ESSAY III.

THE APOSTLE PAUL.

ST. PAUL, though chosen last, is the first in rank of the "glorious company of the Apostles." The Twelve, striving among themselves who should be the greatest, little thought that a native of Tarsus, a city of an insignificant province of Asia Minor, would bear off the palm from the children of the Holy Land. They were appointed to a general office, but he was singled out for a peculiar mission, for which neither the zeal of Peter nor the love of John was adequate. To overstep the limits of Palestine, and carry the Gospel to the vast Gentile world, required a rare combination of gifts, and in Paul that combination was found. The chosen one must be born as it were between Judaism and Gentilism, that he might not be too much tyrannized over by either system. He must be conversant, too, with the old, that he might better measure and appreciate the new. Paul was a Greek by nativity, a Roman by citizenship, and a Jew by religion. Versed in Gentile lore, and taught at the feet of Gamaliel, he was prepared to see, when his eyes were opened, the perfection of the truth as it is in Jesus. With a profound sense of duty inwrought by the Jewish faith, with the culture of a Grecian city, and under the shield of that magic citizenship by which Rome was then opening privileges to the traveller who possessed it over the habitable globe, Paul was furnished in a remarkable manner for his work, by birth, education, and position.

In considering also the "final causes" of the selection of Paul by that Infinite Intelligence, who adapts now an in

sect to its element of air or water, and now a planet to its orbit, we discern much of fitness and foresight. There is a great work to be done, and a mighty workman is chosen for its execution. The original nature of Paul fitted him to perform a sublime mission. Without question, he is the leading intellect among the sacred writers. He had a too sharply defining imagination for a poet, too logical an understanding for a psalmist, and too impassioned a nature for a philosopher; but he nevertheless combined in himself much of all these characters. His illustrations are often beautiful, his soul is constantly attuned to praise, and by single flashes of thought he compasses results which others attain, by long processes of argumentation. Whatever there might be of ruggedness of outline in the forms in which he presented his thoughts, those thoughts themselves burned with an inextinguishable fire of conviction. He was no quoter nor second-hand repeater. Whatever might go into his mind came out personal and Pauline. Wide in his outlook, yet distinct in his aim; indomitable of will, but flexible when that will must bend or break; profound in his thought, but practical in its application; zealous in temperament, yet imbued with a charity that would clasp the world in his embrace; loving controversy, but loving the truth better than victory; highly intellectual, yet always paying allegiance to the supremacy of the moral powers, — the Apostle presented an ample range of contrasts in his genius and character. The intense earnestness of his mind, in whatever direction it moved, and whatever posture it took, is seen in every sentence. Culture had not quenched the generous flame of native ardor. Inspiration had not dulled the energies of a spirit which concentrated the forces of a hundred wills in a single breast, and which heaved with the affections as of a hundred hearts. His whole being pulsates with life. Every faculty is in a high state of vitality.

If we complain of imperfections, they are not the imperfections of deficiency, but of superabundance. If his page be dark, it is "dark with excess of light." When he enters upon his theme, the windows of heaven are opened and the fountains of the great deep are broken up. It is as the wise man said, "Lo, my brook became a river, and my river became a sea." In the flood of emotions and thoughts on which he is borne along, all temporal interests are swallowed up, and the reader arrives with the writer at the same all-important conclusions, and responds the same devout Amen!

The Apostle's life also possessed a remarkable unity. He believed Judaism divine, and he advocated it with his whole soul. And when new light came, and he recognized the higher divinity of the Gospel, he was "not disobedient unto the heavenly vision." His notable conversion, therefore, was a change in direction, not in motive, or zeal, or conscientiousness, or devotion to the service of God. It was like the change of his name, the substitution of one, and that the first, letter for another, changing, but not annihilating, the original sound.

Yet Paul had passed through very different religious experiences from those of the other Apostles, and he derived new power from this source. It has been said, that we cannot fully know the strength of an opponent's argument, unless we have at some time been of his belief. Paul was

a Hebrew of the Hebrews. A Jewish doctor could tell him nothing new. He had been a Jew after Christ had lived and died, a Jew in opposition and persecution, and he had tasted the guilt of that passion and the force of that prejudice. Men and women he had hauled to prison and to death. In his inhuman bigotry he "breathed out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord," and persecuted them from city to city. The very existence of

new faith.

the Christian Church was endangered by this arch-enemy. But in the height of his career, he is arrested by a voice. from heaven; a voice, not of vengeance, but of mild expostulation and warning from the Lord, whose cause he was pursuing with rancor and murder. Every circumstance connected with the conversion of Paul substantiates its miraculous origin. But within the precincts of his own mind, we detect no compulsion or violation of his free agency. The blow by which he was stopped in his course of persecution was sudden, but the process of mind through which he became fully imbued with the Christian faith and charity was progressive. For a season he sits in blindness and prayer, neither eating nor drinking. For three years he dwelt in Arabia and foreign places, and only once during fourteen years visited Jerusalem, the head-quarters of the Though no one, accordingly, was more active in proclaiming Christianity to the world, or entered so fully into what might be called the missionary cause of that period, no one, again, had a more personal, peculiar, and vivid religious experience. From a persecutor he had been raised to the glorious office of an Apostle; the chief of sinners,, he had found mercy. Hence there is a vividness of emotion, an intense yearning of love and gratitude, that can find no words strong enough to do them justice. Jesus had not been known to him personally in his daily walks and familiar conversation and travels, as he had to the other disciples. He had spoken to him from heaven, and communicated in visions. He was, therefore, a more solemn and awe-inspiring being, a more transcendent benefactor, to Paul, than to John who reclined in his bosom, or to Peter who denied him and was pardoned. Paul was very far from regarding or speaking of Jesus as God, but he more constantly calls him Christ and Lord. The events of his own life became the background on which his rescue from the guilt and fate of