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PAUL’S LIFE OF CHRIST ii | f A Pfal ida 4 ‘ See AWW Sl OF CHRIST BY / GWILYM O. GRIFFITH” NEW ay YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RicHarD CLay & Sons, LIMITED, BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. Lhe Trt. IV. CONTENTS INTRODUCTORY . 1. IN WHAT MANNER Paut’s LIFE OF CHRIST WAS WRITTEN ; 5 2. THE STRANGE PROLOGUE WRITTEN UPON THE HEART OF SAUL. 3. PRESUPPOSITIONS PAUL/S-LIFE OF, CHRIST IN REVIEW. CHRIST BEFORE THE AGES . I. THE PAULINE OUTLOOK. 2. PAUL AND THE MODERN MIND CHRIST IN CREATION AND IN MAN I. THE Cosmic PAssIoNn : 2 f : 2. CHRIST IN THE SPIRITUAL HISTORY OF THE RACE. CHRIST INCARNATE . INTRODUCTORY.—‘‘ According to my gospel”’ “In fashion as aman” HUMBLED OBEDIENT TEMPTED “The words of the Lord Jesus” “* They knew Him not”’ “* Seen of Angels ”’ THE LorpD’s SUPPER OS een Scere an Vii PAGE IOI 108 III cai Tot 129 Vill Contents 10. THE GooD CONFESSION BEFORE PILATE Ir. CRUCIFIED 12. Buriep . VI. CHRIST RISEN AND EXALTED INTRODUCTORY.—‘‘ At mid-day, O King’ “* Raised on the third day”’ , ‘* He was seen”’ . ‘* Received up in glory”’ . THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST . ‘ THE Lire or CurRist IN His CHURCH ** The blessed hope’? I ARKRowvn VII. THE LIVING CHRIST AND THE DOCTRINES OF GRACE INTRODUCTORY.—‘‘ We know in part”’ THE DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY LAW AND GRACE ; JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH THE GIFT OF RIGHTEOUSNESS Aber e VILL, THE. CHRIST BEYOND "THE “AGES ANNOTATIONS THE JERUSALEM WHICH IS ABOVE PAUL AS GoOD’s PATRIOT . THE SAINTS TO JUDGE THE WORLD PAGE 134 138 149 153 153 163 166 169 172 177 183 192 192 202 212 222 236 248 257 265 276 I INTRODUCTORY 1. IN WHAT MANNER Paut’s Lire oF CHRIST WAS WRITTEN. “¢Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning those things which are most surely believed among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word, it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the cer- tainty concerning the things wherein thou wast instructed.” So wrote Paul’s beloved physician. And Paul himself, having previously counselled Timothy respecting “‘ the sound words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ ” (1 Tim. vi. 3) is reputed to have added: ‘‘ Hold the pattern ”—or out- line— of the sound teaching which thou hast heard from me in the faith and love of Christ IO St. Pauls Life of Christ Jesus ” (2 Tim. 1. 13); which teaching he refers to as ‘‘ my gospel ” (2 Tim. ii. 8) and epitomizes— He . . . was manifest in the flesh vindicated by the Spirit, seen by the angels, preached among the nations, believed on throughout the world, taken up to glory. (1 Tim. 11.16. Moffatt.) As for Luke, it may be that he took up his task not without some urging from Paul himself in his later years, and not without recourse, also, to Paul’s own invaluable books and parchments. And as for Paul, was he himself in those later years, and seeing that the Lord tarried, never urged by Luke and by Timothy and by believing men of like insight and sympathy, to fill in his own outline of sound teaching concerning the Lord of Glory? For Paul’s treatise would clearly have been different from any treatise which any other Evangelist, or they who were apostles before him, could ever have attempted. Paul’s Life of Christ, so wide-horizoned, so mystical, so discursive, and withal so self-revealing and autobiographical, must have been different from all Lives of Christ that ever have been or ever will be written. We must of course admit that if ever he had Introductory II it in mind to leave such a treatise in the hands of Timothy and of Luke and of the Gentile churches generally, we have no trace or tradition of it. And what would not we give to have it otherwise? Or even to come upon that lost Antiochan manual of the Sayings and Acts of the Master from which, as we may believe, Paul quoted on the beach at Miletus, and which he always packed, with his other precious books and papers, in his travellers’ kit? But if Paul has left us no Life of Christ as such, he has left us fruitful suggestions for such a Life. All through his epistles and reported discourses he throws out hints and sketches and synopses of it, and when we put them together we have, not indeed a collection of biographic detail, but nevertheless a general outline of Paul’s own conception of Christ’s life in time and in eternity. We can say more. Paul’s Life of Christ was ever before him and was fundamental to all he ever wrote or uttered. He carried that Life with him wherever he went. He and his Life of Christ were inseparable. His books and parch- ments he might leave behind, but not that Life. Moreover, it was continually being enlarged and annotated and in some respects revised; every day something was being added to it; it was always growing; it was never finished. We may, 12 St. Paul’s Life of Christ perhaps, follow the whim of Synoptic scholars and call it *“‘Q”—the Pauline **Q’” which we are forced to hypothecate, which we can trace everywhere, though we can discover it nowhere. All this we may confidently affirm. For Paul’s original and fundamental Life of Christ was written, not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not on parchment, but on the tablets of Paul’s own heart and mind. And then, because Paul in his discourses and his epistles was always drawing upon it and transcrib- ing it, here a little and there a little, with spaces between to invite a reverent imagination, it is possible for us to attempt the task which has given their title to these chapters. But first we must consider, not the Life of Christ written on Paul’s heart, but the strange Prologue written on the heart of Saul of ‘Tarsus. 2. THe STRANGE PROLOGUE WRITTEN UPON THE HEART OF SAUL. Before ever the Gospel of God could be written upon the heart of Paul, something had to be written on the heart of Saul of ‘Tarsus—a Prologue so strange that Saul himself could find no satis- fying clue to it until the greater work to which it was an introduction had already been begun Introductory 13 within him. But afterward, indeed, he turned again and again to that Prologue with new and understanding eyes. It became more and more clear to him that the same hand, now recording within him the Life of the Son of God, had already in those earlier days, even from his birth and before it, been busy upon him. For first of all his human heart itself had to be fashioned and prepared. As the papyrus tablet, before ever it was ready for the pen of the scribe, had first to be fashioned out of the flesh of selected reeds and interwoven, strand upon strand, and compacted and made smooth, so into the preparation of the fleshy tablet of Paul’s own heart had gone even the very selection of his forebears and all the discipline of the Tarsus years and of his upbringing in Jerusalem. “It pleased God,” says Paul in after days, ‘‘ who set me apart from my mother’s womb...” and again: “I thank God, whom I serve from my forefathers. ...”> What he could plainly see was that his setting apart at his birth, and his later setting apart at his conversion, and his still later setting apart at Antioch, were all of them traceable to the original, effectual calling and setting apart by God Himself; and that vocation, predestinative and preparative, represented a purpose which, flowing through all Paul’s ancestry, 14 St. Paul’s Life of Christ from Benjamin and before him, had its rise before time itself, in God’s eternity. But to come to the actual Prologue written upon Saul’s heart: we have first to consider that portion of it which was written while he still spake as a child and understood as a child and thought as a child, there in his home in Tarsus. Concerning this we are put in mind of the picture drawn, it seems by Paul himself, of the happy childhood of his own son in the faith, of Eunice, Timothy’s mother, and of his grandmother Lois, and how from infancy young Timothy had been instructed in the Holy Scrip- tures. For Saul, too, we may believe, had known a like happy childhood, and had been instructed in those same Scriptures which were able to make him wise unto that salvation yet to be revealed. And we are by no means to slur over what he thought as a child and understood as a child. A child’s thoughts and a child’s understanding do often, as we know, put older and, forsooth, sager heads to confusion; and it may have been that there was a somewhat in young Saul’s thoughts and understanding in those early years in ‘Tarsus which continually rebuked and put to confusion much that passed for seasoned wisdom in the troubled mind of Saul of Jerusalem. We have Introductory 15 to reckon with that possibility. And of this we may be sure: if the clock of history had chimed the great hour earlier than it did, and if Jesus had been a teacher in Tarsus when actually He was still a child in Nazareth, He would have said, ‘“‘ Suffer little Saul to come unto Me, and forbid him not; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” So, too, we have to remember that whatever may have been the disparity, and even the con- trast, between young Saul’s thoughts in Tarsus and his later and not always wiser thoughts in Jerusalem, yet when he thought as a child and understood as a child, he did so as the child who was father to the man he ultimately became. It is indeed almost to be regretted that Saul in his later years took upon him the name of Paul. Saul he was before his conversion and illumination, and Saul he remained long years afterward ; nevertheless, we have come to use the two names as distinguishing so sharply and absolutely between Saul the persecutor and Paul the Christian apostle that they appear as two persons without any underlying continuity. Yet all of Paul’s natural vehemence and impetuosity, all his eagerness of mind, all his passion for wide horizons and his instinct for universal truth—all these things were potential in young Saul; and we may believe that even before he left Tarsus they 16 St. Paul's Life of Christ had, so to say, broken through the shell and begun to feel a tremor in their wings. His moral qualities were there, also, awaiting development— his pride of purpose, his courage, his capacity for heroic love, a heart “‘ overflowing with, and greedy of, affection.” Moreover, if we rightly colour the contrast between Saul and Paul, we shall do well to remember that even before his con- version there was a contrast and a conflict between Saul and Saul. So Saul, being such a child as he was, was instructed out of the Law and the Prophets in his home in Tarsus, and was set apart for the high calling of a rabbi in Israel, and in that atmosphere of unfeigned faith he grew in wisdom and stature and waxed strong in spirit. And as childhood passed into youth, were there never vouchsafed to him mystic intimations and pre- sentiments of destiny? In his deepening study of the Scriptures, did never a ray of new light, as of promise or prophecy, break out upon him from God’s Holy Word? “The thought came to me,” says Mazzini of his own boyhood days in Genoa, “that we Italians could, and therefore ought to, struggle for the liberty of our country.” The thought— no more, he would have us understand, than “a confused idea’”—‘‘came to him,” it seems, Introductory 17 “one Sunday in April,” while he was walking in the Strada Nuova with his mother. That day there “ came to him,” also,—*‘ flashing before his mind ’”’—the thought that he was destined to play a part in that coming struggle. And presently, boy as he was, there came to him such great heaviness and continual sorrow of heart for Italy unredeemed, that he was fain to garb himself in black as one mourning for the dead. Also there came to him a vehement hunger and thirst of the soul for some new and living word of God, some death-challenging, resurrecting, redeeming word which should ransom his country from the grave. How came these things to this future apostle of Italy and of the New Europe? Through some chance word, it would appear, read or overheard, through a look of nameless suffering in the eyes of a fugitive patriot, through hearing the word Jzalia fall like sad, caressing music from patriot lips. All these things came to Mazzini before his decisive and regenerative illumination, and while he was still a boy in Genoa. And notwithstanding all grave and vital differences, it may be that this early experience of a spirit so clear, so apostolic and in some respects so Pauline, is a fair telescope through which we may look back upon the hidden years of the boy of Tarsus. B 18 St. Paul's Life of Christ And then there was Tarsus itself. Tarsus itself was written in that strange Prologue in the heart of Saul. ‘Tarsus, as Paul was wont to say, was ‘“‘no mean city.”’ Cities there have been, and cities there are still, which have some cause to be known as ‘‘ mean,”’ even in a sense other than that of apostolic usage; but ‘Tarsus was not one of them. ‘Tarsus was not only a cosmo- politan but, what is more, a magnanimous and liberal-minded city; so that between the Jews of that city and their Gentile neighbours there was freer commerce of mind and heart than was commonly to be found. And this, also, in the fulness of time, was to fall out unto the further- ance of the Gospel and Paul’s own fuller salva- tion and apostleship. For if it was “by the good providence of God” that Carlyle, as he has told us, learned German, it was far more clearly by the same good providence that young Saul not only learned Greek, but—using the term in its largest sense—dwelt among the Greeks and became their debtor. For in Tarsus, by the providence of God, young Saul obtained a know- ledge of, and a certain insight into, something of the wisdom and the folly, the light and the darkness, of the Hellenic and Roman world. And this we can affirm without painting a vain picture of a too precocious genius at work upon Introductory 19 bookish lore, or exaggerating Saul’s Hellenism as if it out-coloured his Hebraism, which pre- sumably it never did. Tarsus was Saul’s book; and he read it, as children do, by its pictures. Children learn nervously, and as it were by eye-flashes, by mystic affinities and occult disgusts; and youth learns by the urgings of a new and undefined curiosity which throbs in the blood and in the brain. In this way young Saul was always learning as he walked the streets of ‘Tarsus. Did never the lad look into the eyes of a Gentile youth to feel, for a swift, eternal moment of | insight, that there, also, in that Pagan body, dwelt a human soul much like his own, needing, too, it might be, some fuller, diviner Word than had ever yet been published to mankind? Out of the darkness of that Pagan city did never something of “the Light that lighteth every man’ surprisingly shine forth? Was never in Saul’s Tarsus some unproselyted Gentile who, by his patient continuance in well-doing, put to shame God’s own elect? And amid all the enlightenment of Tiarsian Jewry was there no dimness and vexation, no shadow of sinister things, which for quite other reasons put the elect to shame? If so, we may believe that in one Jewish home there were searchings of heart which later, 20 St. Paul's Life of Christ long after, were to burst forth into that flaming PF Accuse: Behold, thou art called a Jew, and restest upon the Law, and makest thy boast of God, and knowest His will, and approvest the things that are excellent, being instructed out of the Law, and art confident that thou thyself art a guide of the blind, a light of them which are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of babes, having in the Law the form of knowledge and of the truth. Thou therefore that teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? Thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? ‘Thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou rob temples? ‘Thou who gloriest in the Law, through thy transgression of the Law dishonourest thou God? For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you, even as it is written. But we may be sure that all these things together would serve only to fling Saul back the more vehemently upon the Law and the Prophets. All the light-beams which here and there shot forth surprisingly from the gross darkness of the Pagan world, and all the clearer light which revealed and rebuked the darknesss which lay upon his own Jewish world, would communicate to him a challenge to hold not less firmly, but, rather, the more resolutely, to his Hebrew faith. The ways of genius are hid from our eyes, not least of all the ways of religious Introductory 21 genius; but we may hardly believe that no pre-: sentiment of leadership ever touched the soul of Saul. If, even before his illumination, Mazzini —to refer once more to our modern apostle— could dream his dreams of Young Italy and a universal faith, shall we believe that this destined prophet and apostle of the ancient world had, according to the forms and instruments of his own times, no dreams of Young Israel and the “restoration of all things”? Mazzini had Dante to fire his faith and fashion his dreams, but then Saul had Isaiah; Mazzini had Rome, but then Saul had Zion. And the more Saul studied the Prophets and felt also the deep challenge of the world around him, the clearer it must have appeared to him that from Zion, from Jerusalem, must proceed both judgment and salvation for all the earth. In Jerusalem all history became significant and luminous; upon her, though all unknowing, the world waited for the word of authority and power; compared to her, all other cities were as Hagar to Sarah, as bondslaves to the queen-mother. Yes; for not Dante himself, nor Alfieri, nor Foscolo, nor Manzoni could have sung of the love of Italy and of Rome as Isaiah and Micah and Zechariah and all the sweet singers of Hebrew psalmody sang the love of Zion into the soul of Saul. 22 St. Paul's Life of Christ Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city.— Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For, behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the peoples; but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and His glory shall be seen upon thee. And nations shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising—And I will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem shall be called a City of Truth.—And_many nations shall come and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the House of the God of Jacob; and He will teach them of His ways, and we will walk in His paths : for the Lord shall go forth out of Zion, and the Word of the Lord from Jerusalem.—And My House shall be called an House of Prayer for all peoples.—For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same My name shall be great among the Gentiles. All this, and much more besides, was written in that strange Prologue in Saul’s heart. Jerusalem (said Young Israel) should yet be free and glorious in the sight of all men, the mother-city of the world. But we may believe that not all that was written on Saul’s heart in Tarsus was comparable to what came to be written on his heart in Jeru- salem itself. Indeed, what was written on Saul’s heart in Jerusalem is perhaps comparable only to what came to be written on Luther’s heart in Rome—written, that is to say, in that other Introductory 23 strange Prologue which the Gospel of the Refor- mation was presently to ratify and consummate. In ‘Tarsus Saul had been brought up on the Jerusalem of the Prophets and the Psalmists. But that City had never really come to earth; that City was still a Dream City, dwelling in the Unapparent—the Jerusalem that was above. The visible Jerusalem, gaudy and mean, with its quibblers and its cynics, its factions and its jealousies, its time-servers and its bigots—the visible Jerusalem was quite other than the Zion of the Prophets and the sweet singers of old. It is true that Saul was introduced to Jerusalem under auspices the most favourable. It was all in the nature of things that he should go to the liberal school of Gamaliel, and not to the straiter school of Shammai. ‘Tarsus had decided that for him in advance. Gamaliel’s devotion to the Law in its purity and spirituality, and the known fact that Gamaliel’s mind moved in a larger world than ecclesiastical Jewry—the known fact that Gamaliel was disposed to recognise that the Gentiles, who had not the Law, might yet show the work of the Law written in their hearts—all this made him a teacher after the heart of every liberal-minded citizen-Jew of ‘Tarsus, and of young Saul in particular. But not even Gamaliel was able to shield Saul from the shock of his 24. (St. Paul's Life of Christ Jerusalem disillusionment. Had not the great Rabbi himself vexed his righteous soul unto weariness, and settled into a sad and patient prudentialism not at all to the mind and temper of any young dreamer of dreams? In any case, the great Rabbi was powerless to hold back young Saul from his bitter discovery. (And when did he first begin to discover that Ananias and his set were “ whited walls” ?) ‘* We lived in malice and envy” (so he wrote years later, tasting, it may have been, the bitter fruit of personal recollection), ‘‘ hateful, hating one another.” There were other things to trouble Saul at this time. ‘There was the Jordan revival under John. Whether John’s mission were from Heaven or of men, there could be no escaping the challenge of it, so that there went out unto him not simply all Judea, but even “all Jerusalem ” itself. But when John saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said unto them, Ye offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruit worthy of repentance: and think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. And even now is the axe laid unto the root of the tree: every tree therefore that bringeth Introductory 25 not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire. And as the people were in expectation, and all men mused in their hearts concerning him, whether haply he were the Christ, John answered, saying unto them all: [ indeed baptize you with water unto repentance; but He who cometh after me is mightier than I: He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire. All this, too, had to be recorded in that strange Prologue slowly being written upon Saul’s heart. For not Gamaliel himself was able to set forth the spirituality and universality and exacting- ness of the Law of Moses and the Law of the heart as John set them forth for all who, like young Saul, had an ear to hear. Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to the Jordan unto John to be baptized of him. And after that John was put in prison Jesus began to preach the gospel of God, saying, The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe in the gospel. Concerning this, and concerning the likelihood or unlikelihood of Saul’s ever having seen and heard his future Lord and Master in the flesh, what shall we say? Surely, that the likelihood is strong enough. But what passes beyond all likelihood into certainty is that Saul, whether he saw and heard Him or not, had to take know- 26 St. Paul's Life of Christ ledge of Him and of His message, and of His controversies with Saul’s own party, and of His mighty words and deeds, not in Galilee only, but in Jerusalem itself. For there came a time when the Pharisees of Jerusalem said among themselves: ‘‘ Behold how ye prevail nothing: lo, the world is gone after Him!” and when the people said: ‘‘ John indeed did no miracle: but all things whatsoever John spake of this Man were true”’?; and when Caiaphas, being High Priest that same year, said: “It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not ” (for thus he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation ; and not for the nation only, but that He might also gather together into one the children of God that were scattered abroad). And was it that Saul also consented unto His death? For they that dwelt in Jerusalem, and their rulers, because they knew Him not, nor the voices of the prophets which were read every sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning Him. And though they found no cause of death in Him, yet asked they of Pilate that He should be slain. And when they had fulfilled all things that were written of Him, they took Him down from the tree and laid Him in a tomb.—And this also had to be recorded in that strange Prologue in Saul’s heart. Introductory oes And after all this, when Saul was now fully entered upon his career as a rabbi, Jerusalem had by no means recovered from Jesus, from His life and from His death. As we know, it never did recover from Him. ‘There was, as it were, an Afterglow of Jesus, a light strange and portentous —fitful, sudden, elusive; and from that Afterglow or new, strange Light, it was not possible that Saul should completely escape. Here and there, also, in Saul’s own circle there would be some who were touched by the new doctrine and secretly inclined toward the new Way. Moreover, there were those sayings of Jesus, always so quotable, which would sometimes be cited, half in con- temptuous jest, in Saul’s hearing (“‘ As the mad Nazarene would say .. .”—‘‘ As the Galilean would put it .. .”’)—sayings about straining out gnats and swallowing camels, about the blind leading the blind, about washing cups clean—on the outside only, about tithing mint and forgetting GHOTILY 6347 And then we may believe that that invisible pen, all the while busy upon Saul’s heart, pro- ceeded to record a passage more poignant and personal than any that had gone before. Of that shaft of Satan—that ‘‘ thorn ”—which once festered in Paul’s flesh, and since then has 28 St. Paul’s Life of Christ rankled in the minds of all Pauline commentators, we may choose to believe that it was something which belonged exclusively to his later years, something which came to vex and humiliate him as a Christian apostle. But even so, as to Paul’s flesh, was there any such difference between Saul and Paul as that no devil’s shaft may be thought of as ever having wounded him before his con- version? On the contrary, we know that young Saul was a mark alike for the arrows of Satan and the goads of God. Somehow, as we must believe, the Devil’s archers lay in wait for Saul even in Gamaliel’s school itself. ‘I was alive without the Law once,” says Paul in his great autobiographical chapter; ‘‘ but when the Com- mandment came home to me, Sin sprang up ”— and Saul fell, pierced with the venomed shaft. The more he learned from the lips of Gamaliel and, in spite of himself, from the thunderings of John and from such teachings as reached him from a quarter yet more authoritative—the more he learned from any quarter of the purity and spirituality and inwardness of the Law, the more conscious he became of his own stricken condition. There were vehement temptations which secretly shamed him; there were wounds which he was fain to hide even from his own eyes; and if ever he was in danger of being exalted above measure Introductory 29 because, in his study of the Law and his zeal for the Law, he advanced in the Jews’ religion beyond many of his own age among his countrymen— if ever he was in such danger, those secret sores were there to humble him, and the Law itself was there to chafe and to inflame them: and not all his outward blamelessness nor his proud austeri- ties could put them out of the way. This, after all, was Saul’s sorest disillusionment in Jerusalem : his growing disillusionment concerning himself. The Epistles of Saul! What would not we give to have them alongside the Epistles of Paul! What would not we give to read Saul’s letters home from Jerusalem—his letters to his parents and to all his circlein Tarsus! What a contrastive study they would yield us! What vital allusions and parentheses! What outpourings of the heart! Not, it may be, without unmistakable evidences, here and there, that already the goads of God were beginning to be felt and winced at ! Not without hints, too, and fore-gleams of some- thing yet to come—fore-echoes of a music yet to be beaten out! (Could Saul ever have been quite so bitter against the new Way, so exceeding mad against its followers, if he had never in his own secret heart been perilously drawn toward a somewhat different mood ?) 30 St. Paul's Life of Christ But gradually, as one is inclined to believe, a change was taking place which bade fair to end all hope of that Prologue ever leading to any gospel whatsoever in Saul’s troubled and darkened heart. The dreaming years of Tarsus were slowly being lost in the rank overgrowth of Saul’s later life in Jerusalem. Must he not take men as he found them, Jerusalem as it was? Must he not accommodate himself to facts? Must he not, as his admiring friends and his own restless heart were urging him to do, make his own career? Verily “‘ Nature with her everlasting snares and . . . devices, gives man youth, but takes the formed man for himself; she draws him on, entangles him in a web of social and family relations, three-fourths of which are independent of his will . . . he belongs to himself far less than in youth.” * There are no ordinary folk. Every man is extraordinary in his own eyes, caressing his secret thought. And Saul of Jerusalem, this destiny- haunted man with his inner dispeace, his psychic storms and convulsions, his restless intellect, his fierce pride, his disillusion, his devil’s shafts tormenting him—for him action, ambition, offered the alluring way of escape from the agony within. * Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, vol. i. chap. 3. Introductory aI Thus little by little, by urgings and flatteries and the zeal and fever of his own heart, Saul, we may take it, was drawn more and more into the ruling circle in Jewry. More and more their ways became his ways and their Scheme of Thorough his own. More and more, having chosen his medium and instrument, he became a Pharisee of the Pharisees, the implacable foe of all that challenged the ruling tradition. More and more, Saul the liberal thinker became the intolerant champion of the ancient way. Our most deliberate apostasies are apt to play the casuist with us, and we seldom confess to any break in the continuity of our highest pur- pose. Ambition is ventriloquial, throwing its voice, and calling us as if from the heights of aspiration. And had not Saul indeed come to Jerusalem for such a time as this? Was not the hour loudly calling for the authentic leader? The people were as sheep having no shepherd; the Jewish state was threatened alike by zealotry and cynicism, and must be saved from within; true, righteous authority must be revived. And this was no warrior’s mission now, nor task for some desert ascetic or popular “ messiah,”’ shun- ning the political instrument and crazed, it might be, by a popularity he could only disappoint. The less of these the better now! ‘These, it ae St. Paul's Life of Christ seemed, had had their chance, and had failed. What the hour called for—was it not for such aman as Saul? Saul as Hebrew of the Hebrews, Saul as Hellenist, Saul as Roman citizen, Saul as Pharisee—Providence had already strung all these keys, hanging them at his girdle. It was now for Saul to use them ! We understand that the world of action is always an alluring and perilous world for the man whose ambitions would dominate it. It has a hypnosis of its own. It is full of subtle suggestion. It lays invisible, potent fingers upon the chords of the heart, tightening here and relaxing there, until the entire scale and resonance of a man’s nature are imperceptibly altered. ‘The notation of his confessed purposes may remain the same, but their tone is different. Perhaps, for instance, it was not until Saul, fairly set upon his career, had been committed to certain regrettable necessities in the way of repressing undisciplined and heretical factions that he came fully to understand how utterly repugnant to him were the followers of the Way, and how the very name of Jesus of Nazareth was an offence and an exasperation. Withal there were the secret goads of God. For if it is strange how ambition can play the casuist, it is stranger still how within ourselves Introductory re there yet remains a self incorruptible which will in no wise be deceived, nor utterly and finally silenced. There was in Saul a certain malaise and low fever of the soul. Is it unreasonable to sup- pose that there were hours when those early Tarsus dreams called to him in the voice of rebuke ?— hours when it seemed as if at any moment some mystic door in the universe might open, some veil of occult memory be lifted, to his confusion ? (What if, after all, some new Word of God were being spelled out by these poor zealots of the Way ? What if in truth some divine secret were with them, unguessed by the Sanhedrin and the doctors of the Law?) And as if all this were not enough, there was Stephen—Stephen’s trial, and Stephen’s defence, and Stephen’s stoning, and Stephen’s prayer, and Stephen’s face lit up with the vision of Christ, and Stephen’s falling on sleep in the love of God. There were these things: until Saul’s whole being, save for that innermost, undissuadable, unrecognised self of his, rose up in yet more vehement wrath against this new Way and these most hateful Wayfarers, to breathe out threaten- ings and slaughter against them and the Name they named. And how should he have known that thus his unbelief was taking the wrathful road to faith? Not even Satan’s shaft itself Cc 34 St. Paul’s Life of Christ could have been so shaming and torturing now as the shaft that had been shot at him as by some invisible avenging archer from over the dead body of Stephen. And so in the ignorance of his unbelief and the ire of his tormented soul he must plunge yet more fiercely into activity and hie him to Damas- cus on that fateful journey wherein the strange Prologue was to be ended and the Life of Christ begun in Saul’s broken and wondering heart. 3. PRESUPPOSITIONS. Concerning Paul’s Life of Christ there are certain presuppositions which we may do well to bear in mind. Of these the first is, that it was written, so to say, around one central chapter, and that chapter the revelation of Jesus Christ to Paul as the Lord of Glory at once exalted and persecuted. ‘That is to say, the first chapter in the order of Paul’s experience, and the central one in relation to his thought and faith, was that in which we find him smitten to the dust by One who stood on the luminous side of death, and who bore no weapons in His hands save His own wounds—wounds which, in a mystery, Paul himself had inflicted. We have also to remember that not the down- Introductory 35 shining of that sudden and blinding glory, nor the sound of that Voice from the heart of it, nor the silence and the darkness and the trembling that followed, were anything more than the first broken sentences of that chapter. It was in the house of one Judas of Damascus, in the street called Straight, that those first halting lines were written over and expanded and expounded, beginning to take shape as the first—and what was to become the central— chapter of Paul’s Life of his Master. It seems that while Saul in the house of Judas was still in darkness and trembling and sore amazement, there came one knocking at the door. It seems, there came through the darkness the touch of human hands, the sound of a human voice: ‘“* Brother Saul, the Lord, even “fesus, hath sent me...” ; and with that human touch and that human voice there came something more—a strange warming and melting of the heart, a sweet and utter brokenness, joy and sorrow in one, as if Saul were a little child once more at his mother’s side—yea, a sweeter bliss than that, for he was in very truth a little child on the bosom of God. “ Brother Saul, the Lord, even ‘fesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight and be filled with the Holy Ghost.” ee 36 St. Paul’s Life of Christ It was this new-found joy in God, continually renewed, this sense of reconciliation, of being drawn into new and gracious spiritual intimacies, this sense of the forming within him of a new, humbling, exalting, destructive-creative Word greater than all his conceiving, and the opening out before him of a new life, a new mission, diviner than all his dreams—it was this, we must believe, which interpreted and confirmed to him the mighty happening on the Damascus road. Isolated, that single event could have done but little; and as evidence it must presently have evaporated. Paul must soon have come to doubt the validity of an experience to which he could not return, and which remained unrelated to any experience of normal value and significance. But the new sense of spiritual reality which had come to him in the house of Judas of Damascus was continuous; it was an inner apocalypse, lifting veil after veil within Paul’s own heart; it was relating him in new ways to the spiritual world and to the visible world also; it was daily communicating to him conceptions which had yet to be thought out, feelings which had yet to be interpreted; it was challenging him with the sense of a mission and destiny, a call to service and sacrifice, which, great beyond all his dreams, were yet the divine Amen to all the sacred Introductory ay presentiments and aspirations of his truest self. This it was, which confirmed for him the vision of the Damascus road. It had come in direct sequence to that vision, and was its unfoldment. And by the testimony of the Voice itself which had called to him from out the excellent glory, confirmed by the witness of Ananias and by each successive initiation in the new, divine life, it had all come through Jesus of Nazareth crucified and exalted. He it was who had shone upon him from the light unapproachable which was His dwelling, and who had avenged Himself of all Saul’s persecution by pouring into Saul’s heart the light and life and love of God. Long years afterward Paul could sum it all up as an epiphany of God’s kindness and love toward mankind bestowed through Jesus Christ and the renewing of the Divine Spirit. It was something that had “dawned upon him”; Jesus Christ Himself had dawned upon him; and the fact of the sunrise found its continuous confirmation in the ever-broadening day. Thus we have to bear in mind that Paul’s Life of Christ and Paul’s own life developed together. First of all, Paul had to acquaint himself with, and acclimatise his mind to, the Fact of Christ 38 St. Pauls Life of Christ itself. How should he think of Him? ‘“ Who art Thou, Lord ?”’—that first question which escaped his lips as he lay in the dust of the Damas- cus road—that question was never completely answered. It is not completely answered to-day. Is it not the question which each successive age must raise anew? “J am ‘fesus whom thou per- secutest”? was as complete an answer as Saul could bear that day. ‘‘ The Just One” was the name Ananias added three days later—‘‘ the Righteous One.” Saul had heard Stephen use it. It was a favourite title for Jesus with the followers of the Way. Jesus the Just One, then, crucified and exalted, exalted and persecuted— here was a name and title, a portrait and paradox for Saul to take with him into Arabia to brood over beneath the stars! But yet Who art Thou, Lord ? Why should the Just One bear such wounds? Why should the Just One die? He died, the ‘fust for the unjust, that He might bring us to God. So Paul was continually passing from initiation to initiation, and each answer was but one more rung in a ladder whose flight reached up into the light which no man could approach unto. | Then Paul had to take all his other medleyed and tumbled facts (for the shock of that Damascus happening had made havoc of his universe), Introductory 39 and rebuild them around this central Fact. “I rebuilt,” says Mazzini concerning what happened after his own decisive illumination, ‘‘ the entire edifice of my moral philosophy.” So did Paul. And no light labour can that be at any time, particularly when, all the while one is building upon it, one’s central Fact is continually flashing out with new significance—challenging one with some new projection—disclosing new dimensions from every new angle of vision. “We know in part,” said Paul in later years, after long experi- eucer oral! this >) “Sand! weilteach ‘also: in) part.” Who art Thou, Lord? Paul knew whom he had believed; but he had ceased to expect that the mortal years could ever bring to him the complete and final answer. And so, in the third place, Paul found this new and mighty central Fact continually and progressively testing and criticising all his other facts. ‘The stone which Saul of Jerusalem, as an unwise master-builder had rejected, was now requiring the reassembling and re-shaping of all the rest. Indeed, there were some seeming facts which failed altogether to support the weight of this new, tremendous Fact—some massive blocks, much prized by Saul of Jerusalem, and occupying a proud place in his architectural scheme, which crumbled and collapsed into dust 40 St. Paul’s Life of Christ beneath this once-rejected stone. Small wonder that he should presently find himself driven of the Spirit into Arabia, and that no word has reached us to break the silence of those Hidden Years wherein God was revealing His Son in Paul. But then not Arabia itself with its starry solitudes was enough. ‘There had to be also the return to Tarsus. Tarsus was Paul’s second and greater Arabia. There the holy stars of his childhood looked down upon him again, and occult solitudes of memory invited him, as he trod once more the familiar streets. The old home, the old haunts, the synagogue, the old familiar faces, and faces once familiar now seen no more—all these had to test Paul’s gospel, and work a work upon his heart which not Arabia itself could accomplish. That Life of Christ now being written upon the fleshy tablets of Paul’s heart was inscribed in Tarsus in characters indelibly deep. Such kindness and sympathy and faith as he found in Tarsus were more healing and confirming than any good word spoken later by those who were apostles before him ; and whatever of opposition he received there— the coolness, the arched eyebrows, the suspicion —was sharper for him than all the spears of Aretas. Altogether, some fifteen years had to pass Introductory Al after that happening on the Damascus road before the Holy Ghost said, “‘ Separate Me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them”; and at the end of those fifteen years Paul’s Life of Christ was no more than in its beginnings. For we have constantly to remember that into the fashioning of that Life of Christ had to pass not only the truth written by God upon Paul’s heart, but also Paul’s interpretation of that truth. So it had to be, or Paul’s Life of Christ would in no sense have been Paul’s. And Paul’s own interpretations were constantly being revised and enlarged. While he was yet a child in Christ, he thought as a child and under- stood as a child and spake as a child; as he grew in grace and in the knowledge of his Lord and Saviour, he came into a larger understanding, and spoke with a different enunciation and, as it were, in a deeper tone. Constantly as Paul himself grew in grace and thus in the knowledge of his Lord, that growing knowledge was criticising and re-criticising all the knowledge and precon- ceptions which Paul had brought with him at his | conversion and all the interpretations which he / had come to make in later years respecting the/ erotnot “Christ itself... Chere) was then dterce and all but fanatic intensity of the earlier years of faith (mirrored for us in the fierce and all but Y ' 4 | 4 a 42 St. Paul's Life of Christ fanatic intensity of the epistles to the Thessa- lonians), which had to pass into something calmer and deeper, more inward and more universal. The cruder Messianic conceptions which Paul the Christian had taken over from Saul the Pharisee had to come under criticism; Paul’s own most confident interpretations had to come under criticism; ‘for Jesus Christ Himself, in Paul’s ever-deepening knowledge of Him, was the Critic who wrought at the very heart of , Paul’s gospel. (Is it not in part the secret of Christianity’s power of perpetual self-renewal that its most potent and creative criticism comes from within itseli—that Christ Himself is the supreme Critic of every system which would ‘define and interpret Him?) It was always possible, as Paul used to warn his fellow-workers, to have an assured foundation, and yet build upon it an invalid superstructure, or to introduce here and there unworthy and incongruous material; but against this there was the silent judgment which the Foundation itself passed upon all that was built upon it, and there were the fires of God (1 Cor. ili. 10-15). So we have to remember that even as to the earthly life of Christ, concerning which Paul, as he appears to suggest, ‘‘ historied ” Peter, and James Introductory 43 the Lord’s brother, in Jerusalem (Gal. 1. 18), and which he re-lived in his own spirit—even as to this, his own trials and reproaches, joys and sorrows, must have led him year by year into fuller under- standing and deeper insight; until whatever he possessed of a Gospel manual or Antiochan sum- mary of the Sayings and Acts of Jesus must have been at length so underscored and Beni: marked and annotated that only Paul himself / could read it. It was Arabia that expounded the Wilderness, the return to Tarsus that interpreted the return to Nazareth. It was not until he could write, “ being reviled we bless, being persecuted we endure, being defamed we entreat”’ that he understood the patience of Christ; not until he could say, ‘‘ we are made as the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things,” that he tasted the bitterness of his Lord’s rejection. That long journey wherein Paul, bound in spirit, and against all entreaty, set his face to go up to Jerusalem—that journey was the best interpreter of that other journey wherein his Master’s face was likewise set to go up to that same city. It was not until Paul himself had known the treacher- ous salutations of ‘‘ false brethren ”’ (2 Cor. xi. 26) that he learned something of the darkness of that “ night in which He was betrayed,” and it was Paul’s own stripes and stigmata which helped, 44 St. Paul's Life of Christ it may be, to expound to him the wounds of Jesus. But with such clues to go upon and with such daily tutoring from life itself and from the Holy Ghost, Paul did mystically re-live the life of Christ, until, with that “‘ continual heavi- ness and sorrow of heart” for his kinsmen after the flesh and that growing desire that he might even be Accursed*if only they might be saved, he came at length into some insight into the final mystery of all—came to see how it was in his Master’s heart to be made a Curse for us, and how He bore our curse to the Cross. And so but one other word remains to be added here, namely, That whilst Paul’s new life began with the discovery of the mastery and mystery of Christ, and continued in an ever-deepening sense of His spiritual Lordship, all this never cancelled but only confirmed his conception of the primacy of God the Father. Christ’s Lordship was ful- filled for Paul in this—That it brought him to God, brought him to a new joy in God, a new experience of life in God; it did not take the place of that experience; it was not entirely identical with it; it was wholly inseparable from it. Paul’s life was hid with Christ in God.