a persecutor of the Church stood out in strong relief.

His own experiences became motives to prompt him to save others. He had measured the depth of that pit out of which he had been drawn, and he spared no toil or suffering to lift up others also from its dark recesses into light and liberty. The line kindles with personal emotion when he speaks of sin and pardon and salvation, and he added to the power of argument the intensity of personal consciousness and conviction.

Then, too, his life subsequently to his conversion furnishes abundant materials to illustrate and vivify his discourse. He had sounded all the depths of the inward life, and he had traversed all the regions and scenes of its objective manifestations. Hence his character was one of no halting or half-way quality. The pendulum of its movement had a wide swing, and it passed through many arcs of a complete circle. What the Apostle said, he said with all his heart, and what he did, he did with all his might. His faculties have totality of action, and when they enter into battle they give their whole momentum to the charge, without fear or misgiving. He could speak like a prophet, because he had lived like a hero. He could write with the enthusiasm of poetry, though without its form, because in his history were the elements of romance. His journeys,

his perils, his shipwrecks, his scourgings and stonings, his chains and imprisonments, his joys and his triumphs, all afforded vivid figures of speech, with which his glowing mind clothed itself in the act of composition. He had touched the extreme points of earthly vicissitude, and measured the length and breadth of hope and fear. One day on the point of being adored as a god, he was liable on the next to be killed as a common malefactor. Now the object of the most affectionate confidence, and revered as holding the sceptre of an Apostle's authority, he was exposed by the sud

den turn of the wheel of his fortunes to the suspicions of his friends or the malignity of his enemies. Under such circumstances, his words are laden with the unction of the truth for which he lived and suffered. His language becomes action rather than the medium of meditation, and the page seems to heave with the throbbings of a living heart. It thrills and trembles with the exultations and agonies of his powerful emotional nature. "Who," he exclaims, "is offended, and I burn not?" "I glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” The writings of Paul, as said by a brother Apostle, "are hard to be understood," but he himself is transparent and intelligible. His weaknesses and his excellences are depicted with all the accuracy of legal testimony.

In analyzing, therefore, the sources of his power, we detect as one of the greatest charms of his writings their vigorous and vital personality. His epistles are an autobiography. They might be called "The Confessions of St. Paul." However abstruse the point of controversy, the face of Paul himself looks out from amidst the arguments. We feel that it is a warm and living hand, fed from a great heart, that is leading us through the labyrinth of free will and foreknowledge. Paul will ever stand within the circle of our human sympathies, for if we cannot in every instance trace the line of his thoughts in their logical sequence, though we never can doubt that that sequence exists to his own mind, we always feel the electric shock of his enthusiHis tears and bloody stripes wet the leaf we read, and the resonance of his gratitude echoes and re-echoes from side to side. His dangers and sufferings, his joys and triumphs, his glorious self-sacrifice and his poignant self-reproaches, his scathing moral indignation and his sweet and earnest charity, are portrayed on every page as by the colors of the painter, more than the words of the writer.

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autobiographical characteristic of his writings may diminish in some measure the perfection of that "dry light" in which a more impersonal writer would look at his subject, but it will ever add an inexpressible charm to the earliest controversies of the Christian Church, that they were incorporated into the living experience and interest of so large and vital a soul as that of the Apostle to the Gentiles. To this quality especially we may attribute much of the interest which attaches to his writings in the churches of the Reformation, because in him more than in any other Apostle is manifested that marked and self-relying independence which constitutes the genius of Protestantism.

Paul had points of resemblance to the other Apostles, but there were also points of difference. He had zeal, but it was unlike the zeal of Peter. It was the zeal of a wider and more cultivated nature, and hence it was intellectually more catholic, and morally more courageous. The horizon of the one was long limited to the boundaries of Palestine. The horizon of the other, from his earliest conversion, became the utmost ends of the earth.

The love of Paul was great, but it was different from the love of John. The affections of Paul were more concerned with persons, and those of John more with principles. The charity of Paul had a more sympathetic, earthly, and circumstantial character. He remembers all his friends, delights in mentioning their names, and has a good word for each and all. The love of John is impersonal, mystical, rapt, as if already borne beyond the fellowship of time and sense. To the great mass of toiling, struggling spirits seeking to rise to God on the wings of ardent devotion, and to embrace all humanity in universal charity, Paul speaks the more effective word of encouragement. But to the few of celestial temper and exquisite tenderness of soul, John is the more welcome Apostle; for, lying in the bosom of

Christ and of God, he discourses without a pang or effort of perfect union with the Divine nature, and of the heaven of love in which that union is eternal.

Again, Paul moves in a different plane from that of James, who is the Apostle of what may be called the minor morals. Paul is more versatile, and passes readily from the discussion of the great questions of Judaism and of Christianity to the inculcation of the humblest social duties. But James dwells almost habitually in the range of the prudential and familiar. Paul illustrates from his imagination as well as from his experience; while James animates his subject with the ship, the wave, the fountain, the horse, the rich man with his gold ring, and the poor man in his rags. Paul gives principles, James rules. The motives to which Paul appealed are drawn from a wider compass of thought, and from more profound depths of sentiment; while those employed by James lie within the limited, spiritual sphere of a fisherman of Galilee. The Epistle of James is condensed, epigrammatic, and allows but a short space between its premises of doctrine and its conclusions of duty. But the phalanx of Paul's style sweeps the whole field of revelation, history, and human nature, touches heaven and touches earth, and from the whole immense range of contemplation brings to bear on the human heart, not reasons of conscience or utility alone, but inspirations of love and quickenings of spiritual power.

As the characteristics of Paul differ from those of his apostolical associates, so has he had a peculiar influence and destiny in Christian history. He may be called the Apostle of the Protestant Church, if John be that of the Oriental and the Greek, and Peter of the Roman Catholic. The Cathedral of St. Paul stands in London, the Protestant metropolis, and St. Peter's is in Rome. The mysticism of John, the zealous but compromising spirit of Peter, and the

strongly marked intellectual and controversial qualities of Paul, have unconsciously given a cast and coloring to the great bodies of Christendom. As Christ has not yet become the real head of his own Church, those who stood as it were in the capacity of mediators between him and the world have given, not merely a local name and habitation, but an intrinsic spirit, to the churches of nations and ages. Orientalism delights in the Johannine love, and the mystic union with the divine. The Romish Church has too readily coalesced with the existing faith and ceremonies of its converts, whether in ancient Rome or in modern China, as Peter is accused of doing with regard to Judaism. But the Apostle Paul is essentially a controversialist in the good sense of that term, an evangelical dialectician, a tenacious advocate of the truth, ready at all times to do good battle for its smallest iota, whether in theology or morals. The mystical and the ceremonial sects receive Paul with qualification. The followers of Swedenborg do not regard him as canonical, and the liturgies of Greece, Rome, and England contain scarce a sentence from his glowing utterances of truth and love. But the Protestant chiefs have held Paul in great repute. Luther found in him the doctrine of justification by faith, which he hurled as his most effective missile at the Vatican. Calvin took, as heads to his sermons, hundreds of texts from the Epistles of Paul, but scarcely one from the Gospels, and the confessions of faith of all those churches which hold the Trinitarian dogmas and the doctrines of grace, technically so called, bristle with weapons, offensive and defensive, from the same grand armory.

In order to understand the causes of the somewhat exclusive and despotic influence which the writings of Paul exercise over the majority of the Protestant world, we must take into consideration a variety of facts. Paul's writings are argumentative, and Protestantism, in coming out of the