curtain; or if, as in the case of prophet and apostle, they could discern the faint shadows of events to come, yet their perspective was very imperfect. Time, that brought the fulfilment, must also bring the explanation. There is no reason to suppose that Paul foresaw that his Epistles would constitute more than a third part of the permanent Scriptures of the Christian Church. Many believe, and not without plausible reasons, that he viewed the catastrophe of all things as then impending, and that his own were some of the last zealous words that would be spoken to arouse dormant consciences. Paul gives no intimation of having foreseen Christian Europe and Christian America. Much less, probably, did he suspect that the hurried and impassioned letters which he dictated in the intervals snatched from tentmaking, travelling, and preaching, and which bore the form and imperfection of the hour in some respects, would be exalted into permanency and universality, and that one hundred and fifty languages at the end of twenty centuries would repeat his exhortations and arguments to all the tribes of men. He wrote, if we may say so, instinctively, rather than intentionally. As he himself said, "necessity was laid upon him," and a zeal, all absorbing and unselfish, urged him onward. Thus writing for the time, he has doubtless written the best for all times, though, had he foreseen his fortune as an author as well as an Apostle, he would probably have re-edited his letters, to use the modern phrase. But it is well that he did not know the boundless sphere of his influence, for it might have proved a disturbing cause even to his apostolic singleness of heart. It is well that the great do not ever anticipate at the moment the consequences that are to flow from their words and deeds. With all their obscurities, therefore, the Epistles accomplish a greater mission for universal humanity, because they speak so individually to Timothy and Philemon, Romans and Ephesians. The cases of his churches in fact generalized the world. But being "Tracts for the Times,” and all the better for that reason, we must not complain that these letters contain some riddles when read in our times. Paul had in his mind, when he wrote, men and women living in a totally different state of society from the present, and the whole warp and woof of whose social and traditional existence were otherwise compounded and colored. It is indeed wonderful that, in this view, while the form and occasion of the Apostle's works were thus peculiar and temporary, their spirit is so central, and their adaptation so comprehensive and eternal. Another cause of obscurity lies in the controversial character of the Epistles. We have not the statements of the other side, except by implication. We are obliged to read Paul's opponents through Paul. Most of that world of thought and manners which Paul had in his eye, which shaped his arguments, gave complexion to his style, fired his enthusiasm, and aroused his energy, is irrevocably dead and buried, and not even the best trained and most creative moral and historical imagination can raise it again to life. We have glimpses here and there of customs and characters then prevalent, and of the agitating questions of the Church, but they are pale and ghost-like. If the Apostle were hard to be understood in his own day, and his reasonings began so early to be wrested to prove another doctrine, than he intended, how significant was that fact of the fortune of subsequent ages, when whole systems of theology would be built upon his authority, that are alien to his spirit! We are not inclined, again, to make sufficient allowance for the barrenness of language at that period for communicating such truths as Jesus and his Apostles taught. The Hebrew tongue was very limited in its vocabulary, and stiff and circumscribed in its idioms. The Greek, though in some respect the most perfect of languages, had yet sprung from a people rather volatile and witty than spirituallyminded, and more æsthetic than moral. And the Jewish Greek, or Hellenistic dialect, though richer than either Hebrew or Greek alone for the purposes of the sacred writers, was yet too confined and sensuous to give a distinct and luminous outline to that new cast of moral thought, and those higher spiritual conceptions, which it was the mission of Paul to introduce into the Gentile world. Old words must be filled with a new sense. Old idioms must dilate with a grander style of spiritual imagination. Hence we often feel that the writer was obliged to resort to circumlocutions, and multiplicity of terms and sentences, to do himself justice, and that his language sometimes breaks down under the weight of his thoughts. Then the translation into English has still further complicated the difficulties of language. Paul, though rendered in the tongue of Shakespeare and Milton, is obscure, with the best helps of modern criticism. But we can easily imagine, that, if he had originally possessed such a rich and powerful instrument of spiritual expression as the English or German of our day, the demands of so many-sided and profound a soul as that of Paul to defend and embody itself in words would have been more adequately supplied. From these remarks upon the general obscurity of the Apostle, we would descend to some specific points in which he has been, as we think, greatly misunderstood. Unhappy Paul, crucified in the body in his day, crucified in the spirit in ours! He is constantly made to prove what he never believed, to uphold what he spent himself in overthrowing, and quoted continually as authority for sentiments on which he would have bestowed a hearty anathema maranatha. Cant recites, with measured tone and dogmatic purpose, sentences that came glowing in a white heat from his ardent soul. Bigotry is intent upon digging up the flowers which he planted to adorn the garden of God, to find some root of bitterness. Theologians express their ideas in his words, rather than his ideas in their words. The most free from technical or philosophical limitation of any of the writers of the New Testament, unless it be John, recasting the Gospel in his own forms of phraseology, Paul is the last man to be quoted to justify any sort of exclusiveness or uncharitableness in religion, or to tie down all the world to the same formularies of faith, worship, and works. A freely living and a freely moving soul, airing himself in the atmosphere of different countries and continents, conversant with the works of God and the philosophies of men, touching at one point the culture of the intellectual Greek, and at the other that of the believing Hebrew, commissioned to proclaim and establish in new regions so loving and liberal a system as the Gospel, love from God, and good-will to men, with his bosom heaving in sympathetic beatings to every pain and wrong of the race, and with his tears flowing like a fountain whenever ill betided any portion of the Church, Paul is made to utter a language at variance with every emotion of his heart, and every purpose of his life, when he is interpreted as the teacher of doctrines inconsistent with the fatherly character of God, condemnatory of human nature, and darkening its destiny here and hereafter. Paul has given us, not a body of divinity, rigid and narrow, but a soul, and that soul consists in faith, hope, and charity. With what amazement would he have looked upon the spectacle of modern textual theology! With what severity would he have lashed that principle of interpretation that can at one time torture out of his writings justifications for exclusive creeds and persecuting churches, and at another, licenses for social inhumanity and public wrong! Would he recognize, indeed, and own as his writings, those - epistles, crumbled up, almost without regard to connection, into chapters and verses, compacted sentences divided and subdivided into separate propositions, sometimes mistranslated, and shaded with the expressions and biases of a dark age of society and theology,—when read, read piecemeal, as if constituting a charm, not a composition, and when quoted, quoted in fragments, broken from their place and connection, to point a sentence or prop up a doctrine, as if they were independent proverbs, not closely jointed limbş of a living and inseparable body? There is no part of the Sacred Scriptures so much injured by this mode of treatment as the long sentences and close argumentation of the Apostle Paul. No book but one so potent and vital as the Bible could survive for any considerable time such a Medean process. As it is, a new translation can hardly be expected that will secure so generally the suffrages of the Protestant sects in England and America as the imperfect one of King James's reign. But in the mean time, paragraph Bibles, and editions with here and there an explanatory note in the margin, like those of Shakespeare and other English classics, to say nothing of commentaries, might do something to remove the veil from these glorious works. The Epistles are a mine still to be worked, and capable of yielding new supplies to the golden currency of truth. One very important question in regard to these writings is, whether they really make any essential doctrinal addition to the Christian religion, or not. They no doubt contribute many new illustrations, applications, and developments of the truth, but do they impart what is absolutely new, and what cannot be found in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles? On this subject theologians have differed, but even those who take the negative still concede a species of new revelation to Paul, inasmuch as he gives more fully than any other the philosophical explanation of the conclud |