— ‘God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, 4bba, Father” (Gal. iv. 6). II PAUL’S LIFE OF CHRIST IN REVIEW In his epistle to the Philippians (41. 5-11), Paul has given us the great synopsis of his Life of Christ. But here it may not be unprofitable for us to bring together some of the scattered fragments and outlines of his Divine Biography as we find them in the Pauline writings and in the discourses attributed to Paul in the Acts of the Apostles. This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners ; of whom I am chief. And without controversy great is the mystery of our religion ; *—it is He who was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, received up in glory. Man the first ¢ is of the earth, earthy : Man the second is from Heaven. For He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in Him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible ... all have been created through Him and unto * See Moffatt’s rendering. + See Moffatt. 45 46 St. Paul's Life of Christ Him; and He is before all things, and in Him all things cohere.—[For] this mind... was in Christ Jesus: being in the form of God, [He] counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God, but emptied Himself, taking the LOnMOfia Servant. i... And I would not, brethren, have you ignorant how that our fathers... did all eat the same spiritual meat and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of a spiritual Rock that followed them; and the Rock was Christ.—But when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman— remember that Jesus Christ ... was of the seed of David according to my gospel—born under the Law, that He might redeem them which were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.—For of .. . [ David’s] seed hath God, according to promise, brought unto Israel a Saviour, Jesus : when John had first preached before His coming the baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel. And as John was fulfilling his course, he said, What suppose ye that J am? I am not He. But behold there cometh One after me, the shoes of whose feet I am not worthy to unloose.—{For]| John baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying unto the people that they should believe in Him who should come after him, that is, in Jesus. And being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself.—For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for our sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might become rich :— [and] ye remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He Himself said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.-— Christ also pleased not Himself—becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross :—as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached Thee fell upon Me.—For they that dwell in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they knew Him not, nor the voices of the Paul's Life of Christ in Review 47 prophets which are read every sabbath day, fulfilled them by condemning Him. [And] I received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, how that the Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He brake it, and said, This is My body, which is for you: this doin remembrance of Me. In like manner also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in My blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of Me.—For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.—For though they found no cause of death in Him, yet desired they Pilate that He should be slain ;—(before Pontius Pilate [He] witnessed the good confession) :—[and thus] the rulers of this world . . . crucified the Lord of Glory.—And when they had fulfilled all that was written of Him, they took Him down from the gibbet and laid Him in a sepulchre. But God raised Him up :—on the third day according to the Scriptures. And...He appeared unto Cephas ; then to the Twelve; then He appeared to above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain until now, but some are fallen asleep; then He appeared to James; then to all the apostles; and last of all He appeared to me also—to this so-called “ abortion ” of an apostle.* And you, being dead through your trespasses . . . you, I say, did He quicken together with . .. [Christ], having forgiven us all our trespasses ; having cancelled the regulations that stood against us—all these obligations He set aside when He nailed them to the cross, when He cut away the angelic Rulers and Powers from us, exposing them to all the world and triumphing over them in the cross.* [Thus, though] He was crucified through weakness, * See Moffatt. 48 St. Paul’s Life of Christ yet He liveth through the power of God; death no more hath dominion over Him. For the death that He died, He died unto sin once for all; but the life that He liveth, He liveth unto God.—({[And] if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life..—Wherefore also God highly exalted Him, and gave unto Him the name which is above every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth, and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.—Seek [then] the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God; who also maketh intercession for us. And... God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts. [And this is] the mystery which hath been hid from all ages and generations, but now is made manifest to His saints . . . Christ in you, the hope of glory.—For if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His. But he that 1s joined to the Lord is one spirit. For we are members of His body.—For two, saith He, shall be one flesh.—This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and His Church. And now ...{[God] commandeth men that they should all everywhere repent: inasmuch as He hath appointed a Day, in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He hath ordained ; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead.—For yourselves know perfectly that the Day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night; when “ all is well” and “ all is safe” are on the lips of men,* then sudden destruction cometh upon them, like pangs on a pregnant woman—escape there is none.—For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a loud summons, with the voice of the * See Moffatt. Paul’s Life of Christ in Review 49 archangel and the trumpet of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up on the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so we shall be with the Lord for ever. (We know in part and we prophesy in part. For now we see in a mirror darkly.) Then cometh the end, when He shall deliver up the kingship to God, even the Father; when He shall have abolished all [other] rule and authority and power. —For it was the good pleasure of the Father that in Him should all the fulness dwell; and through Him to reconcile all things unto Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things upon the earth or things in the heavens.—For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are a mere nothing * compared with the glory which shall be revealed... . For the Creation itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For... [Christ] must reign until He shall have put all His enemies under His feet. . . . But when all things have been subjected unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subjected to Him that has put all things under Him, that God may be all in all—O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God ! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past tracing out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been His counsellor? For of Him and through Him and unto Him are all things. To Him be the glory for ever. | (1) In the first place, then, Paul is very bold. Mark begins his Gospel with the Jordan baptism ; Matthew begins with Abraham; Luke goes back * See Moffatt. D 50 St. Pauls Life of Christ to Adam, and then—as if Paul’s own spirit were there to urge him—he takes the further step beyond human generation and beyond time into God’s eternity. Luke does so treading on the slippery stepping-stones of genealogy, and after that one step across the awful frontier he shrinks back, as Swédenborg says the inferior angels do if ever they pass -beyond their own sphere and climate. But Paul, like John, is very bold, and takes all time in his stride, and passes over the bounds of earth’s beginnings far into the mystery of the timeless ages. Christ, he shows, was pre-existent; Christ was “rich”; He was rich in God; He was rich as being in the form of God. And if in all this Paul was necessarily thinking of the Eternal Son and not primarily of the time-born Son of Mary, yet his thought is robbed of all meaning the moment we deny or obscure the vital continuum between the two conceptions. So that at the outset of our reconstruction of Paul’s Life of Christ we are faced by the question how he came by this transcendent faith.— “¢ Where did Paul get his Christ ? ” (2) In the second place we have the suggestion of a cosmic Life of Christ. In the Pauline epistle to the Colossians we are brought to the founding of the worlds, the sowing of the fields of space; Paul’s Life of Christ in Review 51 and the Sower is Christ. “In Him were all things created ’’—brought forth out of His own deep, ageless Life in God. That is to say, Paul’s sense of the quickening Life of Christ, begun as an experience of grace and truth in His own soul, had grown till he could set no bounds to it; had grown till he divined it as thrilling and swelling through all things. So that the Real Presence was for him not simply in the bread and wine of the Holy Feast, it was also in every sheaf and vine; it was something cosmic, eternal, and the universe itself was a living thing sustained by that one great Life, even the life of God in Christ. (3) Then again we have hints of a life of Christ in the experience of men, traced through the ages of antiquity. ‘“* All our fathers did eat the same spiritual meat and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock which accompanied them, and that Rock was Ghiist,? (1. Cor. x. 4). The ‘purpose: of ‘the declaration is indeed to enforce a stern warning against certain unworthy and magical views of Baptism and the Eucharist; but the suggestion remains that all that was vital in the experience of the fathers was mediated through the eternal Christ. In a certain mystical sense, Paul’s Christ was dividual, not individual; His life was always 52 St. Paul's Life of Christ being broken and poured forth, for the sustenance of mankind, and in the breaking and outpouring It was always coming into its infinite increase : equally, too, in another sense, He was supremely individual (“‘ Is Christ divided? ’’), the One in whom we are all complete, and through whom all things shall at last find their divine integrity. (4) The fourth stage in Paul’s Life of his Lord shows Him found in fashion as a man. We note that there is no hint of any birth-miracle save the wonder of that birth itself. “‘ When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law” (Gal. iv. 4). Nor can we glean from Paul’s records any mention of miracle at all, save the crowning wonder of the rising again of that Life out of the darkness and silence of the tomb. ‘The “ mind of Christ,” that is what Paul would dwell upon— the mind of Christ as set forth in the humility and obedience and sufferings of Jesus. ‘The whole earthly life and Passion of Jesus was for him the supreme miracle, so that there was a secret and a mystery Between one footfall and the next. Another thought always present in Paul’s mind concerning Christ’s earthly life was the Paul's Life of Christ in Review 53 redemptive necessity which lay behind it. It was not in Paul to view the life of Jesus simply as an alluring display of moral excellence or His Passion simply as a supreme exhibition of Divine love. It was that; but for Paul it was more. He contemplated the awful necessity of redeeming grace. We understand that the implications of the conception of “ fallen human nature ”— a great word with our fathers, and one to which we have temporarily lost the clue—were funda- mental to the Pauline thought. Again we observe touches which heighten the conception of divine drama. Jesus is ‘‘ seen of angels.”? ‘The veil lifts upon the conflicting forces of the over-world and under-world of spirit. Jesus wages war upon invisible principalities and powers of darkness, triumphing over them (Col. ii. 15). (Need we suspect a suggestion of unreality here? Is it only our earthly shadow- play that is dramatic? Is not Reality dramatic also? Is not the original Drama in the unseen ?) (5) The next great chapter in Paul’s Divine Biography sets forth Christ’s victory over death, His return to, and ministry in, the invisible world. He was “raised the third day ’’— “received up into glory.” 54. St. Paul’s Life of Christ As we have said, in the order of Paul’s own experience, this, together with his teaching con- cerning the mystical Life of Christ in His saints, was the first, and became the central, chapter of all. ‘To these teachings belong all that Paul has to say concerning Christ as the Eternal Con- temporary of His people, concerning Christ in the fellowship of -all believers, concerning Him as now mediating God to man and founding and fashioning the true Zion, the mother-city of the soul. For “‘ He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens ” (Eph. iv. 10); and Paul is quick to show that this ascension was not a departure, but a liberation of his Master’s presence—“‘ that He might fill all things.” He was raised, and exalted to that supreme sphere, that He might bestow new gifts and empowerments upon men, and prepare the whole Creation for investiture with that robe of righteousness which was of His own weaving, woven upon the loom of the Cross. But not Paul himself can do more than faintly sketch the Life of Christ in the invisible world and all the projections of His reconciling ministry in the unseen. Not in our little day May His devices with the heavens be guessed. * * Alice Meynell, Christ in the Universe. Paul’s Life of Christ in Review 55 (6) So we come to the chapter on the Blessed Hope, concerning which it is enough to say here that throughout Paul’s epistles and this Pauline Life of Christ which they contain, there is the’note of waiting, of expectancy. ‘The world is moving toward a crisis; time is hastening toward the Day of Christ; the stream of earthly history is flowing swiftly and silently toward its consum- mation. And if, as we shall see later, this faith was interpreted in ways which reveal Paul as a man and not a mechanised instrument of pure ideas, was it less vitally true on that account? There remains the divine, inwrought conviction that Christ’s salvation must be on the grand scale or not atall; that it must mean something for the world as a world; that here on earth righteousness must be wrought out to its divine crisis; that Christ must finally and decisively be reckoned with. (7) And thus, lastly, we have Paul’s forelookings toward the great redemptive consummation. “Then cometh the end ”—the end without end, the beginning of the glory that is beyond all conceiving. 56 St. Paul’s Life of Christ As to the outworking of the redemptive purpose, we are now living, Paul would show, in an inter- mediate age. As to that purpose, even Jesus Christ Himself and His saints who are with Him are as yet in an intermediate, though infinitely glorious, state. As Paul indicates it, they are within the region of the great Until: “for He must reign until. ... .” For while yet Creation groans in the throes of Christ’s cosmic birth, as Time once laboured in the throes of His human birth; while yet there are enmities to be abolished, powers to be subdued, worlds to be reconciled and paracleted—while yet these things are so, Christ must remain divinely unsatisfied — and His redemptive Life unconsummated. For He must reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet. But then cometh the end, when He shall deliver up the kingship to God, even the Father. For when all things have been subjected unto the Son, then shall the Son also Himself be subjected unto the Father who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all. It is with this vision, this “ brave text,” as Emerson calls it,*—-specially to be prized, he thinks, by the Christian philosopher (but how much more by the saint?)—that Paul draws his Life of Christ to its always-unfinished end. + Kesay 2“ Gercles, Til CHRIST BEFORE THE AGES 1. THe Pautine OvuTLookx. Surely we shall come to mental grief if, in our thought about Paul and about Paul’s own thought concerning his Lord, we read into his mind the mind of Athanasius or of Augustine or of any that were apostles (and metaphysicians) after him. For it should be sufficiently clear that Paul was not Athanasius or Augustine; nor was he living in the Niczan or Augustinian world. Paul was Paul; and he lived in his own world. And intellectually and theologically Paul’s world had nothing to do with the later Alexandria or with Constantinople or with Nicza or Hippo or with the later Rome, but with Tarsus and Jerusalem and Damascus and Arabia and Antioch and with the Rome of Augustus and Claudius and Nero, and with the Jerusalem which is above, _and which is the mother of usall. In other words. Paul was the explorer and pioneer, not the precise cartographer and surveyor; he was “ de- scrying new lands and a new law,” not measuring 57 58 St. Paul's Life of Christ and mapping a region which others had descried before him. If we look, for instance, for the Athanasian metaphysic in Paul, shall we find it? For the most part, if we study him, for example, in his prayers and his prepositions, we shall find him in a world quite other than Athanasius’. That Is to say, Paul had not resolved his thought concerning God and Jesus Christ into a formal metaphysical unity. Has it not been well said that, if he had written his letters for future generations, he would have coined his mighty phrases, not “for Anselm or Johann Gerhard,” but “ for Johann Sebastian Bach”? * By which we are to infer that it is the poet-musician, and not the theological dogmatist, who approaches nearest to the Pauline mood. If we are to summarise Paul’s Christology at all, shall we not find it contained potentially in his living experience that Jesus Christ had, in his own phrase, brought him to God—to a new sense of God—a new life in Him, a new joy in Him? For—to glance back once more to Paul’s past— there was a time when he did not joy in God. He believed in Him, he feared Him, he had a certain fierce zeal for Him; but save, it may be, * Adolf Deissmann, The Religion of Fesus and the Faith of Paul, p. 202. Christ Before the Ages 59 for such openings of mind and soul as came to him in his earliest days—moments of — occult recollection wherein for the while it was almost as if he had caught at a forgotten, secret word— save, it may be, for such times, he did not joy in God. The mystical hunger and thirst of the soul was there—for had he not always the mystical capacity ?—but it remained unsatisfied, perhaps unrecognised. Andon this account great portions even of the Old Testament, in which he was so deeply learned, were veiled to him, as they were veiled to all his countrymen in that age. Portions of the Psalms, for instance, with their intimacy and sweetness of confiding trust and communion, were veiled and more than veiled. The very doors, so to say, of the Scriptures were closed and Saul was outside, and the feasting and song were not for him. And then the great change came. First, as we know, came the overpowering discovery of the Lordship of Jesus, and then, presently, those closed doors swung open with a burst of light and song: the door, let us say, of the 23rd Psalm, and of the gist, and the 139th, and a hundred _ other unsuspected doors in the Law itself and in the Prophets, all swung open for him; Creation itself, and Paul’s own heart and mind also seemed full of opening doors. For Jesus Christ 60 St. Pauls Life of Christ was opening up to Paul, not only Moses and the Prophets, but all the universe, and that inner universe which was Paul himself, and leading him into a new sense of Reality, a new-found love for God, a new life in Him, a new joy in Him. All this we have to bear in mind if we would seek to understand Paul’s thought concerning Jesus Christ and concerning God—if we would seek to understand the world of meaning and of spiritual autobiography packed into the great Pauline prepositions—in Christ—through Christ— with Christ—in God—unto God. Especially must we bear it in mind if we would seek to understand how Paul ever came to speak of Christ as being - in the form of God. For Paul there is one Lord of the Spiritual Life—Jesus Christ,—and one God—the Father, who is over all and through all and in all :—there is one God, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom forall. As the head of man is Christ, so the head of Christ is God: for as we are Christ’s, so Christ is God’s, and our life is hid with Christ in God: we are thus heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ. For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as there are gods many and lords many, yet to us there is One God, the Father, of whom are all things and we Christ Before the Ages 61 unto Him, and One Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and we through Him.