Chapter V: Part 5

It was, indeed, massive, thorough and severe. But it was not in the least degree stiff and pedantic. It was, on the contrary, an intellect of marvelous flexibility. There was no material to which it could not adapt itself and no feat which it could not perform. You may observe this, for example, in the diverse ways in which he addresses different audiences. In one town he has to address a congregation of Jews; in another a gathering of heathen rustics; in a third a crowd of philosophers. To the Jews he invariably speaks, to begin with, about the heroes of their national history; to the ignorant heathen he talks about the weather and the crops; and to the Athenians he quotes their own poets and delivers a high-strung oration; yet in every case he arrives naturally at his own subject and preaches the gospel to each audience in the language of its own familiar ideas. Even outside of his own peculiar sphere altogether, St. Paul was equal to every occasion. During his voyage to Rome, when the skill of the sailors was baffled and the courage of the soldiers worn out by the long-continued stress of weather, he alone remained cheerful and clearheaded; he virtually became captain of the ship, and he saved the lives of his fellow-passengers over and over again.

We think of the intellect of the system-builder as cold. But there is never any coldness about St. Paul's mind. On the contrary, it is always full of life and all on fire. He can, indeed, reason closely and continuously; but, every now and then, his thought bursts up through the argument like a flaming geyser and falls in showers of sparks. Then the argument resumes its even tenor again; but these outbursts are the finest passages in St. Paul. In the same way, Shakespeare, I have observed, while moving habitually on a high level of thought and music, will, every now and then, pause and, spreading his wings, go soaring and singing like a lark sheer up into the blue. When the thought which has lifted him is exhausted, he gracefully descends and resumes on the former level; but these flights are the finest passages in Shakespeare.

3. The intellectual superiority of St. Paul is universally acknowledged; and to those who only know him at a distance this is his outstanding peculiarity. But the close student of his life and character knows, that, great as he was in intellect, he was equally great in heart, perhaps even greater. One of the subtlest students of his life, the late Adolphe Monod, of the French Church, has fixed on this as the key to his character. He calls him the Man of Tears, and shows with great persuasiveness that herein lay the secret of his power.

It is certainly remarkable, when you begin to look into the subject, how often we see St. Paul in the emotional mood, and even in tears. In his famous address to the Ephesian elders he reminded them that he had served the Lord among them with many tears, and again, that he had not ceased to warn everyone night and day with tears. It is not what we should have expected in a man of such intellectual power. But this makes his tears all the more impressive. When a weak, effeminate man weeps, he only makes himself ridiculous; but it is a different spectacle when a man like St. Paul is seen weeping; because we know that the strong nature could not have been bent except by a storm of feeling.

His affection for his converts is something extraordinary. Some have believed that there is evidence to prove that in youth his heart had suffered a terrible bereavement. It is supposed that he had been married, but lost his wife early. He never sought to replace the loss, and he never spoke of it. But the affection of his great heart, long pent up, rushed forth into the channel of his work. His converts were to him in place of wife and children. His passion for them is like a strong natural affection. His epistles to them are, in many places, as like as they can be to love-letters. Listen to the terms in which he addresses them: "Ye are in our heart to die and live with you"; "I will very gladly spend and be spent for you, though, the more abundantly I love you, the less I be loved"; "Therefore, my brethren, dearly beloved and longed for, so stand fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved."

To his fellow-labourers in the Gospel especially, his heart went out in unbounded affection. The long lists of greetings at the close of his epistles, in which the characters and services of individuals are referred to with such overflowing generosity and yet with such fine discrimination, are unconscious monuments to the largeness of his heart. He could hardly mention a fellow-worker without breaking forth into a glowing panegyric: "Whether any do inquire of Titus, he is my partner and fellow-helper concerning you; or our brethren be inquired of, they are the messengers of the churches and the glory of Christ."

There is no more conclusive proof of the depth and sincerity of St. Paul's heart than the affection which he inspired in others; for it is only the loving who are loved. None perhaps are more discriminating in this respect than young men. A hard or pedantic nature cannot win them. But St. Paul was constantly surrounded with troops of young men, who, attracted by his personality, were willing to follow him through fire and water or to go on his messages wherever he might send them. And that he could win mature minds in the same way is proved by the great scene at Miletus, already referred to, where the elders of Ephesus, at parting with him, "all wept sore, and fell on Paul's neck and kissed him, sorrowing most of all for the word which he said, that they should see his face no more."

