrospect. They were free to ask themselves, "What meant this surprising way of revealing Messiah "in heavenly places," and letting his disguise first fall off in his escape from local relations? The scene from which he looked down,--was it the mere upper chamber of Judaea, or did it overarch the human world? Who could claim him, now that he was there? Was it for him to examine pedigrees to test "the children of the kingdom"; or would he, as Son of David, even come emblazoned with his own?" The mere conception of an ascended and immortal being, a.s.sessor to the Lord of _all_, seemed to dwarf and shame all provincial restrictions, and sanction the distaste for binding forms and ceremonial exclusiveness. The withdrawal of Christ to a holier sphere accorded well with all that was most spiritual in his teachings and in himself; and could not fail to reflect a strong light back on this aspect of his life, and give a more significant emphasis to the tradition of his deepest words. In the mind of many a disciple this tendency would be favored by a weariness towards the outer worship of the temple, and a secret aspiration after purer and more intimate communion with G.o.d. Especially was the _foreign_ Jew obliged to confess such a feeling to himself. The very speaking of Greek spoiled him for thinking as a Hebrew; for language is the channel of the soul, and according as the organism is open, the sap will flow. Accustomed to the simple piety of the Proseucha, where G.o.d was sought without priest or sacrifice, and adequately found in poetry, and prophecy, and prayer, the h.e.l.lenist acquired a tone of sentiment on which the material pomps and puerilities of Mount Moriah painfully jarred. Nor could he enclose himself contentedly, like the Palestine Jew, within the sacred boundary that admitted the most worthless son of Abraham, and shut the n.o.blest Gentile out. Living in heathen cities, dealing with heathen men, touched at times with the sorrow or the goodness of heathen neighbors, his moral feeling fell into contradiction with his inherited exclusiveness, and inwardly demanded some other providential cla.s.sification of mankind.

Accordingly, it was the h.e.l.lenist Stephen who first saw, in the heavenly Christ, a principle of universal religion and a proclamation of spiritual worship. When accused of defaming Moses and the Law and the holy place, and setting up Jesus to supersede them, he boldly reflects on the stone Temple, rooted to one spot, as at variance with His nature who said, "Heaven is my throne, and earth my footstool,"

and points to the earlier tabernacle, movable from place to place, following the steps of wandering humanity, as truer emblem of a faith that takes every winding of history, and a G.o.d who goes where we go, and stays where we stay.[59] This n.o.ble doctrine doubtless expressed a feeling common among the foreign Jews of liberal culture and fervid piety; and when consecrated by Stephen"s martyrdom, it would a.s.sume a distinctness unknown before, and become the admitted type of belief among the Christian h.e.l.lenists. That it was confined to them is evident from the partial effect of the persecution in which Stephen fell. _His_ friends,--perhaps we may say his _party_,--hunted from house to house, fled from Jerusalem; but the Jewish Apostles remained where they were,[60] apparently unmenaced and undisturbed. The hostility of the city drew therefore a distinction between such Hebrew Christians as the twelve, and the freer "Grecians" who proclaimed a Spirit above the Temple and the Law. The former, const.i.tuting an inner sect of Judaism, might hold their ground unmolested; the latter were treated as apostates, and "scattered abroad." The essential, but hitherto dormant, ant.i.thesis between the Gospel and the Law, had thus burst into expression, and embodied itself in two sections of the Church that grew ever more distinct; the Hebrew party concentrated in Jerusalem, and remaining intensely national; the h.e.l.lenistic, spreading itself on the outskirts of Palestine, and erelong fixing its head-quarters at Antioch. Within this freer circle, first as persecutor, soon as disciple, appears Saul of Tarsus. So congenial are its tendencies and aspirations with his nature and his antecedent position, that his hostile att.i.tude towards it might well strike him, on looking back, as a monstrous self-contradiction. A foreigner to Palestine, a "citizen of no mean city," familiar with a trade that bought from the shepherds of Mount Taurus, and sold to the Greek skippers of the Levant, he knew the human side of the Gentile world too well to rest in a narrow Judaism. We cannot imagine his fervid, free-moving mind, content to live within the enclosure of Rabbinical niceties, or able to find, in the materialism of the Temple rites, his ideal of true worship. With sympathies essentially cosmopolitan, he could scarcely fail to be disappointed, not to say repelled, by Jerusalem,--so different from the dream of his young romance. Some higher, fresher communion between earth and heaven, some wider monarchy for G.o.d than over a mere clan, would be to him natural objects of aspiration. Hence his first persecuting att.i.tude towards the Christian h.e.l.lenists was permanently untenable; and as he went amongst them, words were sure to fall upon his ear, and holy looks to meet his eye, that would smite him with a kindred affection. Whether the death of Stephen left on his mind images which he could not banish, and commenced a reaction which no plunge into fresh violences could arrest, it is vain to conjecture. That it should be so, would be only human; for in the life of pa.s.sion, triumph and humiliation are near neighbors, and often the last note in the song of exultation dies down into the plaint of compunction. Certain it is, that shortly afterwards it "pleased G.o.d to reveal his Son in him"; that, with the suddenness characteristic of impa.s.sioned natures, he came to himself, and found his proper work, "to which he had been set apart from his mother"s womb"; and that his new convictions were of the very same type and tendency with Stephen"s, and strongly discriminated from the Messianic doctrine of the twelve at Jerusalem. The incipient breach between Law and Gospel, latent in the Master, denied by the twelve, bursting forth among the h.e.l.lenists, finally realized and defined itself in Paul; whose intense impulses were too great for the custody of his will; whose soul had wings to fly, but not feet to plod; who felt himself the theatre of living powers not his own, and could find no peace till, by communion with the heavenly Son of G.o.d, he discovered a providential love universal as human life, and a way of reconciliation quick and open as human trust and reverence. It is easier to speak of the effects than of the nature of his conversion.