* ‘This, we may take it, had come to be Paul’s interpre- tation of his own experience. ‘The fact remains that notwithstanding all the Pauline emphasis upon the primacy of God, the Father, Paul can find no category for Christ that falls below the Divine mystery. It may be, indeed, that we have need to watch ourselves lest we press Paul’s terms into the service of a later pedantry. Do we perfectly know what he meant by “the form of God”? But whatever clue we follow, we are led into the light of a glory that is unsearchable. Perhaps we may dare to say that for Paul Jesus Christ was a mystery in a sense more inscrutable than God the Father Himself. It seems as if for Christ Paul has no clear category at all. We are reminded of the mystical word: ‘“‘ No man knoweth the Father save the Son and he to whom the Son willeth to reveal Him: [but| no man knoweth the Son save the Father ”’ only. We shall be told in explanation of Paul’s thought concerning Christ in His pre-existence _and heavenly glory that our apostle developed his gospel in a Gentile soil and climate, and that in that world such a process and product of thought Spee 1 Cortam..3) 62 St. Paul’s Life of Christ was not altogether without certain suggestive affinities and precedents. And then, it may be, we shall be reminded that Paul was a propagandist for Christ and His spiritual Lordship in an empire wherein Cesar’s sovereignty itself was expressed, if not in terms of pre-existence, at least in terms of divinity; and again, that even Paul’s upbringing as a Jew and a Pharisee, and his training as a rabbi, had urged his mind toward some such conception as he had at length attained unto: that is to say, Paul as a Jew and a Pharisee and a rabbi had been brought up in the romantic hope of a supernatural, Heaven-born Messiah and in the belief in an original, archetypal Heavenly Man. And yet again we shall be taken back to Plato and to the Platonic revival, to Philo and the Alexandrian school, and to their possible influence upon Paul and his Christian contemporaries. — But after we have given due heed to all these things, shall we be left with the clue which nobly solves for us the secret of this great first chapter in Paul’s Life of Christ ? And does the addition of our more psychological and psychical explanations leave us with the whole secret in our hands? It is clear that Paul, like many a mystic before and since his time, claimed the power of penetrating by revelation into the Christ Before the Ages 63 celestial arcana, arriving at his ideas by other than normal intellective processes. But if to say this is to say no more than that his innermost mental conceptions were in this way displayed and dramatised before him, it is still left for us to inquire how they came to be there and what called them forth. After all, is there any satisfying explanation, worthy of Paul, worthy of his moral dignity and the height of his inspiration—worthy, even, of our own serious approach to him—apart from this, that he believed what he did because, face to face with Jesus Christ, he could do no other? Are we not at length led to see that that Life of Christ which was being lived in Paul’s broken and renewed heart was a life to which there was for him no ultimate conclusive explanation in Nazareth or Bethlehem or anywhere else soever, save in the eternities with God Himself? Jesus Christ as Paul had come to know Him had about Him the rumour and mystery of the Godhead ; and the Holy Ghost testified within Paul that this was so. 2. PauL AND THE Mopern MIND. And for our own part, beset as we are to-day by a thousand questions and dubieties, can we find 64 St. Paul's Life of Christ our minds’ abiding tabernacle on the terrestrial side of this mystery, or find rest at any point on that bridge over which Paul travelled eager and unresting—the bridge which spans the chasm between Bethlehem and the Eternal Years? Came that Life out of the void or out of the Great Deep? That Life with its holy secret, with the purpose of the Cross slowly unfolding, to open at last into the crimson bloom of the Divine Passion—shall we be content to trace it back through the tale of human generations, the darkness of primeval jungles, the slime and scum of primeval swamps, to its blind beginnings among the solar gases? No “spirit of truth” shall we ever find bearing witness with our spirits to so forlorn a conclusion! But then shall we think of that life, drawn from out the boundless deep of Divine Being, as an unconscious stream, an emanation, a sleeping tide, slowly at length awaking to itself beneath the Syrian stars—utter- ing itself at last with the voice of many waters breaking upon the rocks of Golgotha—receding again into the eternal silence to leave only confused, reverberant echoes to trouble the cavernous shores which it once invaded? Surely this were a languid and pathetic theosophy savouring less of eternal verity than of the limp reaction of sophisticated minds. If we concede Christ Before the Ages 65 as much concerning Jesus, must we not concede more? What do we know of the reach and history of our own beginnings? ‘* Man is a stream whose source is hidden.”? But what, as we survey our own lives, is no more than a weak peradventure, becomes in Jesus Christ a challenge to audacious faith. Manifestly He has brought to earth a mystery that is not of time. In Him humanity is full-orbed, effulgent, and in His light we see light. For Paul, at any rate, it was no strange thing that He who had shown Himself lord of death should be lord of birth also. If Paul is driven to affirm a Pre-existent Christ, the Archetypal Man, the Man from Heaven, “through whom are all things and we through Him,” an Emerson, recking little of Gamaliel nor yet of Philo, but knowing the sincere milk of the Platonic word, will affirm the Over Soul to which we who live in succession, in parts and particles, are all equally related. In wise silence, in infinite repose and recollection, in universal beauty and universal truth, and in the deep heart of man, the Over Soul hath its dwelling. By which it may appear, indeed, that the Emersonian ~ Over Soul is a sublimated and infinitely magnified Emerson (for so our minds will reflect that in Reality which reflects ourselves). But if one day E 66 St. Paul's Life of Christ in the Concord woods or, let us say, on the road to Boston, the Over Soul had proclaimed itself to Emerson as One who wore the stripes of the Southern slaves, the wounds of Gettysburg and Vicksburg and the Battles of the Wilderness ; or if that day the Over Soul had proclaimed itself to him not in Platonic speech and accent, but in his own homelier American, somehow strangely recalling the sonorous voice of Abraham Lincoln, slain a while before—from that hour would Emerson have been able any longer to think of his Over Soul simply as the supernal Sage, the supreme dispassionate ‘I’ranscendenta] Philoso- pher? After that happening on the Damascus road and that illumination in the house of Judas on the street called Straight, it was, at any rate, not possible for Paul to rest in the thought of any Platonic Logos or Over Soul as the supreme Sage of eternity. He must find place for the wounds of Jesus. The Wisdom of God is also the Redeemer, the bleeding Victim of His own holy love and of human sin. So for Paul the point is not that Christ dwelling in the eternal light, reached after equality with God (that was Cesar’s way), but that from eternity His mind was set upon something other and far different. Christ Before the Ages 67 Was not Czsar, also, something more than himself—the symbol and manifestation, emergent in the visible world, of certain forces, personal or otherwise, at work within this disordered universe? Is there not subtly present in Paul’s thought a certain antithesis between the Mind that was in Christ and the Mind that was in Cesar? Both the Mind of Cesar and the Mind of Christ were alike the mind of Conquest; the difference lay in the motive and the means. Czsar thought it a prize to be grasped at to be on an equality with the gods; Cesar was rich and had a mind to be yet richer; Czsar was for making himself of great and yet greater reputa- tion; Czsar was fain to fill all things by ascent to self-lauding power. Christ, being in the form of God, thought it not a prize to be grasped at to claim equal honours with the Most High; Christ, being rich, for our sakes became poor; Christ made Himself of no reputation; Christ would fill all things through His descent first to the deepest depths of self-abnegation. Czsar sought conquest through self-expansion, the establish- ment of a throne, the imposition of a Law; Christ sought conquest by self-oblation, the setting up of a Cross, the bestowal of Grace. Had not Paul come to perceive these two conflicting Minds warring in the universe and 68 St. Paul’s Life of Christ warring, too, within himself? Had he not already foreseen, even in his own day, the ultimate joining of the issue, Christ or Cesar? ‘There were, plainly, sufficient reasons why in his epistles he should not elaborate the idea, but can we trace no hint of it? It is too uncritical to suggest that it is some future and imminent Cesar that Paul has in mind when he speaks of the Man of Sin— the adversary who should oppose and exalt himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped—sitting in the temple of God and setting himself forth as God (2 Thess. 11. 3, 4)? And is not the Man of Sin Satan’s own Logos, the supreme embodiment of spiritual rebellion, the Darkness that darkeneth every man? At all events, Paul attained to a point which the world has yet to reach; he passed utterly and for ever out of Czsarism into Christ. ‘‘ The grace of our Lord flooded my life along with the faith and love that Christ Jesus inspires” (1 Tim. i. 14: Moffatt). IV CHRIST IN CREATION AND IN MAN 1. THE Cosmic Passion. Of Michelangelo, Walter Pater quotes Grimm as saying: ‘‘ When one speaks of him, woods, clouds, seas, and mountains disappear, and only what is formed by the spirit of man remains behind.” * In a sense this is true of Paul. If we look to him for a merely lyrical appreciation of Nature, it is in vain; Paul’s interpretations are not lyrical but epic, and it is deeply true that for him woods, clouds, seas and mountains do presently dissolve into some mighty manifestation of the spirit of man. But then we may also add of Paul as Pater of Michelangelo: ‘“‘ With him the very rocks seem to have life—they have but to cast away the dust and scurf that they may rise and stand on their feet.” To begin with: we may be sure that Paul’s conversion and illumination wrought in him a more imaginative and mystical appreciation of * “The Renaissance,” chapter on Michelangelo. 69 70 St. Pauls Life of Christ Nature than he had known before. We may say indeed that Paul’s interest in Nature was evan- gelical. Not all the cosmic ideas active or latent in the mind of Saul of Jerusalem could have com- municated to him such insight and sympathy and intensity of feeling as we find in the great “‘ Creation ”’ passage in Romans vill. It is Paul’s sense of the quickening and redeeming life of Christ, begun as an experience of redeeming grace in his own soul, and growing till he could set no bounds to it—this sense of grace and redemption it is which throbs at the centre of his thought concerning Nature. What Tennyson sang of his friend, Paul could have addressed with infinitely deeper meaning to Christ :— Strange friend, past, present and to be, Loved deeplier, darklier understood ; Behold I dream a dream of good, And mingle all the world with thee. Thy voice is on the rolling air, I hear thee where the waters run; Thou standest in the rising sun And in the setting thou art fair.* For Paul, within and beneath the infinite taci- turnity of Nature there was a universal heart-beat that throbbed right up to the surface of things; the universe was a living thing, and its life was * [Tn Memoriam. Christ in Creation and in Man 71 not simply the impulsion of a blind unmoral energy; it was hid with Christ in God. And in Nature, too, the life of Christ was a Passion. For Paul is very bold, and follows his subjective clue to its conclusion. The universe which was Paul himself and the universe which was Creation as a whole were intersphered, and the life of Christ which was energizing mightily in Paul toward Paul’s complete redemption was likewise energizing mightily in Creation unto Creation’s complete redemption. Creation and ourselves, it would appear, are in the throes of a like re-birth. For Paul in this mighty chapter in his Life of Christ leaves Darwin far behind in his realism, as also he leaves Wordsworth far behind in his mystical idealism. Paul has felt all that Words- worth came to feel of that immanent Presence in 2 4 ; Nature which disturbs us with the joy of elevated j thoughts; but he has felt, too, that Nature is in bondage, that there is a great cosmic struggle which has to be worked out; that there are in Nature rude and tormenting passions and as it were baffling futilities. This, says Paul, is a passing phase, and the ultimate responsibility for all the cosmic agony is with God : for the Creation was ‘“‘ subject to vanity, not by its own will, but by reason of Him .. .”: but this present phase is Fhe. St. Paul's Life of Christ none the less real on that account. ‘“* For the earnest expectation of the Creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God... . For we know that the whole Creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” With Paul it is indeed true that “ the very rocks seem to have life—they have but to cast away the dust and scurf that they may rise and stand on their feet’! And then, as we follow the thought of our spiritual and apostolic Michelangelo, it becomes more and more plain to us that, as Grimm says of his great Florentine, “when one speaks of him, woods, clouds, seas, and mountains dis- appear, and only what is formed by the spirit of man remains ;”’—always, of course, interpreting that saying evangelically and in due subordination to the creative and redemptive sovereignty of God. Creation, says Paul, is waiting for the sons of God, for the New Humanity. That is to say, the clue to the Cosmos, to the meaning of the cosmic struggle, isin man. ‘There is much in the ordering of things which seems to belie any sort of faith in a beneficent creative purpose; it is only as we pass from exterior Nature to that which is interior—to human nature and its redemptive promise—that we touch for ourselves the moral Christ in Creation and in Man 73 purpose which runs through all things. Man challenges the cosmic order. And there is, perhaps, in the whole of Paul’s outlined and fragmentary Life of Christ no portion more daring and tremendous than that portion which treats of this theme. When we think of Paul’s own inherited idea of the universe—a flat earth with its lamp-lit dome above and its underworld beneath—a Creation whose years were numerable and whose days were numbered—we are the more amazed that he ever came to see what he did see and what he is at pains to make us see. According to Paul, the life of Christ in Creation and the life of Christ in Redemption converge toward the manifestation of the sons of God—the New Humanity. At this point Nature and human nature are brought so close together in Paul’s thought that it almost seems as if he were feeling toward the faith that Creation itself is in process of becoming human in Christ; as if in mountain and wood and sea and all that they contain there were a nascent spiritual affinity with humanity, and we without them should not be made perfect; as if Christed man should at last be able to say ‘‘ I—Nature,’’ and Nature, “J—Man.” “ For Creation itself shall be de- livered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” 74. St. Paul's Life of Christ However this may be, it is clear that when Paul, our Michelangelo, hews from the rock this statuary image of Nature as a plagued, dishevelled captive, mighty in her bonds, leaning forward with shaded eyes to scan the far horizon for the appearing of the sons of God, he gives us, by suggestion, not one symbol but a series. For must not Creation have waited in like manner first of all for the advent of Man? And in the fulness of the time he comes; he raises his rude altars and goes questing and questioning through the earth, seeking to know, seeking to attain. Did not Nature come to a new birth in him—to a new chance of understanding and of being understood ?— The winds Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, A querulous mutter, or a quick gay laugh, Never a senseless gust now man is born.* But the Dawn Man, as Paul well understood, did not set Nature free. We have Paul’s con- ception of the Dawn Man, too (1 Cor. xv. 45, 46)—a man of the earth, earthy. Pater’s descrip- tion of Michelangelo’s own creation will stand, perhaps, for Paul’s as well: “in that languid figure . . . something rude and satyr-like, some- thing akin to the rugged hill-side on which it * Browning, Pauline. Christ in Creation and in Man 75 lies.” And Paul’s Dawn Man is himself in bonds. “The first man became an animate being” ; tne first. man is of the earthy ‘earthy ss ssithat is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.” Moreover, the Dawn Man fell. For when little Saul of Tarsus knelt at his mother’s knee and was instructed in the sacred Scriptures, he was taught out of the Book of Beginnings how the Dawn Man, the first Adam, so full of wonderful possibilities, so eager to learn and to put names on things and to become wise, had yet been beguiled by an evil power already abroad in the lower creation; had allowed himself to be ensnared into letting that mind be in him which was also in the cunningest and subtilest of the creatures of the field. How that mind, that evil mind, came to work in the lower creation the Book of Beginnings did not say; but so it was; the evil principle was there, already in the earth, before man. And now it was as if the Dawn Man were marked, so to say, with the slime and venom of the snake, and as if that evil strain of the lower world had worked in him to keep him down in his earthiness and away from his predestined heavenliness, and to multiply sorrows upon him and upon the earth itself. But then also young Saul was taught out of that 76 St. Paul's Life of Christ same wise book that the Dawn Man and his kind were always warring against that strain, never wholly giving in to it—always smiting, as it were, at the serpent’s head, though always, too, being bruised and venomed afresh. (Here in this strange divine enmity put into man against that beguiling evil which beset him, did Paul, later, see the first evidence of that hidden life of Christ in Creation and in Man?) So the quest continues. Creation in bondage still listens for the footfall of the deliverer: a thousand imprisoned energies in earth and sea and air call for release. Long before Paul’s day Man the Thinker, the Civilizer, had appeared, taking up the Dawn Man’s task, and had wrought prodigiously upon the earth. Him, also, Paul has limned out for us; and we see in that ruthless sculpturing, as he means us to see, the reason of Creation’s continued bondage. For Man the Civilizer has that same evil strain in him which was in his fathers, accentuated by all his increase of knowledge; he had held down the truth in unrighteousness, and, becoming vain, his foolish heart had been darkened; professing himself to be wise, he had become a fool, until that darkened heart of his had come to be brimful of envy, murder, malignity, intrigue (Rom. i. 18-32: Christ in Creation and in Man 77 see Moffatt). This is our apostolic Michel- angelo’s sculpture of Man the Civilizer, toying with baubles, unconscious of his fall, uncon- scious of his true task, his mighty brow darkened with folly. Creation, then, is still in bondage because Man has failed her. The cosmic life of Christ is still a Passion, a crucifixion. It is as if the Christ of Nature stands bound in the judgment-hall of Man,—as if the very stones cry out in the voice of the eternal Victim, ‘“‘ Man, Man, why per- secutest thou Me?” And yet, as Paul sees it, it is Man that must indeed break Creation’s chains, Man it is that must lead forth Nature as the King’s daughter into her queenly inheritance. And for Paul it is as if Nature knew it; as if the Holy Ghost testified within her that through Man her redemption should yet be brought to pass. This is Nature’s Gospel, for the life of Christ in Creation must fulfil itself at last in a race of liberators—the- sons of men who are also sons of God. And who are these sons of God, as Paul foresees them, that shall set Creation free, so wonderfully _ relating themselves to the hidden possibilities within the now vexed and troubled soul of Nature —who are they but the saints who shall appear 78 St. Paul's Life of Christ with Christ at His glorious coming, and they also who, being still on earth, shall be changed out of all their earthiness into His heavenliness? Who are they but the New Humanity which is the fuller incarnation of Christ Himself? May we not infer that it was Paul’s faith that yonder in the unseen they who had experienced immortality and were with Christ were being schooled in the higher lore of their divine sonship, and that here among the novitiate saints on earth the work of preparation was likewise going on? And Paul knew not the day or the hour when the sons of God should gloriously appear, and when the hills should break forth before them into singing, and all the trees of the field should clap their hands. ‘“‘Even apostles must have their illusions” ! O divine illusion that could send forth under the stars this scarred and branded, shrunken-bodied man, and persuade him that the earth beneath his feet was tremulous and convulsive with an agony that was an unborn glory! O divine illusion that could make him feel of sun and moon and all the starry host,—of rock and cloud, bird and beast and all living things—that they and he were of the same family, sharers of like sorrows and a like immortal hope,—called unto “ the glorious liberty of the children of God”! O Christ in Creation and in Man 79 divine illusion, return thou unto us! Art not thou more true than all our disillusion and despair? 