The nature of St. Paul's work no doubt immensely developed this side of his character, but, before passing from the subject, it is worth remembering how the circumstances of his birth and upbringing were providentially fitted to broaden his sympathies, even before he became a Christian. He was not simply a Jew, but a Hebrew of the Hebrews; and he felt all the pride of a child of that race to which pertained the adoption and the glory and the covenant, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises. He could always put himself in touch at once with a Jewish audience by going back on associations which were as dear to himself as to them. Yet, although so thoroughly a Jew, he belonged by birth to a larger world. He was not born within the boundaries of Palestine, where his sympathies would have been cramped and his horizon narrowed, but in a Gentile city, famous for its beauty, its learning and its commerce; and he was, besides, a freeborn citizen of Rome. We know from his own lips that he was proud of both distinctions; and he thus acquired a cosmopolitan spirit and learned to think of himself as a man amongst men.

Nor ought we, perhaps, to omit here to recall the fact, that he learned in his youth the handicraft of tent-making. This brought him into close contact with common men, whose language he learned to speak and whose life he learned to know--acquirements which were to be of supreme utility in his subsequent career.

* * * * *

Gentlemen, it is generally agreed that a certain modicum of natural gifts is necessary for those who think of entering the ministry. Here is Luther's list of the qualifications of a minister: you will observe that most of them are gifts of nature: 1. He should be able to teach plainly and in order. 2. He should have a good head. 3. Good power of language. 4. A good voice. 5. A good memory. 6. He should know when to stop. 7. He should be sure of what he means to say. 8. And be ready to stake body and soul, goods and reputation, on its truth. 9. He should study diligently. 10. And suffer himself to be vexed and criticized by everyone.

The first consciousness of the possession of unusual powers is not unfrequently accompanied by an access of vanity and self-conceit. The young soul glories in the sense, probably vastly exaggerated, of its own pre-eminence and anticipates, on an unlimited scale, the triumphs of the future. But there is another way in which this discovery may act. The consciousness of unusual powers may be accompanied with a sense of unusual responsibility, the soul inquiring anxiously about the intention of the Giver of all gifts in conferring them. It was in this way that Jeremiah was affected by the information that special gifts had been conferred on him in the scene to which I have already referred in this lecture. He concluded at once that he had been blessed with exceptional talents in order that he might serve his God and his country with them. And surely in a gifted nature there could be no saner ambition than, if God permitted it, to devote its powers to the ministry of His Son.

There is no other profession which is so able to absorb and utilise talents of every description. This is manifest in regard to such talents as those mentioned by Luther--a good voice, a good memory, etc. But there is hardly a power or an attainment of any kind which a minister cannot use in his work. How philosophical power can serve him may be seen in the preaching of Dr. Chalmers, whose sermons were always cast in a philosophical mould. The philosophy was not very deep; it was not too difficult for the common man; but it gave the preaching a decided air of distinction. How scientific acquirements may be utilised is shown in the sermons of some of our foremost living preachers, who find an inexhaustible supply of illustrations in their scientific studies. Literary style may supply the feather to wing the arrow of truth to its mark. That poetic power may serve the preacher it is not necessary to prove on the spot where Ray Palmer wrote "My faith looks up to Thee." Business capacity is needed in church courts and in the management of a congregation. In some other professions men have to bury half their talents; but in ours there is no talent which will not find appropriate and useful exercise.

We perhaps lay too much stress, however, on intellectual gifts and attainments. These are the only ones which are tested by our examinations in college; yet there are moral qualities which are just as essential.

The polish given by education tells, no doubt; but the size of the primordial mass of manhood tells still more. In a quaint book of Reminiscences recently published from the pen of a notable minister of the last generation in the Highlands of Scotland, Mr. Sage of Resolis, there is a criticism recorded, which was passed by a parishioner on three successive ministers of a certain parish: "Our first minister," said he, "was a man, but he was not a minister; our second was a minister, but he was not a man; and the one we have at present is neither a man nor a minister."

There is no demand which people make more imperatively in our day than that their minister should be a man. It is not long since a minister was certain of being honoured simply because he belonged to the clerical profession and wore the clerical garb. People, as the saying was, respected his cloth. But ours is a democratic age, and that state of public feeling is passing away. There is no lack of respect, indeed, for ministers who are worthy of the name; perhaps there is more of it than ever. But it is not given now to clerical pretensions, but only to proved merit. People do not now respect the cloth, unless they find a man inside it.

