Chapter XX: Part 20

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 God's truth. For myself I indulge a joyful hope that the next century of Christendom will be nobler 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 mass 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 God and become simply an existence in God; did we exchange self-assertion 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 sanctities 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 God, 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 assume _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 God 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., Principal of the Collegiate Institution,
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 title-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 attitude; 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 God 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 noble 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 "Horæ Paulinæ." 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 documents, 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 illustrated 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 archæological 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 "Principal of a Collegiate Institution," 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 orbit, and yet miss him after all. It is an illusory process to paint the ancient world as it would look to an Hellenic gentleman then, or a university scholar now; and then think how St. Paul would feel in passing 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 classifications 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 passionate depths of human nature,--a critic pre-occupied by Catholic or Protestant assumptions, 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 aptitude 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 manœuvring the forms and antitheses 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 attitude 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 _God_, 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 associate, 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 assumption 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 institutions 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 passing 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 identity. 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 God 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 God,--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 attitude 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 tittle 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 sanctity 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 God 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 antithesis 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 God 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-assert 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 God'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 Judæa, 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, assessor 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 God. 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 God was sought without priest or sacrifice, and adequately found in poetry, and prophecy, and prayer, the Hellenist 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 noblest 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 classification of mankind. Accordingly, it was the Hellenist 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 God who goes where we go, and stays where we stay.[59] This noble 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 assume a distinctness unknown before, and become the admitted type of belief among the Christian Hellenists. 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, constituting an inner sect of Judaism, might hold their ground unmolested; the latter were treated as apostates, and "scattered abroad." The essential, but hitherto dormant, antithesis 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 Hellenistic, 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 attitude 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 God than over a mere clan, would be to him natural objects of aspiration. Hence his first persecuting attitude towards the Christian Hellenists 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 passion, 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 God to reveal his Son in him"; that, with the suddenness characteristic of impassioned 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 Hellenists, 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 God, 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 principally 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 assured 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 multitudes 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 revelation, but many; not only by special revelation, but as the inward experience of a long life, from which his union in Christ with all mankind, and his mission to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles, were from the beginning inseparable; as a part of which the image of the meekness and gentleness of Christ formed itself in him, not without the remembrance that he had 'seen' Him who was now passed into the heavens."--Jowett, Vol. I. p. 216.

Since the Apostle "nowhere speaks of any special truths or doctrines as imparted to himself" (I. 72); since he never dwells on the life of Christ, the miracles, the parables, so that it is even doubtful what he knew of them; and since his whole appeal is either, (1.) to the witness of the Hebrew Scriptures, or (2.) to historical testimony, or (3.) to the assurance of the living Spirit,--it is evident that his conversion chiefly gave him that inward image of Christ crucified and risen, which attended him through all his years, and so lived in him as to take the place of his personality, and coalesce with his spiritual affections, and do the work of his will.

Of the Apostle's mode of thought when fresh from his conversion no memorial exists; his earliest extant writing being of a date fourteen or fifteen years later, and the report in the Book of Acts not being altogether reliable--as Mr. Jowett has shown[61]--for historical accuracy. But we learn from his own remarkable statement to the Galatians, that he kept aloof from the churches in Judæa, and was unknown to them by face; that it was three years before he entered Jerusalem, or saw an Apostle; that he then made acquaintance with Peter, and met James, but without its affecting his independent course, which ran through eleven years more ere it brought him to Jerusalem again; that his errand, on this second visit, was to take security against being thwarted by Jewish jealousies sanctioned at head-quarters; that from James, Cephas, and John--the "seeming pillars" of the Church--he learnt nothing that he cared to hear; that they, on the other hand, could not gainsay the independent rights of so fruitful an apostleship, and agreed with him not to cross his path, if he would leave them theirs. The emphasis with which, in this animated passage, St. Paul dwells on the separate sources of his own faith, and disowns any obligation to the prior Apostles, renders it certain that the biography, the discourses, the human personality of Jesus, were indifferent to him; and that with only the cross and the resurrection (contained as data in the vision of conversion) he could construct his scheme. The unmistakable sarcasm of the expressions, οι δοκουντες,--δοκουντες ειναι τι--οι δοκουντες στυλοι ειναι,--betrays a state of mind, in regard to the twelve, out of all sympathy with the grounds of their authority. And the necessity, in order to agreement, of marking out for each, not a separate geographical beat, but a distinct religious and ethnologic ground, shows that, with external mutual toleration, there is yet wanting the inner unity of an identic faith. Only in the absence of a common Gospel would each party have to take its own, and spare the other. Indeed, the difference was so fundamental as to involve everything that St. Paul then, and Christians now, would deem characteristic of their religion.