His writings exhibit its results, but only vaguely allude to its occurrence, and never in terms at all resembling the recitals in the Book of Acts, or abating their discrepancies. Of these narratives (Acts ix. 1-9, xxii. 6-12, xxvi. 12-18) Mr. Jowett remarks, "There is no use in attempting any forced reconcilement." (I. 229.) On the one hand, "There is no fact in history more certain or undisputed than that, in some way or other, by an inward vision or revelation of the Lord, or by an outward miraculous appearance as he was going to Damascus, the Apostle was suddenly converted from being a persecutor to become a preacher of the Gospel." (I. 227.) On the other, "If we submit the narrative of the Acts to the ordinary rules of evidence, we shall scarcely find ourselves able to determine whether any outward fact was intended by it or not." This, however, is of the less moment, because it is evident from the language of the Epistle to the Galatians (Gal. i. 15, 16) that,--

"Whether the conversion of St. Paul was an outward or an inward fact, it was not princ.i.p.ally the outward appearance in the heavens, but the inward effect, that the Apostle would have regarded. Compare Eph. iii.

3: "How that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery (as I wrote afore in few words)."

"It has been often remarked, that miracles are not appealed to singly in Scripture as evidences of religion, in the same way that they have been used by modern writers. Especially does this remark apply to the conversion of St. Paul. Not a hint is found in his writings, that he regarded "the heavenly vision" as an objective evidence of Christianity. The evidence to him was the sudden change of heart; what he terms, in the case of his converts, the reception of the Spirit; what he had known, and what he felt; the fact that one instant he was a persecutor, and the second a preacher of the Gospel. The last inquiry that he would have thought of making, would be that of modern theologians: "How, without some outward sign, he could be a.s.sured of the reality of what he had seen and heard." No outward sign could, as such, have convinced the mind of a man who fell to the ground amazed, unless it were certain that his companions had seen the light and heard the voice. Nor unless they had distinctly been partakers of the supernatural vision could he ever have been satisfied that what they saw was anything but a meteor, or lightning, or that the voice they heard was more than the sound of thunder. No evidence of theirs would have been an answer to the language of some of the rationalist divines: "St. Paul was overtaken by a storm of thunder and lightning in the neighborhood of Damascus."

Such difficulties are insuperable; at best we can only raise probabilities in answer to them, based on the general tone of the narrative in Acts ix. But we may remember that the belief in some outward fact was not the essential point in St. Paul"s faith, and therefore we need not make it the essential point in our own.

"It is not upon the testimony of any single person, even were it far more distinct than in the present instance, we can venture to peril the truth of the Christian religion. Weak defences of comparatively unimportant points, undermine more than they support. He who has the Spirit of Christ and his Apostles, has the witness in himself; he who leads the life of Paul, has already set his seal that his words are true. Were the other view supported by the most irrefragable historical evidence,--had the sign in the clouds been beheld by whole mult.i.tudes of Jews and Gentiles, believers and unbelievers,--it is to the internal aspect of the event we should be more inclined to turn, both as the more religious one, and the one which more closely links the Apostle with ourselves."--Vol. I. p. 230.

With the essentially inward character of this crisis, the substance of the revelation involved in it strikingly corresponds.

"It was spiritual rather than historical; a revelation of Christ in him, not external information brought to him. It was the ever-growing sense of union with Christ, imparted, not in one revelati

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