2. CHRIST IN THE SPIRITUAL History OF THE RACE. The ways of God with mankind make up a Bible clearer, more intimate than anything we can discern in the Bible of Creation; and the life of Christ, the urge of the Spirit, half-revealed and half-concealed in Nature, move toward their fuller manifestation in mankind. For one thing, according to Paul, there is a certain Law-work going on in the heart and conscience of man, Jew and Gentile alike; and this law-work is preparatory to the fuller coming and activity of Christ. All of Paul’s early training in Tarsus and all his later training at the feet of Gamaliel helped him to see this, helped him to see that though from Adam onward our fathers continued to carry in their veins the venom of the serpent, yet there has always been a dis- cernible touch of God in man: and _ perhaps there is nothing in which Paul is more daringly himself than in his working out of this conception and of what follows from it. Two things, we are told, filled Immanuel Kant with admiration and awe—the starry heavens So St. Paul’s Life of Christ above and the moral law within; and these two things filled Paul, also, with a like sense of wonder and worship. As he considered the heavens, the work of God’s fingers, the moon and the stars which He hath ordained, it became more and more plain to him that ‘the invisible things of God since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even His everlasting power and God- head.” Moreover, even the Gentiles, who have not Moses’ Law, ‘‘ show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them” (Rom. u.). Sothat over and above all that was written of the Law upon tables of stone and upon embroidered synagogue-scrolls there was the writing of the divine oracles by the finger of God upon the tablets of man’s own heart. But then there was something more. Paul will suggest to us, 1t seems, a certain strange interlinear writing, discernible in man’s heart, between the lines of the Law. For the Law was fixed, the Law was inexorable; the Law, that is to say, was always the Law; and no man falling short of its obedience could hope from it for glory or honour or immortality, or look for Christ in Creation and in Man 81 aught beside accusation and condemnation and wrath. And yet Paul seems to suggest that men did hope for glory and honour and immortality, and did so, presumably, because it was somehow in their hearts to do so. It was in the hearts of Jew and Gentile alike to do so. Jew and Gentile alike, each in his own way, hoped by patient continuance in well-doing, even though it must needs be imperfect well-doing, to attain at length to that glory and honour and immortality which were witnessed to by their own spirits within them. For it seems clear that when Paul speaks of this (Rom. 11. 4-11), it is as of something deeply known already. He recognizes a something which is neither wholly of the Law nor wholly of the Gospel, which we have called an interlinear word of hope. ‘‘ Glory and honour and peace to every man that worketh good ”’ (v. 10), though no man with all his good working can fulfil the righteous- ness of the perfect Law. Whence came this hint of uncovenanted mercy written thus in the heart of man? ‘There is a Law, says Euripides (dis- cerning that oracle within his own heart), which is above all gods, which makes them and unmakes. But now is there also an everlasting kindness and good-will which dwelleth in the shadows of that Law itself? Is there in man’s heart as it were a secret intimation of Christ? As for Moses’ Law, F 82 St. Paul's Life of Christ says Paul, the word of Grace and the hope of Christ preceded it—a triumphant Pauline dis- covery (Gal. u.). In all of which, both as to the Law and as to the Word of Promise, we see Paul tracing something of the outline of that hidden Life of Christ in the ages and in the heart of man. But then again there was something more. For Paul is very bold, and says, speaking after the manner of a rabbi in Christ: “ All our fathers did eat the same spiritual meat and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock which accompanied them, and that Rock was Christ’ (1 Cor. x. 1-3). Here, indeed, as we have already remarked, the specific purpose is to enforce a warning against certain unworthy and magical views of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper—to show that no sacrament can be unto life which is not partaken of discerningly ; but the declaration itself points beyond the admonition to a larger truth. “All our fathers ”—of the desert-pilgrimage— “did eat the same spiritual meat and did all drink the same spiritual drink.” For the Lord took manna and blessed it and said, Take, eat; this is My Body which is for you. In like manner, also, after that the rock had been smitten, He Christ in Creation and in Man 83 took of the water and said, This is the new , Covenant in My smitten and outpoured life: this do as oft as ye drink it in remembrance of Me. For so the manna and the water were the Lord’s Supper in the wilderness, foreshowing His life and His death till He should come. And if ever Paul had fully written out his Life of Christ, in that mystical and allegorical chapter given over to this particular theme should we not have found him unsurpassed even by the last and most far-horizoned of our four Evangelists—unsur- passed as to his teaching concerning that Bread from Heaven and that Water of Life, and that universal Light, which are the life and sus- tenance and illumination of men? For in that mystical and allegorical chapter, in which Paul would write as a rabbi in Christ, should we not read concerning the desert-pilgrimage itself and its pilgrims (as we read in Galatians of Mount Sinai itself and of Hagar and Sarah) :—‘ which things are an allegory,” and as we read in Ephesians of the marriage bond :—‘“ This is a great mystery; but I speak concerning Christ and His Church”? All our fathers of the desert-pilgrimage did eat the same spiritual meat and did all drink the same spiritual drink; which _ things are an allegory and a great mystery; but I speak concerning Christ and all the pilgrims of 84. St. Paul's Life of Christ faith in all the ages. For the mystery hid from all ages and generations hath now been manifested to the saints, to whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Finally, if Paul’s Life of Christ had ever been fully written out, it seems clear that we should have had a great Pauline chapter on the Baptism of John, the Forerunner. It seems clear; for once and again, in the discourses attributed to him in the book of Acts, we find him at pains to expound the message and mission of the desert- prophet. “ John” (says Paul in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch) “ first preached before His coming the baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel. And as John fulfilled his course he said, Who think ye that [am? Iam not He. But behold there cometh One after me whose shoes of His feet | am not worthy to unloose.” ‘“¢ And it came to pass that while Apollos ” (who, being instructed in the Way of the Lord, had known only the baptism of John) “‘ was at Corinth, Paul having passed through the upper country, came to Ephesus, and found certain disciples ; and he said unto them, Did ye receive the Holy Ghost when ye believed? And they said unto Christ in Creation and in Man 85 him, Nay, we did not so much as hear whether there be any Holy Ghost. And he said, Into what then were ye baptized? And they said, Into John’s baptism. And Paul said, John baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying unto the people, that they should believe on Him which should come after him, that is, on Jesus.” Thus, far beyond the Judzan borders, even to Galatia and to Ephesus, Paul had found the name and fame of that Elijah-like prophet potent among his fellow-countrymen. Not only had John his disciples, who, by their zealous repentance and spirituality, were named to Paul for fully instructed followers of the Way itself—he had his apostles also. For John, being dead, was yet speaking. Almost it seemed as if, being dead, John had poured out his spirit upon his disciples in a baptism as of fire; nevertheless, it was the baptism of a fiery law, and not of grace. ‘That is what Paul perceived. Living or dead, John was always the Law,—the Law touched, as it were, with the expectation of grace, but never- theless the Law in its austerity and exactingness, its fierce anger against all disobedience. He was not simply the Law of Moses; he stood for the universal Law, so wide were his applications, so direct his appeal beyond all ceremonial ordinances to the conscience and the heart. 86 St. Pauls Life of Christ It is a disquieting thought that, faced with disciples so zealous, so devout and so upright of life as those whom Paul first found in Ephesus, we ourselves would possibly have detected in them no cardinal defect of experience; Paul, however, was quick to observe the lack of a certain affluence and rest of heart,—a sign that prompted the swift and searching inquiry which traced their baptism to John and not to Jesus. And verily, if John had been able to give them rest, he would not have testified of another who should come after him; but John, like the Law itself, could not give them rest, and this Paul knew full well. All that John had ever done, at most, for Paul was to shut him up to the faith and fulness yet to be revealed. And in all this John was a true symbol, not only of the Law, but also of all that was prophetic in mankind throughout the ages. In John’s message the Eternal Christ was as it were leaping in the womb of revelation ; but now the fulness of the time had come. V CHRIST INCARNATE 1. InTRopuctory.—‘ According to my gospel.” According to Paul’s Gospel Christ was mani- fested in the flesh, born of woman, of the seed of David. ‘That is to say, Paul’s Gospel was at once ideal and historical; it was spiritual but not spectral; it was embodied. Paul, indeed, was resolved to know no man, nor yet Christ Himself, simply as flesh and blood. ‘To him it had become clear that flesh and blood were of little profit save for the uses of the spirit. But then it had that profit—that value; and this very truth of the supreme importance of knowing Christ not after the flesh but after the spirit had been borne in upon Paul not in spite of flesh and blood, but by means of it. It was because Christ had taken upon Him flesh and blood and had died the death of flesh and blood that Paul, by his own showing, had come to this resolve: ‘‘ For we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead; and that He died for all . . . wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we 87 88 St. Paul’s Life of Christ have known Christ after the flesh, yet now hence- forth know we Him [so] no more ” (2 Cor. v. 16). Even here it is possible, indeed, that some of our moods find us remote from the Pauline point of view. For is it not occasionally comforting to remark that in religion the Idea is everything? What though our historical gospels go, does not the eternal Idea remain to consecrate the soul of man through each successive epoch of progress ? Shall we be childishly concerned about dates and documents and events of time? Is not Truth timeless and spiritual and above all? What though our creeded temples fall, have we not an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens? These are brave interrogatories, and they do us service. Nevertheless, if we sojourn too con- tinuously in the region of this Magnetic Pole of all our theosophies, shall we not presently find the twilight very long, and a certain benumbment and torpor overcoming us? And as we turn again to the Pauline latitude and climate, are we not made aware that here is a world more quick and vivid—ruder, stronger, fuller of the heat and struggle and triumph of life? Shall we not do well if in some of our moods we remind ourselves that it is possible to be metaphysical overmuch?—that even a_ too- Christ Incarnate 89 metaphysical spirituality itself may conceal an incipient atheism and consumption of the soul? It is a sickly thing to live too long under the moon, or in that twilight zone of faith where truth is forever spectral, haunting, as it were, the great white silence. Friendship is a spiritual thing; but I have a friend: shall I not become historical? Shall I not declare how he came into my life in my great need? how the clasp of his hand brought courage to me? how I came to listen for his footfall on the gravel path? “I had no rest in my spirit because I found not Titus, my brother; but taking my leave ... 1 went from thence into Macedonia.’’—** And when we were come into Macedonia our flesh had no rest. ... Never- theless God, that comforteth those that are cast down, comforted us by the coming of Titus.” Shall we sublimate this Pauline record, dis- solving ‘Titus into ethereal elements and con- serving only the Pauline experience of comfort and a certain elusive and abstract sense of comradeship? And so with Paul’s greater Friend? But then, again, as to our approach to Paul’s Gospel, we of to-day are conscious of a certain shifting even of evangelical emphasis. ‘‘ God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Him- go St. Paul's Life of Christ self.” That declaration in itself is indeed a sanctuary wherein all devout hearts may worship. But how would we interpret it? Are there not times when we handle the Pauline instruments as one would handle the fossil tools of a buried civilization ? The viewless electric energy which from the beginning has been thrilling through the earth and the firmament, visible in fitful flashes in the summer sky, but elusive, uncomprehended, is at length caught within delicate filaments and given a constant epiphany, fixed, orb-like, effulgent, to enlighten the darkness of the earth. So shall it satisfy us to say that the divine energies of truth and grace, active throughout the ages, but un- comprehended—flashing in the firmament of prophecy only to vanish again into viewless mystery—shall we say that in Jesus, caught, as it were in the quivering filaments of His soul, those energies at last became fixed, luminous, and manifest to all? This is no mean faith to set forth, but it falls short of Paul’s Gospel in one vital particular which for him sharpened and heightened every detail of Christ’s earthly ministry: it leaves us with no clear sense of Christ’s pre-existence, and thus of His voluntary condescension and grace. It is open to us all to recognize that the Pauline Christ Incarnate gl conception of Christ, in His pre-existence as the eternal Son, in His ideal, archetypal humanity as the Heavenly Man, and in His voluntary self- abasement as made in the likeness of sinful flesh, had for Paul supreme moral and evangelical value. It is open to us to recognise that to make Christ’s Bethlehem birth the upspringing out of the unconscious of a life which had no antecedent being and therefore no elective purpose, no will- to-be, until it fashioned that will out of its own infant appetites, would be to take all the colour out of Paul’s Gospel ; 1t would muffle the majestic organ-tones of Grace which accompany and interpret the entire recitative of Paul’s narration of Christ’s earthly ministry; it would deprive us of the glow and rapture of a redemption wrought for us at infinite cost by One who, though He was rich, for our sakes became poor. Fach age, it is true, must read the stars for itself: and it may be that there are discoveries to be made in periods of occultation and eclipse which can be made at no other time. We must be true to our light, true even to our dimness of light. But above all our dimness and vexation, our questionings and dubieties, does not Paul’s Christ, clearer, surer, more sublime than all our thought of Him, look down upon us with His own starry eyes of pity and of grace? 92 St. Paul’s Life of Christ 2. ** In FASHION AS A Mavn.”’ From the day when Paul heard a Voice speaking to him in the Hebrew tongue out of the excellent glory and saying “JI am Fesus” he began to understand not only that He who thus called to him was a man (he had believed that before he had well believed anything else concerning Jesus), but also that He was The Man, the Man from Heaven, the One in whom humanity was original, authentic, complete. Earthly man was in the image of God; in the Heavenly Man the image was fulfilled unto the very Form of God. But then also it was clear to him that Jesus in the days of His flesh had been found in fashion not as The Man, the Lord of Glory, but as a man in all things like unto His brethren. And thus at the outset, as we may believe, Paul found in his hands the clue to the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. So that there was nothing more to Paul’s mind than the thought that when, in the fulness of the time, Christ was manifested, He was manifested as one born of woman, born under the Law. Not all the works of wonder which they told of Christ who had been eye- witnesses of His ministry were nearly so much to Paul’s mind as the wonder of Christ Himself in His self-emptying humility and identification Christ Incarnate 93 with His brethren. For not only did He not take upon Him the nature of angels, He took not upon Him, either, the fashion of human perfect- ness, but was found “in the likeness of the flesh of sin.” ‘There was the wonder that He had not flashed upon men in His “ body of Glory,”’ whose brightness Paul had beheld for one blinding instant on the Damascus road, but that He had taken upon him the fashion of sinful mortality, a body that could be broken and crucified, that could bleed and die. Concerning which there is no more Pauline passage to be found than that which was addressed to the Hebrews by Paul’s unknown disciple: ‘‘ For it became Him, for whom are all things and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Author of their salvation perfect through sufferings. . . . For verily not of angels doth He take hold, but He taketh hold of the seed of Abraham. Wherefore it behoved Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren” (Heb. ii. 10, 17). All this that unknown disciple may have heard many a time from Paul himself in his prayers and in his discourses and in his reasonings with his own countrymen. “ For,” says Chrysostom, “‘it is necessary for us to speak of the scope of Paul and his mind, which one may find everywhere shining forth... . What then 94 St. Paul’s Life of Christ is Paul’s mind and what is his custom?... Having once taken hold of our Lord’s Flesh, he freely thereafter uses all the sayings that humiliate Him; without fear, as though that were able to bear all such expressions.” * So He was “ born of a woman, born under the Law.” Only, as Paul seems to suggest to us, He was the Child of the Ages also. All time was His mother, all history pregnant with Him. It was “in the fulness of the time ” that He came. Not nine moons back was the beginning of that holy conception. What the starry night at Bethlehem witnessed was the travail of the ages. 3. ‘° HumBiep.” Perhaps, then, it would not be too much to say of Paul in Arabia, receiving of the Lord that which later he was to deliver unto men, and in Tarsus, returned to his own people, and in Judza, treated by his familiar friends as a heathen man and a publican, that no thought was oftener in his mind concerning Jesus Christ than this—that ‘“* He humbled Himself.”’ For as for Paul himself, it was by nature very hard for him to humble himself. It was hard for him to empty himself of those prerogatives and of that prestige which were his as a man of birth and education, as a * Chrysostom: Homil. 1 Cor. (xxxix). Christ Incarnate 95 man of high standing, both as a Jew and as a Roman. We know that, by the grace of God, he did come into his own great kenosis ; yet to the | end of his days Paul’s kenosis was incomplete. It is plain to see that Paul had a constant struggle with himself in the matter of humility, and that long after his conversion it went hard with him to endure contradiction with meekness and con- tumely with submission. (“‘ And the high priest Ananias commanded them that stood by him to smite him on the mouth. Then said Paul unto him: God shall smite thee, thou whited wall ! ”’) So that it may be said of those always-unfinished chapters of Paul’s Life of Christ that there was none to which he would return with so heart- searching a sense of his own insufficiency as to that chapter which set forth how Christ humbled Himself. Christ, Paul would show, humbled Himself by His very birth, appearing amongst men not in “the body of His Glory,” but in a body of humiliation. Paul’s own body of humiliation was constantly expounding to him his Master’s great humility. It was always, perhaps, something of a trial to Paul’s natural pride of spirit that— unlike his royal namesake—his own bodily presence was unimpressive. For ‘his letters,” said his 96 St. Paul's Life of Christ traducers, “‘are weighty and strong; but his bodily presence is weak, and his delivery of no account.” In a manner of speaking, Paul was without form or comeliness. He knew that men were saying as much and more; and we can see, perhaps, the deepening of his colour at the thought of it (2 Cor. x. 10). But then Christ had humbled Himself to wear just such a body as Paul’s. The outward Paul (2 Cor. v. 6) which was slowly decaying, and the outward Jesus which knew hunger and exhaustion and pain and death, were both in the likeness of ungodlike, sinful flesh. It must, also, have been in Paul’s eyes no other than a great and beautiful humility that, like himself, his Lord should once have thought as a child and felt as a child, and as a child should have been taken up with childish things. It would never have been to Paul’s mind to embellish those childish years with traditions of miraculous prescience and magical power. No fabled wonder- stories of those Nazareth years would he ever have permitted Luke to set in store for inclusion in that gospel which he had it in mind to write —nothing that would have shown Jesus, with all His gifts of heart and mind, as doing other than thinking and speaking as the Holy Child He was, Christ Incarnate 97 and as being subject to His parents. For so did He humble Himself. Jesus’ very upbringing, too, in such a town as Nazareth must have appeared to Paul as part of his Lord’s humbling of Himself. Paul’s own birth and childhood in the great city of Tarsus and his upbringing in the still greater city of Jerusalem served to fling into bolder relief the humility of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem and His upbringing in Nazareth. But all this was only the beginning of Christ’s humbling of Himself. ‘There was, as He grew into man’s estate, the daily contradiction of sinners which He endured. As Paul’s unknown disciple hath it, and as Paul himself must often have said to his sorely-tried elders and evan- gelists: ‘“‘ Consider Him that hath endured such contradiction of sinners”’—such hostility from sinful men—‘“‘so as to keep your own hearts from} daintme: and \-failinge *’..(tHeb.