Perhaps the educational preparation through which we pass at college is not too favourable to this kind of power. In the process of cutting and polishing the natural size of the diamond runs the risk of being reduced. When we are all passed through the same mill, we are apt to come out too much alike. A man ought to be himself. Your Emerson preached this doctrine with indefatigable eloquence. Perhaps he exaggerated it; but it is a true doctrine; and it is emphatically a doctrine for preachers. What an audience looks for, before everything else, in the texture of a sermon is the bloodstreak of experience; and truth is doubly and trebly true when it comes from a man who speaks as if he had learned it by his own work and suffering.

It will generally be noticed in any man who makes a distinct mark as a preacher that there is in his composition some peculiarity of endowment or attainment on which he has learned to rely. It may be an emotional tenderness as in McCheyne, or a moral intensity as in Robertson of Brighton, or intellectual subtlety as in Candlish, or psychological insight as in Beecher. But something distinctive there must be, and, therefore, one of the wisest of rules is, Cultivate your strong side.

But what tells most of all is the personality as a whole. This is one of the prime elements in preaching. The effect of a sermon depends, first of all, on what is said, and next, on how it is said; but, hardly less, on who says it. There are men, says Emerson, who are heard to the ends of the earth though they speak in a whisper.[44] We are so constituted that what we hear depends very much for its effect on how we are disposed towards him who speaks. The regular hearers of a minister gradually form in their minds, almost unawares, an image of what he is, into which they put everything which they themselves remember about him and everything which they have heard of his record; and, when he rises on Sunday in the pulpit, it is not the man visible there at the moment that they listen to, but this image, which stands behind him and determines the precise weight and effect of every sentence which he utters.

* * * * *

Closely connected with the force of personality is the other power, which St. Paul possessed in so supreme a degree, of taking an interest in others. It is the manhood in ourselves which enables us to understand the human nature of our hearers; and we must have had experience of life, if we are to preach to the life of men.

Some ministers do this extremely little. Not once but many a time, I have heard a minister on the Sabbath morning, when he rose up and began to pray, plunging at once into a theological meditation; and in all the prayers of the forenoon there would scarcely be a single sentence making reference to the life of the people during the week. Had you been a stranger alighted from another planet, you would never have dreamed that the human beings assembled there had been toiling, rejoicing and sorrowing for six days; that they had mercies to give thanks for and sins to be forgiven; or that they had children at home to pray for and sons across the sea.

There is an unearthly style of preaching, if I may use the term, without the blood of human life in it: the people with their burdens in the pews--the burden of home, the burden of business, the burden of the problems of the day--whilst, in the pulpit, the minister is elaborating some nice point, which has taken his fancy in the course of his studies, but has no interest whatever for them. Only now and then a stray sentence may pull up their wandering attention. Perhaps he is saying, "Now some of you may reply"; and then follows an objection to what he has been stating which no actual human being would ever think of making. But he proceeds elaborately to demolish it, while the hearer, knowing it to be no objection of his, retires into his own interior.

If what was said in a former lecture about the distinctive difference between the preaching of the Old Testament and that of the new be considered, it will at once be recognised how vital is this aspect of the matter. The prophets of the Old Testament, in common with the thinkers of antiquity in general, thought of men in masses and regarded the individual only as a fragment of a larger whole. But Christ introduced an entirely new way of thinking. To Him the individual was a whole in himself; beneath the habiliments of even the humblest member of the human family there was hidden what was more precious than the entire material world; and on the issues of every life was suspended an immortal destiny. This faith may be said to have made Jesus Christ the Saviour of the world; for He saw in the lost children of men that which made Him live to seek them and die to save them. And it is by this same faith and vision that anyone is qualified to be a fellow-worker with Christ. No one will ever be able to engage with any success in the work of human salvation who does not see men to be infinitely the most interesting objects in the world, and who does not stand in awe before the solemn destiny and the sublime possibilities of the soul. It is by the growth and the glow of this faith that the worth of all ministerial work is measured.