The question was this,--"How might a born Gentile become a Christian?"--"By becoming a Jew first, and then accepting Jesus as appointed to be the Jews' Messiah," was the answer at Jerusalem. "By believing in Jesus straightway," was the reply of Paul. With irresistible force he contended that, according to his opponents' view, the Gospel opened no door at all, and was simply nugatory. For it had _always_ been possible for a Gentile to become a Jew; and if, without this step, faith in Christ was unavailing, the real efficacy must lie in what the Jew brought to Christ, not in what he received from him; so that it was hard to say what good there could be in passing on from Moses at all, or what essential difference between the unconverted and the converted Hebrew. And, in truth, they were _not_ strongly contrasted in Jerusalem; and in habit, thought, and feeling, the twelve were probably much nearer to Gamaliel than to Paul. The altercation between Peter and Paul at Antioch is full of instruction on this point; proving, as it does, that the intensest form of ritual exclusiveness--the refusal to partake at table with the uncircumcised--was retained in the parent church, and enforced with jealous vigilance. In the Syrian capital the Gentile disciples were numerous, the Pauline comprehensiveness prevailed, and the intercourses of life were unhindered by ceremonial scruples. Peter, thrown amongst them on a visit, yields to the local impression, and, as long as he can do so unobserved, falls in with their free ways; feeling all the while, no doubt, like the Quaker from home tempted into a ball-dress or regimentals. Soon, however, the strict brethren at Jerusalem send to look after him or the Antiochians, and instantly his liberality is gone; he is the prim Jew again, and the Gentile dishes are all unclean. And who then are these new witnesses, that he should fear their report? They are deputies from James, "the brother of the Lord," who, on account of this affinity,[62] was the recognized head of the Judæan Christians; and of whose ascetic abstinences, and constant devotions _on the temple pavement_, till "his knees were become like the knees of a camel," Hegesippus preserved the tradition.[63] It was clear, therefore, that Peter's association with the Gentile Christians was exceptional,--a violation of his professed rule, and of the allowed usage of the Apostolic Church. To own brotherhood with the uncircumcised believer, was a forfeiture of character, probably an outrage on his own conscience, to the Christian Apostle! This was the result, among his first disciples, of nearly twenty years' belief of Christ in heaven. There could be no real sympathy between such an evangile and Paul's. It let him make converts, but would not acknowledge them when made. It could not resist the fact of his success, but treated his "children in the faith" as in a doubtful case, left to Heaven's "uncovenanted mercies," and needing to be put in a securer state, as soon as his back was turned, and teachers could be sent to complete the task. Hence the opposition that tracked the steps, and so much marred the work of the Apostle, wherever he went; and in repelling which he wrote his chief Epistles, and matured the form of his great theology. Mr. Jowett, whilst allowing that this opposition was systematic and persistent, and in some degree connived at by the twelve, is yet anxious to lay it mainly to the charge of their followers, and defines the relation of the two sections thus: "Separation, not opposition; antagonism of the followers rather than of the leaders; personal antipathy of the Judaizers to St. Paul, rather than of St. Paul to the twelve." (I. 326.) These are fine distinctions, and for this very reason likely, we fear, in the rough movement of human passions, to be more ideal than real. True, the feeling of a leader is ever apt to run into exaggeration among the followers; nor probably was Apostolic control over the mass of believers so complete as to exclude this danger. But the Epistle to the Galatians is written by one leader, and speaks of the others; and the impression it conveys is surely one of very decided antagonism, and that, too, not accidental, but depending on permanent differences of principle, which discussion did not smooth away, and which penetrated into the very organism of daily life. In the altercation with Peter, what was the point of Paul's rebuke? Did he simply censure his moral weakness and inconsistency? Not so, or he would have exhorted him to take whichever course he approved, and stick to it. Did he find fault with his _exceptional_ act, of eating with the Gentile Christians? Not so, for he did the same himself. The thing he blamed was nothing less than the rule and usage by which Peter _habitually lived_, and which, it is declared, virtually made Christ of none effect. Here was a collision of irreconcilable principles, and every subsequent occasion of personal contact, under like conditions, would be as liable to produce it as the first. Nor have we, in fact, any reason to suppose a closer approximation at a later part of the Apostolic age. That Paul looked with any particular respect on the other Apostles, is surely not proved, as Mr. Jowett imagines, by his appeal (1 Cor. xv. 5) to their testimony respecting the _fact_ of their Lord's resurrection, or by his claiming (1 Cor. ix. 5) to stand on a like footing of privilege with them.[64] To produce the spectators of an event as its proper witnesses, is no expression of feeling towards them at all; and to say, "Are the other Apostles to have the right of taking their wives with them at the cost of the Church, and may not I take or decline my mere personal maintenance as I think proper?" institutes a comparison in which it is difficult to discover any strong sentiment of "respect." Nor do the doctrinal agreements, of which, as well as of the personal relations of fellowship, our author makes the most, amount to any substantial concurrence, when we penetrate to the essence from the form. On both sides, says Mr. Jowett, the disciples were baptized into the _same name_. (I. 340.) Yes; but how different the _object named_ as present to their thought; in the one case, the human life in its detail, with the resurrection as its crown; in the other, the cross of Christ that stands between them, and his life in heaven that passes beyond them! Both sections, it is again said, find their _ground_ in the Old Testament. (I. 341.) True: but the one on Moses, the tables, and the holy place; the other, on Adam's nature, and the patriarchs' freedom, and the prophets' insight; the one, moreover, using the ground to intrench the Law for ever; the other, to drive the ploughshare over its ruins, and make it a fruitful field. Once more, it is said that on both sides there was a looking for "the day of the Lord," an expectation of Christ's return to end the world within that generation. (I. 341.) Assuredly, but with such differences in the vision, that, in the apocalyptic picture of the one, Paul is not among the Apostles, or his followers among the white-robed and crowned (Rev. xxi. 14, and ii. 2, 14, 20); while in that of the other, the advent will but perfect and perpetuate a union with Christ, already present to their consciousness, and open to all who live with him in the Spirit. In short, twenty years after the death of Christ, the two elements that were harmonized in him, but are ever apt to part in our imperfect minds, the ethical and the mystical, the historical and spiritual, ascetic concentration and outspreading trust, fell into determinate antithesis, realizing their conflict in the immediate question of Jew and Gentile, and finding their respective representatives in the twelve and St. Paul.