| xu. 37:4 see Moffatt). And in this matter, as in almost all others, Paul’s own life was constantly interpreting to him the life of Christ. All the contradiction which Paul endured from the Synagogue and from the Sanhedrin, and even from his fellow- _ labourers and apostles, served to send him with new eyes to the record of what his Lord went G 98 St. Paul's Life of Christ through. Even Paul’s sharp contention with Peter, the Lord’s own companion and apostle, and with James, the Lord’s own brother, helped to show him how much contradiction, how much narrowness and blindness, the Lord had humbled Himself to endure from day to day, not alone from His enemies, but also from His friends. There were times, indeed, as we have already seen, when it seemed as if in this matter he were almost re-living the life of Christ: and this not only in the contradiction which, like his Master, he endured from the Pharisees and from the Sadducees and from false brethren, but in his having, like his Master, to bare his back to the smiters, and in his having at last, hke Him whom all forsook, to tread the winepress alone. For ‘at my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me.” And this is the place for us to note, moreover, that Paul, in his great portrait of Jesus Christ in His humility and humiliation, has a bold and vivid line in which he shows Him “in the form of a servant.” And here, too, it must have been no light thing for Paul, being such a man as he - was, to have added that line. With Saul of Jerusalem it must have been a thing incredible that God’s Messiah should so humble himself; Christ Incarnate 99 and even for Paul the believer it must at first have been a strange, dark doctrine to be pondered in Arabia not without rebellion of heart. Yet so it was. Cesar in triumphal state was not more evidently in the form of a god than Jesus Christ was in the form of a servant. He was in the form of a servant when He learned His trade in Nazareth and laboured at it, and took His orders for this and for that and carried them out. Young Jesus bending to His trade (was it as a builder, “‘ turning stones into bread”? ?), taking His orders from His father Joseph, and taking them, too, from exacting and voluble customers or employers, who must be served to a nicety and have things thus and so—Paul, who had himself learned a trade and followed it knew something of what all that could mean But then he also knew that in all this Jesus wore no more than the outward form of a servant ; he knew that all these things were no more than a shadow and parable of something more meaning- ful and more searching by far. As also when, the same night in which He was betrayed, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands and that He came forth from God and goeth unto God, riseth from Supper and layeth aside His garments; and He took a towel and girded Himself: then He poureth water into 100 St. Paul's Life of Christ the basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was girded :—this, too, was a shadow whereof the substance was something more inward and spiritual. And this inner substance it was into which Paul throughout his believing years was penetrating; namely, how the Son of Man was in the world, not as the kings of the Gentiles, who exercise lordship, but as one that serveth, and how in that form of a bondservant He gave His life to ransom them that were bound. For Paul came to see that that form of a servant which Christ took upon Himself was none other than the form of the Suffering Servant of God who was oppressed, and who humbled himself, and was as a lamb led to the slaughter, and was numbered with the transgressors, and bare the sin of many. This Paul had to see and feel for himself; but having so seen and so felt, he, whose way it had been to carry himself high among men, could presently write to a handful of slaves and nonde- scripts: “Though I be free from all, yet have I made myself servant unto all ”—“‘ For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake.” And so to the end, by likeness and by contrast of experi- ence, Paul continued to search the depths of his Christ Incarnate IOI Master’s abasement; even to the time when, despised and cast out as “ the filth and offscouring of the earth,” he came to see with deepening insight how Christ was “‘ made to be sin for us ”’ ; and until at last, being such an one as Paul the aged, he stretched forth his hands, and another girded him and led him to where he knelt and bowed his head to the sword. In that moment the last crimson line was written in Paul’s never- finished chapter on the Humiliation of Christ. 4. OBEDIENT. ‘“‘He became obedient,” says Paul, summing up his Master’s life in another penetrative, and, so far as the New Testament is concerned, almost exclusively Pauline word. And beyond question that word was deep-rooted in Paul’s mind from the first. Humility may have been a word sown in Paul’s mind and nature only in his later and evangelical years; but obedience was as much a Sauline as a Pauline word. It was with him in all his blameless observance of the Law and the traditions of the fathers; with him, too, we may well believe, in all his fierce persecution of the intractable followers of the Way; and it remained with him, to take on a new and deeper meaning, ~when the Damascus road suddenly opened into that same Way, with Saul himself taking his first 102 St. Paul's Life of Christ halting pilgrim-steps upon it. Small wonder, then, that in Paul’s great summary of the Life of Christ we find this word taking a conspicuous place: for with all natures which, like Paul’s, were punctual in discipline and given to authority, the obedience and discipline of Christ were some- thing to be noted immediately and memorably. (Does not this in some measure account for that spontaneous understanding and freemasonry of spirit which seems to have sprung up between Jesus and certain of the military and civic officers of the Gospel records ?) For a beginning, then—Jesus was obedient to the Law of Moses. He was, as Paul says, born under the Law. And the first commandment of that Law to which He learned obedience was that commandment with promise which Paul was afterwards forward to enjoin upon all children in the Lord: ‘‘ Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” No father and mother were ever so honoured by their children’s obedience as Joseph and Mary were honoured by. the obedience of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ grew up to obey the Law of Moses with such an obedience as gave to the Law itself a new height and depth of meaning and of Christ Incarnate 103 promise. Paul’s obedience had been outwardly blameless; but Christ’s obedience had been ~ transforming—transforming in respect of the Law itself. For Jesus obeyed the Law of Moses as a master musician follows the scant score of some ancient melody. Where the mere executant with mechanic accuracy goes through his blameless performance—in danger, perhaps, in his dull correctitude, of reading into the score the specks and stains which time has added to the sheet— the master will bring out the hidden movement, the true motif, and carry it forward to a climax which only his touch can bring out. So Christ obeyed the Law. He fulfilled it—filled it out. _ Jesus Christ, according to Paul, so obeyed the Law of Moses as to end it as a merely racial and ceremonial code, and liberate it as a spiritual force. Christ, says he, is the end of the Law unto righteousness (Rom. x. 4). He so obeyed it that for those who followed Him all that was local and transient in it fell away, with all like- wise that was condemnatory and destructive, while all in it that was timeless and universal and exalting was conserved and everlastingly estab- lished: ‘‘that the righteousness of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit ” (Rom. vill. 4). 104 St. Paul’s Life of Christ For within and beyond the Law of Moses which Jesus Christ so honoured and obeyed, was the Law of God; and if for the Jews, in their mechanic obedience, these two were identi- cal, for Jesus Christ, in His spiritual obedience, they were not identical. For not only did He distinguish between Moses’ precepts and the web of tradition spun around them out of the spider- brains of the legal casuists; He also distinguished between Moses’ precepts and the eternal prin- ciples of sovereign righteousness which they interpreted. It belonged, indeed, to His very honouring and obeying of Moses’ Law that He should recognize as still higher the original and absolute and still-unfolding Law of God. He could not have honoured Moses’ Law so well, had He not honoured that higher Law still more. For He never summoned men, as His ecclesiastical opponents were wont to do, to yield a blind obedience to the ancient letter, but rather to yield an obedience that was intelligent and dis- cerning. He taught men to mark where Moses’ code was an accommodation to a hard and sapless age (Mark x. 4), and to look, therefore, in their spiritual obedience beyond Moses’ precepts to eternal principles. He taught them to regard the Law not only as an institution but as a prophecy, a promise of that which was to come. Christ Incarnate 105 All this, through much study and prayer, in his musings on ship-board during his missionary wanderings, and at the camp-fires while his companions slept, and in his disputings with his legal-minded fellow-countrymen, Paul had to see for himself: so that presently he could set down the wonder of Christ’s obedience, so profound, so spiritual, so transforming, side by side with the wonder of His coming in the likeness of men. His becoming a man like unto His brethren and His becoming obedient with an obedience which so far surpassed, in its character and in its fruits, that of His brethren—these two things Paul set down together (Phil. i. 8) But then He was obedient in a still deeper and more particular sense. He was obedient not only to the Law of Moses and to the Law of God after which it was patterned, but also to the specific, : particular will of God in relation to His own life and ministry. Here indeed was the very flower and perfectness of the obedience of Christ, as something personal, filial, intimate, minute. ‘The will of God was something more personal and intimate than the Law of God: and of this Paul himself knew something by his own experience. For with Paul himself, besides the general Law of God and of Christ, there was the heavenly Me 106 St. Paul’s Life of Christ vision, specifically for himself, and the vocation which grew out of it, and the inner, mystic guidance which continually interpreted to him the outworking of that vision: and Paul well understood that the extreme test of his own obedience lay in these particulars. So the supreme significance of Christ’s life, and, above all, of His death, lay in this—that His life and death were not only in conformity with the Law of God, but were expressly and par- ticularly the carrying out of the will of God concerning Jesus Christ Himself; His obedience was the outworking of His own heavenly vision and heavenly vocation: and from the hour that that heavenly vision dawned upon Him at His first baptism in the Jordan to the hour when it was fulfilled in His last and greatest baptism beyond Kedron, He was obedient—“ obedient even unto death.” It was precisely here that Paul, like John, and like that Pauline disciple who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews, came into his deepest discoveries. Jesus was not more surely led up of the Eternal Spirit into the wilderness at the outset of His _ ministry than He was led up of that same Spirit ~* to Calvary at its close. It was His obedience which took Him to the Cross, and which argued for the Cross a profound and particular signifi- Christ Incarnate 107 cance. It was not the Law of Moses which laid upon Him the necessity of submitting to it, nor yet the general, universal Law of God: it was the will of the Father, the commandment which He had received of Him. For when presently in Paul’s case, also, the net of ecclesiastical and political conspiracy was drawn close, and he found himself set, like his Master, on his defence, Paul felt no such necessity laid upon him; quite otherwise. “ But Paul said, I am standing before Cezsar’s judgment- seat, where I ought to be judged: to the Jews have I done no wrong, as thou very well knowest. If I am a wrongdoer and have committed any- thing worthy of death, I refuse not to die: but if none of those things is true whereof these accuse me, no man can giveme up untothem. [I appeal unto Cesar.” In all this, we may believe, Paul was obedient. Neither the Law of Moses nor the Law of God, nor yet that heavenly vision by which he lived, laid it upon him to do other than he did that day. And therefore, it may be, there flashed upon him that day not alone a new sense of his Master’s humiliation, who had no title to carry His debased and unknown name to the tribunal of the lord of all the earth, but also a new sense of that special and particular obedience to His Father’s 108 St. Pauls Life of Christ will which led Him to submit to His unjust death. Could not He, too, have said to His judge: “ To the Jews have I done no wrong, as thou very well knowest ”? Could not He, too, have said: “‘ If I am a wrongdoer and have committed any- thing worthy of death, I refuse not to die,” but if not, ‘no man can give Me up unto them”? But He was ready to be offered up; and that commandment He had received of His Father. For being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross. 5. DLEmpren. In all this, also, Paul came to see that Jesus Christ was continually under self-discipline. “¢ Certainly,” says he, ‘‘ Christ pleased not Him- self’? (Rom. xv. 3)—in that declaration laying bare the truth of the probation and inward conflict of the Son of Man. With such a self to please, would not self-pleasing for once have become a beautiful and godlike thing? But certainly, says Paul, He lived by no such rule. Certainly He bore within Him a self whose impulses and desires were the stuff of life with which He had to work, but which He would not use save to cast it upon the loom of that cross which He daily took up and on which He wove Christ Incarnate 109 those impulses and desires into the perfect pattern of His Father’s design. In all things wherein Jesus suffered reproach and contumely and pain He pleased not Himself. There was that in Him which shrank from these things and desired other and far different things ; and these other and different things also were within His grasp, and only by stern self-discipline did He renounce them. To say this is to set forth Jesus in His temptations. For a man is tempted when He is drawn away of his own desires and enticed; and Christ also, Paul will have us remember, knew the urgings of that self without which there can be no moral life, and which, undisciplined, must lead to its destruction. What Paul himself has in mind when he makes this declaration he plainly shows us. He has in mind the 69th Psalm. “ For Christ also pleased not Himself; but as it is written, ‘ The reproaches of them that reproached Thee fell upon me.’ For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that through patience and comfort of the Scriptures we might have hope.” Paul has this scripture in mind, and whatever he had heard or read of Jesus’ temptation in the desert or His strong cryings and tears on the hillside and in the Garden and upon the Cross, those things he sees again, more vividly, IIO St. Paul's Life of Christ it may be, than in any gospel-picture, in the 69th Psalm— Save me, O God, for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing : I am come into deep waters where the floods overflow me. Let not them that wait on Thee be ashamed through me, O Lorp: Let not those that seek Thee be brought to dishonour through me, O God of Israel. Because for Thy sake-I have borne reproach ; Shame hath covered my face. I am become a stranger unto my brethren, And an alien unto my mother’s children. For the zeal of Thy house hath eaten me up: And the reproaches of them that reproach Thee are fallen upon me. This is the picture which Paul has in mind when he speaks of Christ pleasing not Himself: the picture of his Lord in His sorrows and temp- tations. ““T was with wild beasts—and angels,” says the Master to Peter one day concerning His temptation and illumination in the desert; or so we may believe; and when Peter would recount the Temptation to John Mark—and even, it may have been, to Paul himself when Paul “‘ historied ”? him in Jerusalem (Gal. 1. 18)— he could think of no better word for it than that swift metaphor of Jesus’: He was with wild beasts, and ministering angels (Mark i. 13). Christ Incarnate rita Subtle impulses and desires, stealthy as beasts of prey, taking upon them the colour of the innocent shadows in which they lurked; heaven-born thoughts that came with a waft of angel-wings.... But who can fathom the deeps of the loneliness and sorrow and reproach of the Son of Man? I sink in deep mire where there is no standing : I am come into deep waters where the floods overflow me. Not Paul himself will fathom those deeps. Only he will have us be very sure that beneath the deep mire and amid the flood He found this sure rock: ‘“‘ Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” For even Christ pleased not Himself. 6. Tue Worps or THE Lorp Jesus. “I coveted,” says Paul to the Ephesian Elders on the beach at Miletus, ‘‘no man’s silver or gold or apparel. Ye yourselves know that these hands ministered unto my necessities, and to them that were with me.” And he continues : “In all things I gave you an example, how that so labouring ye ought to help the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He Himself said, It is more blessed to give than to receive ~)(Atts xx? 33-36). Beyond doubt, during his three years’ ministry in Ephesus, Paul had opened to them many 112 St. Paul’s Life of Christ another of the sayings of his Master; and yet it may be urged that in the discourses and letters which have come down to us Paul has surprisingly little to say concerning the words of the Lord Jesus. It may be urged that we can glean from Paul very little of what Jesus ever taught, that indeed about Jesus as Teacher he has hardly more to say than about Gamaliel. However, the length of any disciple’s textual quotations from his master may not be the surest gauge of that disciple’s devotion to and under- standing of his master’s doctrine; there are other standards; and when we examine Paul’s own teachings we see that he himself has so remembered the words of the Lord Jesus as to assimilate their very gist and marrow. To begin with this saying that ‘‘it is more blessed to give than to receive’: we owe it to Paul that this saying has come down to us at all. He quotes it to his Ephesians as if it were one of his choice and much-discoursed-upon texts. And what saying could be a better key for the opening of the whole doctrine of Jesus as a Teacher of men? Luke in his Gospel has a saying like unto it, namely, that to give is to make sure of receiving (Luke vi. 38), and again the plain precept: ‘“‘ Give to every one that Christ Incarnate 113 asketh thee” (verse 30); but Paul’s quotation goes deeper. It approximates to those sayings of Jesus’ which sharpen truth to the point of paradox. The meek inherit more than the masterful; the poor are better off than the rich; the way to find life is to lose it; giving is more blessed than receiving. It is a saying which probes experience to the bone; and it opens to us, as we have said, the whole doctrine (and life) of Jesus. All the blessedness which Dives missed and the Good Samaritan found; all the blessedness of the widow who cast her all into the treasury, and of that irrepressible citizen of the New Kingdom who, conscripted to travel a mile out of his way, goes striding over an extra mile through sheer mirth of invincible good will; yea, the blessedness of the Master Himself and His approach to life—it is all here. All the folly, also, of the hypocrites who would find their blessedness not in giving but in being seen to give; all the folly of the proud who collected salutations and found enlargement in the salaams they received, and not in the recog- nition they bestowed; all the folly of a pagan civilization founded upon exploitation and not upon benefaction—upon the lust of exacting service, and not upon the rewarding luck of giving it—all this, too, is here. With so golden H 114 St. Paul's Life of Christ a key as this hanging at Paul’s girdle, all the doors of his Master’s teaching were open to him. Then, again, there is another passage which clearly shows to what good purpose Paul had remembered the words of the Lord Jesus, extract- ing their vital essence—the passage in which he sums up the whole Law of Christ. Jesus Christ Himself once summed up His law, as we recall, in a certain memorable picture. As for the picture itself, Paul had known it from his childhood. From his childhood he had been instructed in the expectation of the Great Judg- ment, when the Son of Man should sit on the throne of his glory with all his holy angels about him, and when all nations, with the dead them- selves, summoned up from the vales of Hades, should: be gathered before that awful throne. Young Saul had often in his mind’s eye beheld that picture and imagined that great and final parting when, the dooms being pronounced, the righteous would enter into life and the wicked would go away to the eternal fires reserved for the Devil and all his fallen ones. In all these things Paul had been instructed from his child- hood. But what Saul as a young Pharisee had never rightly understood was the principle upon Christ Incarnate 115 which that Great Judgment should proceed. For the most part it had been left for him to infer that the Judgment would put all good Jews and proselytes on the one side and all Gentile infidels on the other—all the correct and ceremonially clean on the favourable side, and all the heretical and unclean on the side of final reprobation. However much the contrastive colours of that picture might be softened or heightened—softened by Gamaliel and his school, heightened by the straiter school of Shammai— and, moreover, luridly done over and transformed by John the Baptist and his school—yet, in the main, there seemed no clear discriminating rule other than this. But Jesus Christ, using that picture for His Own great purpose, made it clear that the critical test of Judgment Day was not to be a question of race, nor of circumcision, nor of ceremonial cleanness, nor of the observance of days and months and times and years, but that the all- deciding question was to be this: Had they put their shoulders beneath the common burden? Had they supported the weak? Had they fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick, succoured the prisoner? Or had they gone their own way, bearing no burdens save the burdens of their own interests, their own accumulating 116 St. Paul's Life of Christ and self-centred cares? ‘That was the question, said the Lord Jesus, summing up His law. And Paul, writing to the Galatians, himself sums up his Master’s teaching and says: “ Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ ” (Gal. vi. 2). Ye Galatians, who have come to profess so great a concern for the Law of Moses and for the works thereof, for feasts and fasts, for circumcision, for times and seasons —have ye so soon forgotten that your acquittal at the Judgment Throne standeth not in these things, but ina living faith in Christ your righteous- ness? But and if ye must speak of Law, here is a law indeed concerning which ye do well to be affected, even the Law of Christ Himself: and if ye would know what it is, behold I give it you in a word: ‘* Bear ye one another’s burdens.” Do this, and fulfil the Law of Christ ! And after all can we find a word which better epitomizes the teachings of Jesus than this summary of His Law so easily introduced into Paul’s exhortation to the Galatians? Moreover, is not Paul remembering the words of the Lord Jesus when he says: ‘‘ Bless them that persecute you; bless, and curse not’; and when he says: ‘* Love is the fulfilling of the Law”; and when he says: ‘‘ I would have you wise ” (as serpents ?) ‘‘unto that which is good, and simple” (as Christ Incarnate ay: doves?) “unto that which is evil”? And in many another Pauline word is there not a reminis- cent note that carries us back to the Voice of Galilee? We have enough, at any rate, to show us that in that Life of Christ written upon Paul’s heart and mind there must have been a chapter on The Words of the Lord Jesus ;— “sound words,” says Paul to Timothy, “ even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ,’’ concerning which if a man consent not unto them, “ he is puffed up... knowing nothing” (1 Tim. vi. 3, 4). ‘ 7. “‘THey KNEW Him not.” “They that dwell in Jerusalem, and their rulers,” says Paul, “‘ because they knew Him not, nor the voices of the prophets which are read every sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning Him ” (Acts xi. 27). They knew Him not. » And this ignorance and blindness of Paul’s own unbelief in time past, and of the continued unbelief of his kinsmen according to the flesh, whose were the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the Law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose were the Fathers, also, and of whom was Christ Him- self as concerning the flesh—this ignorance and blindness of their unbelief was continually excit- 118 St. Paul’s Life of Christ ing his sorrow and amazement, so that he carried great heaviness and unceasing pain in his heart. Looking back upon his own unregenerate years, upon the time when he ranked as an expert among experts in all things pertaining to the Law and the Prophets; looking back upon all the discussion concerning Jesus of Nazareth which he had engaged in with those that were rabbis before him; looking back, it may have been, to the times when he himself had looked upon the Son of Man—when for a vivid, remembered moment, their eyes had met: looking back upon all these things, the wonder grew upon him that they all should have been so ignorant and so blind in their unbelief. “‘ They knew Him not.” They knew so much; they were confident that they were guides of the blind, lights unto them that were in darkness, correctors of the foolish, teachers of the simple, having in the Law the embodiment of knowledge and of truth : but Him they knew not. As for Paul and his school, they knew the Scriptures. ‘They were word-perfect in them, and were zealous to contend for the word- perfectness of the Scriptures themselves. ‘They knew all that the Prophets had said concerning Him, and those same Prophets they read Sabbath by Sabbath in the synagogues. ‘They contended Christ Incarnate 119 for the hope of His coming; and it was their line of things to be expert in the signs of His approach and the manner of His appearing. At the rumour of His advent they sought Him out, deputing their own authorities to investigate His case; in Jerusalem itself their own eyes beheld Him, their ears heard Him, their hands handled Him ; He taught in their streets and sat at meat in their houses; they heard His parables, they observed His deeds, they beheld His compassion, His ire, His joy, His tears; they saw Him die. ... But they knew Him not. It was not, then, that they were men of nomad minds, wandering in far fields of speculation, and missing Him in the quest; they held to the Law and to the Testimony. It was not that they rejected the Prophetic Word; they built upon it, elaborating a grandiose scheme. It was not that they were careless of faith, lacking gravity and a sound discipline; they were rancorous against all laxity. It was not that they had no religious regard for the Christ of God; they reverenced Him as a figure in Holy Writ and were prepared to chart and diagram their detailed belief in His Person and Ministry. What they failed to recognize was that Jesus of Nazareth bore any relation to this Scriptural Hope which 120 St. Paul's Life of Christ they had formularized. What they failed to recognize was that the movement among the hills of Galilee had anything to do with that movement in the souls of the holy men of old who testified of Messiah. They knew Christ as a Scriptural conception; they were blind to Him as a contemporary Fact—blind to Him as the Initiator at work in the living present. As experts, authoritative in their field, they thought they knew Him. They had run a critical eye over Him and marked His ways. They knew Him for an uncredentialled rabbi, an upstart innovator, a man slack as to fastings and ablutions and such-like godly proprieties, a Sabbath-breaker and remover of the ancient landmarks of belief, a vain person, a glutton and a wine-bibber, an associate of wundesir- able folk, a man possessed, a deceiver of the people; and the sacred books which testified of Him they used to confirm their rejection a Him And because they knew Him not, they knew nothing truly; but all things were veiled to them, and a veil was upon their own hearts also. They knew not the Scriptures truly, nor the Power of God, nor the times in which they lived, nor yet themselves and the meaning of their own deeds. They lived in a veiled world, Christ Incarnate 121 a world of illusion. Upon the tomb of that dead age Paul’s epitaph remains :— °C ’THEY KNEW HIM NOT.” 8. ** SEEN OF ANGELS.”’ Christ, says Paul, quoting, as we like to think, from an early hymn of the Church, was “ seen Srnccisc (i lim-) il. i160), |~ bheres are Locher Pauline passages which speak of the relation of Christ and His saints with the over-worlds and under-worlds of the spirit-realm. These passages remind us that the grammar and dialect of faith change with changing times. We have to trans- late Paul’s idiom into our own terms, and there may be times when we have no valid equivalents. In such cases it may be well to remember that where Paul’s dialect differs from our own, it does not follow that it is a less authentic transcript of reality. Good Master Lawrence, finding his lot cast to be out of England during the Cromwellian wars, engages himself to write a ‘‘ Treatise of Our Communion and Warre with Angells.” * Nothing, says he, opening his philosophy, 1s made perfect alone. Which is to say that man himself must find perfectness not otherwise than * Published, 1640. 122 St. Paul’s Life of Christ in communion with all the good creatures of God. To this end God useth angels, that there may be a love and acquaintance grow between us. And though now we have not such a visible converse with them as formerly, their workings dre not ceased. For God useth this Ministration and Guardianship of Angels not only for their own good and ours, but in particular to preserve that Eutaxy and good order which He hath put into all things. Moreover, Master Lawrence will follow Augustine in holding that the Angels, being the highest of all intellectual creatures, yet have much that is hidden from them. They have a Morning and an Evening knowledge— that is to say, a knowledge that is clear and a knowledge that is dim. And so through a curious and discriminating disquisition. No doubt we have long ago forgotten Master Lawrence, as we have also forgotten, or generally lost sight of, the Angels: in which respect his dissertation appeals to us as something quaint and naive, a sort of antique metaphysical sampler. Yet it does not necessarily follow that ours is the superior Divinity. It may even be argued that here Master Lawrence’s sense of his citizen- ship in the universe is somewhat larger and more vivid than our own. And may there not be certain overtones and undertones of truth which Christ Incarnate 123 have become inaudible amid the clatter of our too mechanical age? Is there no populous unseen universe intersphering this visible order of things? Or shall Modern Man strut his little planet amid the teeming, starry Vast, persuaded that he and God are the only intelligences of notable sort—or, it may be, himself alone? At any rate, Paul, like Master Lawrence, will have it otherwise. Paul, too, could have written a Treatise of Our Communion and War with Angels; and because in Paul’s Life of Christ the angels have a place and cannot well be edited out of it, we may consider what was his mind, also, in this matter. Paul had learned to believe in Angels while yet he was a child in Tarsus, and had even learned to put names upon some of the greater captains of the heavenly host—as we put names to the stars. As a devout Jew and a Pharisee he con- tinued to believe in them; and we may even say that as a Christian man and an apostle he came to believe in them more vividly and experi- mentally. Many things he had come to discard, after that great change, but not his faith in an unseen world populous with myriad intelligences ; many things had been ground to powder beneath the weight of that new, mighty Fact, that chief 124 St. Paul’s Life of Christ Corner Stone over which he himself had so savingly fallen, but not his belief in Angels. Indeed they are continually flashing through his epistles. According to Paul, then, there is a visible z| world and there is an invisible world and man is related to both. Just as the pond-lily is partly | submerged in the water-realm and is rooted in | gross elements, but puts forth its leafage on the surface and flowers above it, breathing the upper air and receiving the influences of sun and sky and all the starry firmament, so man lives in two realms, rooted as to his physical nature in the clay, and lying afloat, as it were, in time, yet unfolding here and now in the atmosphere of eternity, and receiving nutriment and empower- ment of the spiritual universe. Paul will show that man on his spiritual side has a capacity for communion with God and with his fellow-man ; but then also there is an intermediate area of communion; he may receive influences from supernal beings. ‘The spiritual world as Paul conceives it 1s a vast and manifold economy ; and human life is related not only downward to the lower creation and its cosmic travail, but upward to the Most High God and outward to occult realms of spiritual existence. Christ Incarnate 125 Moreover, Paul will show that if there are supernal influences, there are also influences infernal. In the realm invisible and in touch with man there are powers that dwell not in the light of God; and their guidance is mis- guidance. According to Paul, their influence comes by way of the dark thoughts and imagina- tions of men; and, as he saw it, the world was largely under their direction. Sea-craft may not travel across country, but they will sail up the channels and rivers, penetrating inland in that way, following their own element. So in Paul’s conception the world was invaded by spirit- forces through the spiritual faculties of men; and the warfare of the saints was thus to capture the thought and imagination of the world, holding them for Christ against every dark invasion. ‘“‘However immediately and properly,” says Master Lawrence, “the Devil may concur in the point of temptation, yet he ever concurs remotely . . . for between the temptation of the Devil and sin there ever mediates, and goes between, cogitation or thought, in which the temptation properly and formally lies.”” So that, as for our Adversary, we must “set him up for a Butt to shoot against, but in our confession charge only ourselves.” ‘The weapons of our 126 St. Paul’s Life of Christ warfare,” says Paul, “are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the casting down of strong- holds; casting down imaginations and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ’? (2 Cor. x. 4, 5). “For we have to struggle, not with blood and flesh, but with the angelic Rulers, the angelic Authorities, the potentates of the dark present, the spirit-forces of evil in the heavenly sphere ” (Eph. vi. 12: Moffatt). Doubtless, morbid superstition, both primitive and modern, at work on this same borderland of experience, has wrought evil in the earth. In place of angels we have banal ghosts; in place of errant spirits—in the braver Hebrew thought the fallen offspring of the Highest, and with that ineradicable kinship always to be reckoned with—we have the progeny of creative Evil, dark witnesses to a Dualism in which the universe appears as a house for ever divided against itself. Here indeed is no Eutaxy as Master Lawrence hath it, but hopeless Ataxy and moral chaos. But this is hardly Paul’s doctrine, which is grounded upon the creative and providential sovereignty of God. As to the powers of dark- ness, says our Pauline essayist, they are not the rulers of the world—“ that is God’s territory ”— Christ Incarnate rey but of the moral darkness thereof. (“‘ When ye are in the dark, the spirit of darkness is bold with you.”) And for the rest: “ God created them,” and, “He hath a hand over them still. They cannot break loose nor get beyond their Tether ” ; and, ‘“‘ God knows how to improve every creature,” and He made nothing in vain. And thus bravely to the conclusion, namely, That it illustrates the divine goodness and bounty rather to bring greater good out of evil than to permit no evil at all—‘‘ else no evil would befall.”” In which, we may take it, Paul would have concurred. And all this we have glanced at because Paul’s conception of the life of Christ and Paul’s con- ception of the world in which that life was lived belong together. To think of that world as a very small one and of that life as having been lived in a corner must always be possible. ‘The obscure province—the uncredentialled Rabbi— the evanescent popularity—the quibbling sectaries —the tumult in the ancient city—the soon unheeded cross :—what was it all but a storm on an inland lake, with its shrill winds, its land- locked surge, its little nameless ships—all so local, so pathetically vivid, so little noticed? It is always possible to paint the picture so. But it was not possible for Paul. He must 128 St. Paul's Life of Christ have the living universe for his background. He must have men see the Life of Christ as central and crucial to the whole movement of things, supernal and infernal, divine and human. Christ was “‘ seen of angels,” and, for His sake, so, too, were His apostles after Him: “ We are made a spectacle to the world—to angels and to men” (1 Cor. iv. 9). For Paul, the life of Christ was a life which throbbed from the centre to the uttermost circumference of things: its conflict was far-flung throughout the visible and invisible realms, its issues involved the whole universe of God. So, on the night on which He was be- trayed, when the lanterns flashed among the olives, and on that still darker morrow when three crosses crowned the hill, something was being wrought out which was for all the ages and all the worlds. Paul learned to see the Son of God on Calvary challenging and cutting off all the malign powers of the Unseen and triumphing over them (Col. ii. 15); he learned to see that the conflict and victory of Christ’s Cross were not for man only, nor for this earth alone, but reached out unto the reconciliation of all things (Col. i. 20). Shall we of to-day find ourselves long content with a meaner view of history and of life, and of Christ Incarnate 129 that supreme Sorrow and Triumph which have consecrated all history and all life? Does not Science itself take up the parable, and tell us that every blow of the hammer upon the nails of the Cross sent a tremor to the stars? g. THe Lorp’s Supper. “‘T received of the Lord,” says Paul, ‘ that which also I delivered unto you, how that the Lord Jesus in the night in which he was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He brake it, and said, This is My body, which is for you: this do in remembrance of Me. In like manner also the cup after Supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in My blood: this do, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of Me” (a Cor. xi. 23-25). It is hardly to be challenged that, under Christ, we owe the Lord’s Supper supremely to Paul, to his insight and mystical imagination. What original motive and urgency led him, as bishop of the Gentile churches, to turn to the tradition of the Supper and make it the subject of such intense and inquiring meditation 1s a question which they must discuss who are com- petent to do so. But what seems sufficiently clear is, that the Supper came at length to take so demanding a place in Paul’s mind, and to I 130 St. Paul’s Life of Christ meet so deep a need in the minds of his Gentile converts, that he had no rest in his spirit until he had sought to learn directly of the Lord Himself how he ought to think of it. For shall we do well to reduce his “I received of the Lord ” to the value of “‘ I received of tradition ”’ ? Paul, being such a man as he was, with so intense and psychical a nature, and having had such experiences of vision and intromission as we read of in his epistles, may here be understood to mean no less than he appears to say. Intense and prayerful meditation upon all he had ever learned concerning that Last Supper brought Paul, we may well believe, into that state of high and mystical consciousness which his language here suggests. For Paul, then, with this tradition before him and with this mystical opening and heavenly confirmation sealing it into him afresh, the Lord’s Supper was Christ’s Cross and Passion interpreted by Christ Himself. At the Supper the Lord Jesus had rehearsed Calvary. At the Supper, and in the very hour of His Passion, He had set forth His own mind concerning His death. The broken bread and the wine poured forth were the visible metaphors which, by swift election, He chose in that hour to reveal His thought. Christ Incarnate 131 Assured of this, Paul had now in his hands a clue to the Cross and to all the prophecies of the Cross. Not one of those who were apostles before him and had received the bread from the Lord Himself, and the cup still warm from His hands who had held it and blessed it—not one of them could instruct Paul as this ordinance now instructed him. It took him back to the Upper Room; it made him as if he too had been an eye-witness and partaker of that solemn feast; but then it did much more. For it was not with the outward showing of that new and Christian Passover that Paul was concerned so much as with its innermost meaning. And the Lord’s Supper told Paul that the Lord Jesus went that night into the darkness of His betrayal and arrest with a great light shining in His soul. It told Paul that Jesus went forth knowing that His sacrifice was to be as bread and wine for the souls of men, and that, so knowing, He gave thanks. It told him that his Master went forth with the vows of God upon Him to ratify the new Covenant of the Most High. It told him that in all that befell that night on which the Lord was betrayed, and on that morrow of suffering and shame, Jesus Christ knew Himself to be in the hands, not of Caiaphas nor of Herod nor of Pilate, but of God, and secure in the [Re St. Paul's Life of Christ outworking of His Covenant-purpose for man- kind. For by one offering He perfected for ever them that are sanctified, even as it is written: This is the Covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord; I will put My laws on their heart, and upon their mind also will I write them; and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more. Once, then, that Paul felt fully assured that he had the mind of the Lord concerning the Holy Feast, he set it to the fore in all the churches committed to his care. (Was it not in his dis- course at the Lord’s ‘Table in that many-lighted and crowded upper room in ‘Troas that Paul, so caught up in his theme, forgot the passing of the hours and “continued his speech until mid- night ? ’’) No one indeed could well have been less sacramentarian than this Apostle of Uncircum- cision who will even thank God that he has “baptized nobody.” He well understands how the simplest of symbols, wrested to schismatic or superstitious ends, can frustrate the purpose it is meant to serve. He is forward to show that the mere act either of baptism or of partaking of the Supper can never of itself secure spiritual grace or Divine favour. ‘The sacraments in the Christ Incarnate 133 Wilderness, he points out, had no magical efficacy for those who partook of them—a fact, says he, recorded for our warning. ‘“ Our fathers were all baptized unto Moses in the Cloud and in the sea, and did all eat the same spiritual meat, and did all drink the same spiritual drink... . But with many of them God was not well pleased ; for they were overthrown in the wilderness ”’ (1 Cor. x. 1-6). Moreover, it would not be a forced enlargement of Paul’s own declaration concerning his mission to say that he came, not to administer sacraments, but to proclaim the Gospel. Yet the Supper is a holy mystery, witnessing not only to Christ in His humiliation, but to His present exaltation. For is it not evident that Paul makes of it something more than a memorial; something more than a means of fellowship in sacred memories and in a sacred hope? Does it not appear as if in his eyes the bread and the wine themselves possessed a certain potency—as if the symbols themselves came to be touched with a living mystery, so that to partake of them unworthily was to run the risk of illness and death? ‘“‘ Anyone who eats the loaf or drinks the cup of the Lord carelessly will have to answer for a sin against the body and blood of the Lord. . .. For he who eats and drinks without a proper sense of the Body, eats 134 St. Paul’s Life of Christ and drinks to his own condemnation. ‘That is why many of you are ill and infirm, and a number even dead” (1 Cor. xi. 27-30: Moffatt). We have to imagine Paul at Communion. © For so vivid and experiencing a nature, so quick an imagination, so mystical a spirit, how could the symbols of the Holy Feast have seemed other than luminous and ineffable, involved in the radiant mystery of the real Presence? To read Gal. i. and 2 Cor. xii. and Romans vii. and vii., and then to imagine Paul at Communion, is to feel that for him, in those tense moments of adoring silence, the bread and the cup may well have blent with, and mystically passed into, the spiritual glory which they symbolized. How could Paul ever take of that bread and that cup without discerning the Body and Blood of the Lord? And how could he contemplate any careless, unworthy handling of those symbols without feeling it was an act of dishonour not wholly unlike theirs who, in the days of Christ’s flesh, handled undiscerningly and guiltily the body of the Son of Man? 10. THE Goop ConFEssion BEFORE PiLatTe. “‘T charge thee ”—runs the apostolic admoni- tion to Timothy, “in the sight of God, who quickeneth all things, and of Christ Jesus, who Christ Incarnate Lee before Pontius Pilate witnessed the good confes- taut toa eal Ga Me Bia a yg la Be Paul’s beloved physician has drawn for us the picture of Jesus as the meek captive in the hands of His enemies, and has shown us how the whole company of His accusers rose up and brought Him to Pilate, and how He witnessed so good a confession that Pilate must needs say, ‘‘ I find no fault in this man.” Luke indeed leaves us with the impression that Jesus’ witness before Pilate that day was not nearly so much in uttered word as in something which speech could neither express nor describe. But if we are to take this charge in First ‘Timothy as reflecting Paul’s own thought —a fragment of that Life of Christ upon which he was continually drawing—we may judge that Paul would have emphasized, even more than Luke has done, the spiritual and inexpressible