It is far easier, however, to acknowledge this view in the abstract than to cherish it habitually towards the actual men and women of our own sphere and our own vicinity. That man is the most interesting object in the world; that the soul is precious; and that it is better for a human being to lose the whole world than to miss his destiny--these are now commonplaces, which everyone who bears the Christian name will acknowledge. Yet in reality few live under their power. Many a one who has paid the tribute of love and admiration to the spectacle of Christ's compassion for the outcasts, and melted with æsthetic emotion before a picture of the Woman taken in Adultery or the Woman that was a Sinner, has never once attempted to save an actual woman of the same kind in his own city, and would be utterly at a loss if such a one, in an hour of remorse, were to throw herself on his pity and protection. There is a great difference between a sinner in a book or a picture and a sinner in the flesh. Multitudes in their hearts believe that all the remarkable and interesting people lived long ago or that, at any rate, if any are now alive, they live many miles away from their vicinity. They believe that there were remarkable people in the first or the ninth century, but by no means in the nineteenth; they believe that there are interesting people in Paris or London or New York; but they have never discovered anything wonderful in those living in their own village or in their own street. Many who consider themselves enlightened will tell you that their neighbours are a poor lot. They fancy that, if they were living somewhere else, fifty or a hundred miles away, they would find company worthy of themselves; though it is ten to one that, if they made the change, their new neighbours would be a poor lot also.

If a minister allows himself to harbour sentiments of this sort, he is lost.[45] No one will ever win men who does not believe in them. The true minister must be able to see in the meanest man and woman a revelation of the whole of human nature; and in the peasant in the field, and even the infant in the cradle, connections which reach forth high as heaven and far as eternity. All that is greatest in king or kaiser exists in the poorest of his subjects; and the elements out of which the most delicate and even saintly womanhood is made exist in the commonest woman who walks the streets. The harp of human nature is there with all its strings complete; and it will not refuse its music to him who has the courage to take it up and boldly strike the strings. The great preacher is he who, wherever he is speaking, among high or low, goes straight for those elements which are common to all men, and casts himself with confidence on men's intelligence and experience, believing that the just suggestions of reason and the terrors of conscience, the sense of the nobility of goodness and the pathos of love and pity are common to them all.[46]

Let me close this lecture with a few words on a great subject, to which a whole lecture might have been profitably devoted.

No safer piece of advice could be tendered you than to let the beginning of your ministry be marked by care for the young. This is work which more than any other will encourage yourselves, and it is more likely than any other to establish you in the affections of a congregation.

To work successfully among children you must know their life and have the _entrée_ of their little world of interests, excitements, prizes and hopes. It is not difficult to get it, if only we are simple and genuine. Children will approach their minister gladly, and make him their confidant, if only he is accessible to them. By the ministers of an older generation they were kept at an awful distance. When they were out of temper or doing wrong, they were threatened with a visit from the minister in the same way as they might be threatened with the policeman, or the parish beadle, or a still more awful functionary of the universe. This, let us hope, has passed away, and in most parishes a ministerial visit is spoken of as a promise instead of a threat. A minister is proud nowadays if a child flies up to him in the street and ruffles his feathers with boisterous familiarity, or if a group of children pin him into the corner of a room and order him, under pains and penalties, to tell them a story. We are returning to the ideal of Goldsmith, in the _Deserted Village_:--

"The service past, around the pious man
With steady zeal each loyal rustic ran;
Even children followed with endearing wile,
And plucked his gown to share the good man's smile."

More important even than accessibility is genuine respect for the children.

We ought to respect their intelligence. When we are preaching to them, we should give them our very best. I venture to say, that a much larger proportion of the sermons preached to children is never written out than of sermons to adults. The preacher, having thought of two or three lines of remark and got hold of two or three stories, enters the pulpit with these materials lying loosely in his mind, and trusts to the moment for the style of the sermon. Of course, if a man has trained himself to preach in this way always, it is all right; but, if not, it is a mistake. Children are greatly affected by felicity of arrangement and the music of language; they do not know to what their pleasure is due, but they feel it; and, if a preacher has the power of original thought or of beautiful diction, there is no occasion when he should be more liberal in the use of it than when he is addressing them.[47] The truth is, it is a complete mistake to make the children's sermon so different from other sermons as to create the impression that it is the only utterance from the pulpit to which they are expected to listen. It is not easy to get children to begin to listen at all to what is said in church; the children's sermon is a device to catch their attention; but it ought also to be a bridge conducting them over to the habit of listening to all that is said there. If they acquire the habit, they are our best hearers. A boy of twelve or thirteen can follow nearly anything; and there is no keener critic of the logic of a discourse or warmer appreciator of any passage which is worthy of admiration.

But, while we respect the intelligence of the young, there is something else which we need to believe in still more. We do not half realise the drama of religious impression going on in the minds of children. We forget our own childhood and the movements excited in our childish breasts under the preaching of the Word--how real the things unseen were to us; how near God was, His eye flashing on us through the darkness; how our hearts melted at the sufferings of Christ; how they swelled with unselfish aspirations as we listened to the stories of heroic lives; how distinctly the voice of conscience spoke within us; and how we trembled at the prospect of death, judgment and eternity. What we were then, other children are now; and what went on in us is going on in them. It is the man who believes this and reveres it who will reap the harvest in the field of childhood.

There is no surer way to secure for ourselves the interest of the old than to take an interest in the young. Of course a forced interest in children, shown with this in view, would be hypocrisy and deserve contempt. We must love the children for their own sakes. Yet we may quite legitimately nourish our interest in the young by observing that it is one of the strongest instincts of human nature which makes fathers and mothers feel kindnesses shown to their children to be the greatest benefits which can be conferred on themselves. An Edinburgh minister, who has had conspicuous success in preaching to children as well as in every other department of the work of his sacred office, once, in a gathering of divinity students, of whom I was one, told an incident from his own life which is almost too sacred to be repeated by any lips except his own, but which I hope he will excuse me for enriching you with, as it puts in a memorable form one of the truest secrets of ministerial success. On the morning of the day when he was going to be ordained to his first charge, he was leaving his home in the country to travel to the city, and his mother came to the door to bid him good-bye. Holding his hand at parting, she said, "You are going to be ordained to-day, and you will be told your duty by those who know it far better than I do; but I wish you to remember one thing which perhaps they may not tell you--remember, that, whenever you lay your hand on a child's head, you are laying it on its mother's heart."

FOOTNOTES:

[43] "The Sybarites of to-day will tolerate a sermon which is delicate enough to flatter their literary sensuality; but it is their taste which is charmed, not their conscience which is awakened: their principle of conduct escapes untouched.... Amusement, instruction, morals, are distinct _genres_."--AMIEL.

[44] The finest description of a speaker known to me is this of Lord Bacon in Ben Jonson's _Discoveries_; and it is evident that it was the man rather than the manner or even the matter which made the impression: "Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language, where he could spare or pass by a jest, was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spoke; and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was, lest he should make an end."

[45] It has often astonished me to observe how easily ministers' wives in this respect find for themselves the right path. One would think it would be very difficult sometimes for those who have been brought up in cities or in a secluded circle to adapt themselves suddenly to a remote and unselect society; and they have not, like their husbands, had the opportunity of meditating long on the duties of a public position. A hearty and cordial humanity in the members of a minister's family lends an immense assistance to his work. A minister ought to belong to no class of society, but to have the power of moving without constraint in every class.

[46] "Not a heart but has its romance, not a life which does not hide a secret which is either its thorn or its spur. Everywhere grief, hope, comedy, tragedy; even under the petrifaction of old age, as in the twisted forms of fossils, we may discover the agitations and tortures of youth. This thought is the magic wand of poets and preachers."--_Amiel._

[47] This may be a reason for rather devoting a whole diet of worship to the children once a month or once a quarter than only giving them a few minutes every Sabbath. But many follow the latter practice with excellent results. Perhaps there ought to be something specially for the children at every service. If I may mention my own practice, I have, during my whole ministry, preached to children once a month; and every Sunday I have a children's hymn in the forenoon and a prayer for children in the afternoon.

LECTURE VII.

THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN.

In the last lecture I spoke of St. Paul as a Man, showing how remarkable were his endowments and acquirements, and how these told in his apostolic career. But it was not through these that he was what he was. Great as were the gifts bestowed on him by nature and cultivated by education, they were utterly inadequate to produce a character and a career like his. It was what Christianity added to these that made him St. Paul.

It is right enough that we should now recognise the importance of his natural gifts and trace out the ways in which Providence was shaping his life towards its true aim before he was conscious of it. But St. Paul himself had hardly patience for such cool reflections. He turned away with strong aversion from his pre-Christian life as something condemned and lost; and he delighted to attribute all that he was and did to the influence of Christ alone. In my last lecture I quoted a single passage to show that he himself recognised that his natural endowments had been bestowed in order to fit him for the peculiar work which he was destined to accomplish in the world; but I question if from all his writings I could have quoted another passage to the same effect. It was only for a moment that he allowed himself to stand on this point of view; whereas we could quote from every part of his writings such sayings as these: "By the grace of God I am what I am"; "I laboured more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God in me"; "It is no more I that live, but Christ liveth in me."

That this was his habitual way of estimating his own achievements is strikingly illustrated by his mode of thinking and speaking of certain defects in the equipment with which nature had supplied him for the career on which he was embarked. Gifted as he was, even he did not possess all gifts. He lacked one or two of those which might have been thought most essential to his success.

It would appear that he lacked the rotund voice and copious diction of the orator; for his critics were able to allege that, whilst his written style was powerful, his spoken style was contemptible. Painters have represented him as a kind of demi-god, with the stature of an athlete and the grace of an Apollo. But he seems to have been diminutive in stature; and there appears to be evidence to prove that there was that in his appearance which, at first sight, rather repelled than attracted an audience. He felt these defects keenly, and could not but wish sometimes that they were removed. But his habitual and settled feeling about them was, that he ought to look upon them as sources of strength rather than as weaknesses, because they made him rely the more on the strength of Christ. This was an unfailing resource, on which he felt that he could draw without limit. And so he gloried in his infirmities, that the power of Christ might rest upon him.[48]

It might be said that it was only the enthusiasm of Paul which made him attribute to Christ that which really belonged to himself. But his own point of view is the just one. It was Christ who made him; and, if we are to understand a ministry like his, we must try to measure the influence of Christ upon him, or, in other words, investigate the elements of his Christianity.

* * * * *

1. Paul could claim that even in his pre-Christian days he had lived in all good conscience towards both God and man. Yet this profession of uprightness does not prevent him from confessing elsewhere that deep down in his consciousness there had been a mortal struggle between the principles of good and evil, in which the good was far from always winning the victory: "We all," he acknowledges, "had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath even as others." In the seventh chapter of Romans he has drawn a picture of this struggle, and it is to the very life. Theologians have, indeed, disputed among themselves as to the stage of experience there referred to--whether it is the state of an unconverted or of a converted man. But the human heart has no difficulty in interpreting it. The more thoroughly anyone is a man, the more easily will he understand it; and especially the more upright and conscientious anyone is, the more certainly must he have experienced what is described in words like these, "That which I do I allow not, for what I would that do I not, but what I hate that do I"; "For the good that I would I do not, but the evil that I would not that I do"; "I find, then, a law that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man; but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. Oh wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Thus Paul had been a lost man, in hopeless bondage to sin.

But he had to repent of his own righteousness as well as of his sin. He had inherited the passionate longing of the Jewish race for fellowship with God--the longing expressed a hundred times in the poetry of his fathers in words like these: "As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God"; "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?" He had been taught that the great prize of life is to be well-pleasing to God, and he had learned the lesson with all the passionate earnestness of his nature. Yet he never could attain to that for which he longed. There always seemed to be a cloud on the Divine face, and he was kept at a distance. Luther went through the very same experience. His was also a passionately religious nature, and he strove with all his might to get into the sunshine of God's face; but his efforts were entirely baffled. Wash them as he would, his hands were never clean.

What could an earnest nature do in such circumstances but seek to bring still greater sacrifices? Probably this was the source of Paul's zeal in the work of the persecutor. He was vindicating the honour of God when he exterminated the enemies of God. The work must have gone sorely against the grain of a nature as sensitive as his, especially when he saw scenes, like the death of Stephen, in which the gentleness and heroism of his victims shone out with unearthly beauty. But he only flung himself more passionately into his task; because, the more trying it was, the greater was the merit of doing it, and the more certain was he of winning at last the full approval of God.

This portion of Paul's career seems to be capable of complete vindication on the ground of conscientiousness. Indeed, in reviewing it, he stands sometimes on this point of view himself, and says that God had mercy on him because he did it ignorantly in unbelief. But oftener he thinks of it with overwhelming shame and remorse. The whole course of life which had logically led up to work so inhuman in its details and so directly in the face of God's purposes was demonstrated by the issue to have been utterly ungodly. His thoughts had not been God's thoughts nor his ways God's ways. The scenes of the persecution, when, haling men and women, he cast them into prison; the hatred and fury which in those days had raged in his breast; the efforts which he had put forth to oppose the cause of Christ, which it was his firm resolution to extinguish to its last embers--these memories would never afterwards quit his mind. They kept him humble; for he felt that he was the least of the apostles, who was not worthy to be called an apostle, because he had persecuted the Church of God. He called himself the chief of sinners, and believed that God had in his case exhaustively displayed the whole wealth of His mercy for a pattern to all subsequent generations.

The first element of St. Paul's Christianity, then, was the penitence of a lost man and a great sinner, who owed to Christ the forgiveness of his sins and the redemption of his life from an evil career. And he believed that Christ had purchased these benefits for him by the sacrifice of His own life.

2. The second great element of St. Paul's Christianity was his Conversion, which set a gulf between the portion of his life which preceded and the portion which followed it. It was the chief date of his life, and confronted him every time he looked back. Its influence extended to every part of his experience; but perhaps its most important effect was to set Christ up within him as a living Person, of whose reality he was absolutely assured.

Probably Paul's opposition to Christianity was from the first very specially opposition to Christ Himself. When he struck at the disciples, he was really striking at the Master through them. It is easy to conceive what an affront the pretensions of Jesus must have been felt to be by Paul. Jesus had been a man of about his own age--a young man; he had sprung from the lowest of the people, being a villager and mechanic; he had never sat in the schools of learning; the men of ability and authority had had no hesitation in condemning Him. That such a one should be esteemed the Messiah of the Jews and worshipped as if He were Divine, raised a storm of indignation in the heart of Paul.

Probably nothing could have converted him except the miraculous occurrence which God employed. Christ had to come to him in person and in a visible shape--in the shape of the glorified humanity which He wears somewhere in that empire of God which we call Heaven. Paul knew the light in which he was enveloped to be a Divine light; the sound of the voice calling him was the thunder which from of old had been recognised by the race to which he belonged as the voice of God; he was looking straight up to the place of God; and in that place he saw Jesus, whom he was persecuting. Most Divine of all, however, were the sweetness, the clemency and the respect of the words in which he was addressed. This Jesus, against whom he was raging, came to him, not with corresponding rage, to take vengeance and destroy him, but with winning words of truth and with the call to a high and blessed vocation. It was this which broke the heart of Paul and attached him to Christ forever.

He always afterwards believed that what took place on this occasion was what I have said--that Jesus of Nazareth descended from the right hand of God to prove to him who He was and to claim him as His servant and apostle--and never afterwards did he for a moment doubt that the man whom his fellow-countrymen had crucified, and whom he himself had persecuted, was seated on the throne of heaven, clothed with Divine blessedness and omnipotence.

Of course others have doubted this. It may be said that what Paul saw was only a vision, and that therefore his new life was founded on a mistake. I believe his own account to be the correct one; but perhaps we need not dogmatize too much about what he saw; because it was not in reality on any theory of this vision that his faith was founded. It was not because he saw Christ that day with the bodily eye, or believed he did so, that he became or continued a Christian; it was because, trusting Christ, thus revealed, he obtained that for which he had all his life been longing: he was no longer banished or kept at a distance, but brought nigh to God; he was reconciled, and the love of God was shed abroad in his heart. He had all his lifetime been asking in despair, "What must I do to be saved?" but now he was saved. The humiliating bondage in which his spiritual nature had been held was dissolved, and, following Christ, he advanced from victory to victory.

This is the test of all conversions; it is the best evidence of Christianity; and it is the power of preaching. We believe in Christ not only because there is sufficient historical evidence that He existed eighteen hundred years ago and did such acts as proved that He was sent from God, but because He proves Himself to be living now by the transformation which He brings to pass in those who put their trust in Him. We are certain that there is a Saviour, because He has saved ourselves. I am happy to see that this evidence of our religion is at present coming again to the front. One of your younger scholars, Dr. Stearns of Bangor, Maine, has developed it, in a book just published, with great breadth of theological knowledge; and a former Yale lecturer, Dr. Dale of Birmingham, has given a telling exposition of it at the same time.[49] This is the vital force of preaching. We are witnesses to Christ--not merely to a Christ who lived long ago and did wonders, but to a Christ who is alive now and is still doing moral miracles. And the virtue of any man's testimony lies in his being able to say that he has himself seen the Christ whom he preaches to others, and himself experienced the power which he recommends others to seek.

3. After his conversion the whole life of St. Paul was comprehended in one word; and this word was Christ. There has often in modern times been a Christianity which has contained very little of Christ. Mr. Sage, of Resolis, one of whose quaint sayings I quoted in my last lecture, has solemnly left it on record that, when he was a student at Aberdeen, the Professor of Divinity, who was also Principal of the University, in a three years' course of lectures on the principles of the Christian religion, never once mentioned the name of Christ; and in those times sermons were perfectly common in which there was not the slightest allusion to the Saviour. In our day this is entirely changed. Yet we are also surrounded with a Christianity which is extremely vague. Almost every sentiment in which there is anything devout or humane receives the name of Christian; and the question which many are asking is how little it is necessary for one who claims the Christian name to believe and profess. Even this question may, indeed, in some cases indicate a state of mind far from unpromising, which requires the utmost pastoral sympathy and skill; but, if we wish to know what Christianity is in its power, we must not live in this unhealthy region, but find a Christianity in which the distinctively Christian element is not a minimum but a maximum. Such was St. Paul's Christianity. Its most prominent peculiarity was that there was so much of Christ in it. He expressed this in the characteristic saying, "To me to live is Christ," which was only a Greek way of saying, To me life is Christ; and, from whatever side we look at his life, we see that this was true.

Christ had obtained, and He retained, an extensive hold on his emotional nature. St. Paul's was a large heart, and it was all Christ's. We are shy of speaking of our personal feeling towards the Saviour; and we probably feel pretty often that the conventional terms of affection for Him, which are made use of, for example, in the hymns of the Church, transcend our actual experience. St. Paul, on the contrary, has no hesitation in employing about Christ the language commonly used to describe the most absorbing passion, when love is filling life with a sweet delirium and making everything easy which has to be done for the sake of its object. St. Paul's achievements and self-denials were almost more than human; but his own explanation of them was simple: "The love of Christ constraineth us." He had to forego the prizes which to other men make life worth living; but what did he care? "I count them but dung," he says, "that I may win Christ." If only he retained one thing, he was willing to let all others go: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution, or famine or nakedness, or peril or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ our Lord." These sound like the fervours of first love; but they are the words of a man at the height of his powers. And in old age he was still the same: still to him Christ was the star of life, and the hope of being with Him had annihilated the terrors of death: "I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better."

But Christ was enthroned in St. Paul's intellect no less than in his heart. It was an intellect vast in its compass and restless in its movements; but all its movements circled round Christ, and its most powerful efforts were put forth to reach the full height of His glory. Everyone acquainted with his writings knows how full of Christ they are. What is technically called his Christology is both splendid and profound; but, indeed, his whole thinking is Christological; he saw the whole universe in Christ.

Perhaps, however, we see even more suggestively how his whole mind was occupied with this subject by observing the way in which the mere incidental mention of the name of Christ sends him off into the most sublime statements regarding Him. For example, when he is speaking to husbands about loving their wives, the thought strikes him that this love is like that of Christ to His people; and he breaks forth: "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church and gave Himself for it, that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing." In like manner, happening to be recommending generosity, he thinks of the generosity of Christ, and away he breaks into an incomparable description of His descent from the throne of the Highest to the death of the cross: "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God," and so on; and, not content with following Him down, in accordance with the thought with which he started, he pursues the subject under the impulse of sheer love, following Him up to the highest heaven: "Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him and given Him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things in earth and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." When is it that the mind thus starts off into a subject at any chance hint or suggestion, pouring out the most astonishing ideas in the most felicitous language? It is only when it is possessed with it, and when its ideas are so hot and molten, that they are ready to avail themselves of any outlet.

What may be called the inner or spiritual life of St. Paul may most of all be said to have been all Christ. His own theory of this innermost life is that it is a kind of living over again of the life of Christ: we die with Him to sin; we are buried with Him in baptism; as He rose, so we rise again to newness of life; He ascended to sit on the throne of the Father, and we are seated with Him in heavenly places. He is the very soil in which this life grows, and the atmosphere which it breathes; a Christian is "a man in Christ," and all the functions of his interior and even of his exterior life are performed in this element: he speaks in Christ, he marries in Christ, he dies in Christ, and in the resurrection he will rise in Christ.

This is what would be called the mysticism of St. Paul; and doctrines resembling this have sometimes been associated in religion with fantastic speculation and unpractical dreaming. In St. Paul, however, mysticism had no such results. If there was any part of his life on which the influence of Christ was more conspicuous than another, it was the practical part. To him any pretended connection or intercourse with Christ in secret had no meaning unless its outcome was visible in a Christlike life--"If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of His."

To his own person he applied this principle in the most rigorous manner. Christ, he is fond of saying, lives in him; he almost speaks as if in his flesh the Son of God had experienced a second incarnation; but he relentlessly draws the practical conclusion. When Christ lived in His own earthly tabernacle, what did He live for? It was for the salvation of men; He went about continually doing good; He lived to seek and save the lost. If so, then, living in St. Paul, He must have the same purpose--to make use of his powers of mind and body for the salvation of the world. In this way Christ was really still carrying on the work which had been interrupted by His death. St. Paul dares to say that he is filling up that which was lacking of Christ's sufferings for the sake of His body, the Church. He says that the heart of Christ is yearning after men in his heart; that the mind of Christ is scheming for the kingdom of God in his brain; he even compares the marks of persecution on his body to the wounds of Christ.