nature of that good confession. For we know enough of Paul’s mind to under- stand that he would have us mark the wonder of it that Jesus, arraigned before Czsar’s man, should have been content to stand thus at the bar at all. Paul would have us remember that it was Christ Jesus who was so arraigned. He would bring into the picture the stars of heaven for a diadem of glory about His head; he would bring in all the angelic host and set them in 136 St. Paul's Life of Christ shining legions around Him. And so he would have us marvel that amid all the things which the friends of Jesus had vehemently urged Him to do, or not to do, and all the other things beyond their dull conceiving which He Himself had power to do, He was content to do that one thing—to stand there and witness the good confession. And here, in truth, was the mystery of the Kingdom as Jesus had always taught it and as Paul himself had come to know it. ‘The mystery of the Kingdom was that it worked in ways which seemed so ineffectual, setting out to do so much by means and methods which seemed so disproportionately small. The mystery of the Kingdom was that the Son of God came not as a warrior going forth to war but as a sower going forth to sow; that the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus taught it, was not like unto marching armies and an assault with battering-rams and catapults and bowmen and spears, but like unto seed which a man should cast into the earth and which should be covered over and die. . . . It was as if Jesus had committed His cause to the sheer impotency of things. ‘* Knowest Thou not,” says marvelling Pilate jiithatel haverpower.2 tn! But then the mystery of the Kingdom was this, also—that the seed, dying and rising again, was Christ Incarnate 137 mightier than the sharp arrows of the mighty— that the seemingly ineffectual dust to which it was committed was withal more potent than the armies which might trample it to-day beneath their iron feet—to-morrow to return to dust together. Along with seed and soil, in invincible alliance, fight all the stars in their courses and all the viewless legions of the winds, the sun also, and all the clouds of heaven, and “ God that quickeneth all things”: and thus the sower at last triumphs over all the warriors of the earth. In some such strain as this, Paul, perhaps, would have Timothy consider that picture of Christ Jesus witnessing the good confession before Pilate. Lest, that is to say, Timothy should presently ask in the relapsing tone, ‘‘ What can one man do?” Lest he should say, as so often good men have been tempted to say—and com- munities and nations, also: ‘“‘ We are outbid, outnumbered; we have no power: what can wedo?” Son Timothy, thou canst do what the Son of God Himself elected to do; thou canst witness the good confession! What if that be the mightiest thing of all? What, we may add, if that be the mightiest thing which any nation can do, and so doing suffer the last ignominy and apparent final van- 138 St. Paul’s Life of Christ quishment? For a nation so resolved and so committed there remains, it may be, one thing which it cannot do; it cannot perish. II. CRUCIFIED. Had we been dependent upon Paul, in his epistles and reported discourses, for the story of the Passion, we should still have gathered that the closing scenes of Jesus’ ministry lay in Jeru- salem; that He was actively opposed by the Jewish authorities; that one night He was betrayed into their hands; and that though they could prove Him guilty of nothing deserving of death, yet they were able to persuade a Roman official named Pilate to have Him condemned. We should have gathered that thus, having witnessed before Pilate the good confession, Jesus was hanged to a wooden cross according to the Roman method of crucifixion; that His blood was shed, and that He died; and that afterwards His body, presumably at the instance of His enemies, was taken down from the Cross and laid in a tomb. All these details we should have been able to gather from Paul’s own Life of Christ. Yet, compared with the Evangelists’ account of the circumstances of Jesus’ death, Paul’s record is even poignantly bare. But then it is not because he makes little of the Cross, Christ Incarnate 139 but because he makes so much of it, that his references to its external circumstances are com- paratively meagre. Because it is central to his moral and spiritual life, central to the whole scheme and process of things in the living universe, he will leave descriptive detail to others, content, himself, to indicate the actual event in its naked realism—‘* He was crucified ”—-and thus to pass at once to its spiritual meaning. In this treat- ment we must now endeavour to follow him. It is clear that to Paul as a Jew and a Pharisee the Cross of Jesus had been a scandal and an offence. We may well believe that it was pre- cisely this that he set to the fore in all his fierce and contemptuous disputings with the followers of the Way wkom he hailed to prison. He was determined to know nothing among them but Christ and Him crucified; determined to placard that fact before them and so put them to open shame. For how could they believe in a Messiah so persecuted and so weak?—or in a “ Risen One” who yet did not protect His persecuted friends nor avenge Him of His adversaries? (And indeed the thought of Jesus not having avenged Himself seems to have remained in the mind of Paul the Christian, at least up to the time of the Thessalonian epistles.) Whatever searchings 140 St. Paul's Life of Christ of heart, then, Paul, as Saul of Jerusalem, may have had concerning Jesus and His teachings, the very fact that He had not discomfited His persecutors, but had been “crucified through weakness’ (2 Cor. xiii. 4), testified in Saul’s mind against any Messianic claim on His behalf. Yet when it pleased God to reveal His Son in Paul, the very first revelation showed Him as the Persecuted One. This was the great mystery which Paul, ‘‘ with Augustine and Luther in his spiritual loins,’? had to take with him to Arabia. From the first there was to be no escape for Paul from the wounds of Jesus. And first of all, now that he was able to think calmly and clearly, there was the fact itself. The fact of the Cross, and of Paul’s experience of new life through Him who had suffered it, preceded all that he ever came to formulate by way of interpreting it. Moreover, Paul knew well—none could have known better—how Jesus came to be crucified. ‘They that dwell in Jerusalem and their rulers,” says he, were accountable for that deed. The | Synagogue, the Temple, the Sanhedrin, the Palace—all were marked with the blood of Christ’s cross. "The Pharisees were accountable, and the Sadducees, and the Herodians ; Caiaphas Christ Incarnate 141 and Annas, Herod, too, and Pilate; yes, Gamaliel himself and all his school, and likewise all the school of Shammai; all the rabbins and all the rabble and all the indifferent populace—all were accountable for His death ; for either by vehement enmity or through self-seeking diplomacy, either by lust of power and greed of gain or by moral apathy, they had together made it possible and brought it to pass. There was something more. Paul came to see that it had all been recorded aforetime. It was all “according to the Scriptures.” It had all been foreseen and foretold. For Paul, with his new eyes, had gone back to the Scriptures to find what he had never found before—namely, that the Prophets had had it upon their hearts that the high service of God was service unto suffering, and that the Servant of God’s annoint- ing must first be despised and rejected and pierced with many sorrows. It came to be a matter of continual amazement to Paul that he and his countrymen should have heard those Prophets read Sabbath after Sabbath in the synagogue, and yet should have remained blind to that prophetic testimony, and never so blind as when they were fulfilling it (Acts xiii. 27-29); but so it was, and so it continued to be. 142 St. Paul’s Life of Christ But not for Paul. ‘“‘ Christ died,” he must now everywhere insist, ‘‘ according to the Scriptures ” —that is to say, according to the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God. All the while that the whisperers and plotters were hurrying from house to house; all the while that secret councils were being called and treacheries connived at; all the while that false witnesses were being bribed and coached in their dark retreats; even to the lighting of the lanterns for the Gethsemane arrest and the lashing of the timbers, beam across beam, to provide for the Son of God His cruel death-bed—all the while in every act, and in every syllable of hate hissed through the teeth of Annas and Caiaphas and their perjured men, the Divine purpose moved to its predicted fulfilment. To what end? To the end that a divine Crisis should be brought to pass. In the first place it was a Crisis unto Con- demnation. God through the Cross condemned Sin in such a way that the condemnation was to reverberate through the conscience of the world. Christ, says Paul, condemned sin in the flesh. Did not Mark Antony put a tongue in every wound of murdered Cesar to move the very stones of Rome? But, for Paul, murdered Christ Incarnate 143 Czsar’s wounds were as nothing to the wounds of Jesus. The wounds of Jesus had in them condemnation so complete, so final, that they meant for Paul the end of the whole order of things, the end of the world. , For the sins which sent Jesus to the Cross / were not unique or extraordinary ; they were the common sins of mankind. The complacent, well-fed Sadducees, secure in their comfortable livings, who had ambled to the Sanhedrin to discuss the strange case of the Nazarene; the lean and soured Pharisees, bigoted for a tradition once vital, but now embalmed and enswathed in cerements of custom and formality ; the sleek and perfumed Herodians, also, with their sycophantic affectations and cynical insincerities; Herod himself, with his vile little world of women and wine, intrigue and ambition, superstition and vanity; Annas, the priest in politics, the politician in Orders, with his well-farmed revenues and his well-laid schemes of patronage and power; Caiaphas, born and reared in the Annas world, married into the Annas family, pledged to the Annas policies and protected by the Annas interests; Pilate, grown morally stale in office, with his official ambitions and his official embarrassments, and his oppor- tunist surrender of a troublesome case, which, 144 St. Paul’s Life of Christ after all, was but one among many; Judas Iscariot, with his soul consumed of egotism and his mind darkened with an egotist’s resentments and given over to base designs; the suborned witnesses, their tongues a-drip with lis, their wits too sodden to lie consistently ; the soldiery, with their coarse, barrack-room jests and their callous horseplay; the rabble, with their brute lust for noise and blood; the indifferent populace, that went its way unheeding, or stood awhile and gazed, and went its way again, preoccupied with its own affairs—what were all these but men whose passions and apathies had been common throughout all generations? ‘Their sins were not peculiar, but representative; and, among other things, in this—that those same sins were so built into their lives, so built into the very fabric of their world, that for them to break away from their sins and form a clear judgment upon a moral issue which challenged them was for them to leap out of themselves and out of their world, and seek a standpoint in the air. They were “* concluded in sin concluded. ‘This was what Calvary had brought to light. Not the Law itself had so condemned sin and exposed it as Christ had condemned and exposed it, on the Cross. In that sense the Cross was the end of the world. For sin was so inextricably inter- Christ Incarnate 145 woven with the whole order of the world’s life that for it to be thus condemned was for that order itself to be marked for destruction. But then the Crisis was likewise unto Life. The Cross was the creative centre of a new, transcendent experience, a new order, a new world. | Paul had known himself condemned the moment he found himself before the Lord of Glory. There was no appeal from the sentence of the wounds of Christ: ‘‘ I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.”’ But with the condemnation came the call to a new life. In the house of Judas of Damascus, when the scales fell from his eyes and he felt in his very frame the electric thrill of a new vitality, he came to know that condemnation to the utter- most had wrought itself into uttermost recon- ciliation; and later he was to learn that that reconciliation, wrought within his own heart, was to embrace all things and fashion a new and universal order (Col. 1. 19, 20). It was precisely in this paradox of mercy in judgment, reconciliation in condemnation, life in death, that Paul found and proved his peace: for in this paradox lay the mystery of Divine atonement. It is true that Paul knew himself reconciled K 146 St. Paul's Life of Christ to God apart from any theory of reconciliation ; but whatever it first meant to him in the house of Judas, it could not have remained simply as a gush of feeling, a vague persuasion of the Divine Love. For the category of holiness was never absent from Paul’s thought, and it is safe to say that for him no reconciliation could have been conceivably valid between himself and the holy God which did not first pass consuming judgment upon Paul’s sins. Reconciliation had to be rooted not only in Love but in Law; it had to address itself not only to the heart but to the conscience. Thus, for Paul, it had to include the idea of Expiation. However it may be with us, it was not in Paul to believe that the forgiveness of sin was something which passed as an easy ripple over the placid surface of the Divine benignity. It was God who forgave, and not simply a de- tached attribute of God. As for Paul himself, night and day his sins were ever before him. They were zhere, and nothing could put them finally out of the way which did not reckon with the Divine Law and the Divine Holiness. So that it is safe, also, to say that not even the Righteousness of Jesus Christ Himself could have met the sore need of Paul’s sin-burdened con- sclence, nor penetrated to the innermost core of Christ Incarnate 14.7 his trouble, had he not felt that that Righteous- ness had expiation at the heart of it. But that expiation, wrought out of the nature of God, was set forth in the Passion of Christ’s Cross. For Paul, then, to believe in Christ crucified was at once to acknowledge the sentence of death and to receive the assurance of eternal life. To believe in Him was to realize the end of all things and the beginning of all things new. Religions, moralities, races, classes were all dissolved around the new and crucial centre. To pass under the portal of the Cross was to abandon all hope, and to find it for ever. And if our evangelical fathers, following Paul, were disposed to interpret all this in formulas too legal and transactional, laying stress upon theories which no longer satisfy the mind, at least is it not true that their doctrine of Substitution was nearer to Paul, and, what is more, nearer to human need and the testimony of Christian experience, than its negation could ever be? If to-day we incline to say that the Atonement, like the Incarnation, is not simply an event but a process, and that the Divine Passion may be traced through the ages in the vicarious sorrows of all who through the Eternal Spirit have offered themselves for the succour of men—even s0, shall it be less true that that Passion found its supreme expression 148 St. Paul's Life of Christ in the Cross of Christ—that there the guilty conscience finds as nowhere else the absolving word? Paul, indeed, must always pass beyond us. We come to feel that for him the Atone- ment passes finally beyond all events and processes of time, and stands as the Eternal Act of God. So that to all this we must add that not even Christ Crucified. was the ultimate objective of Paul’s thought concerning the Divine Passion. Paul’s thought does not terminate upon the cross of Jesus. ‘‘God sent forth His Son”; and in all that Paul has to say God is never the impassive Sublime whose being extends like the untroubled sky which canopies all the unquiet worlds, nor yet the vigilant inexorable One whose concern is for transcendent abstractions; He is the Holy Victim of His own love for His prodigal worlds. It is the way of all God’s sons to be unsparing of themselves; but the measure of the Passion was that God spared not His Son and therefore spared not His own heart. ‘There was a Cross behind the cross, and on that un- apparent Cross suffered the Father Himself. But yet more. Not even upon that Divine and unapparent Cross can Paul’s thought ter- minate: for with Paul there is nothing of that morbid ‘‘ Worship of Sorrow ” which has tinc- Christ Incarnate 149 tured the devotional thought both of Evangelical- ism and Catholicism. Beyond the Cross is the triumph of Love and of Life—‘the far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” There is something else that may not be left unsaid. We may speak if we will of the Cross as the centre of Divine philosophy; but for Paul there was a poignant something in the theme which pierced through all eloquence and smote it to the dust. ‘“‘ He loved me and gave Himself for me.” We come at length to see that if Calvary has Divine significance at all, it can mean no less for each one of us. If God was indeed in Christ, and the Cross was the supreme witness to His eternal Passion, it can mean no less. For the love and sacrifice of the Divine Fatherhood cannot fall short of the love and sacrifice of human fatherhood, which is particular and dis- cerning toward each member of the family. 12. Buriep. “And when they had fulfilled all that was written of Him” (says Paul according to the chronicler of the Acts), “they took Him down from the tree, and laid Him in a sepulchre.”’ “For I delivered unto you,” he writes to the 150 St. Paul's Life of Christ Corinthians, ‘*. .. how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried.” Surely there is a strange vividness and terrible divine irony in the former of these statements. They took Him down. The suggestion is that it was His enemies who undertook to have Him removed from the cross. It agrees with the record of John xix. 31: ‘‘ The Jews, therefore, because it was the Preparation, that the bodies should not remain upon the cross on the Sabbath day (for that sabbath was an high day), besought Pilate that ... they might be taken away.” They so besought him out of pious regard for the Law of Moses which ran: “ If a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree: his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day (for he that is hanged is accursed of God), that thy land be not defiled . ..”?. (Dentiiigas 22, 23). Here was their motive and intention ; and Paul is content to indicate it. They took Him down from the tree. It was a matter of religious scruple; and they were religious men. His dead body was more than unsightly ; it was a ceremonial defilement. As religious men with a nice conscience in the Christ Incarnate 151 matter of the decencies of the law and of Sabbath observance, they would not have it hanging there overnight ; particularly as the next Sabbath was a high day. His body up there on the cross would mar the decorum of the sacred festival. As religious men, they must have it taken down and put out of sight. But not, says Paul, before they, being religious men, had fulfilled all that was written of Him; they had, it would seem, been careful to see to that! ‘The Prophets that were read every Sabbath day—they had fulfilled them in rejecting Him; they had fulfilled them in condemning Him; they had fulfilled them in slaying Him. And now, having fulfilled the Prophets, they must fulfil the Law. So they took Him down, and saw to it: that He was buried. Terrible, divine irony! These busy little men, whose so cunning schemes have been so cleverly carried out; these self-gratulating little men, who have worked so well to their pro- gramme, and accomplished, not without difficulty and anxiety, their every design; these truly indispensable little men, without whom the True Faith, once for all delivered to the Fathers, must perish from the earth—in ways quite other than they suppose they have indeed vindicated the Scriptures, of whose inspiration they are the rte St. Paul’s Life of Christ expert champions, and fulfilled the Law and the Prophets! Not as painted puppets strung on the leading-strings of Fate have they done all this—for then had they no condemnation nor any shame—but as fools and blind whose folly and whose blindness are the slow result of multi- tudinous secret apostasies of heart—as_ such, though all unknowing, they have offered them- selves to the Maker of all history, the Fashioner of every event: and they have been used! The burial of Jesus, then, set the seal of com- pleteness upon His sacrifice. There was the solemn finality of the tomb. And it was alto- gether to the mind of Paul to seek in Christian experience the moral and mystical equivalent of this last act, also, in the Saviour’s Passion. As we are crucified with Christ, so, says Paul, must we be buried with Him: and it was his way to interpret Christian Baptism as symbolically a burial-rite: ‘‘ Our baptism into His death made us share His burial’? (Rom. vi. 4: Moffatt). “*'You were buried with Him in your baptism ” (Col. ii. 12: Moffatt). The believer must have a grave in his history. Self must be mortified even to the finality of burial, that so, from the tomb of that dead self, he may rise into newness of life. VI CHRIST RISEN AND EXALTED 1. Intropuctory.—‘ At midday, O king.” Foremost in the great Life of Christ written upon Paul’s mind and heart, and in the great Resurrection chapter which was the first of that Life to be so written, stands the record of Paul’s own experience of the Lord of Glory. For to Paul, while yet he was Saul the Pharisee, all that Cephas and James had testified to, and the rest who were apostles before him, was but an idle tale and worse, until Jesus Christ shone down upon him on the road to Damascus. And as we of to-day seek our own clue to faith and reality, we do well to betake ourselves to that which lies behind Paul’s thought upon this theme—to his own vital and transforming experience. It is indeed arguable that by omitting all refer- ence to the appearance of Christ to the women at the sepulchre, all direct reference to the sepul- chre itself, all explicit allusion to a bodily mani- festation at all, and by grouping with his own vision all the other appearances which he cites, 153 154 St. Paul's Life of Christ Paul shows that he has no thought of anything other than a spiritual Christophany. But is not this to press the argument from silence too far, and to do violence alike to the plain inference of Paul’s language and to all that we know already of his mind? None the less is it true, however, that while Paul’s thought concerning the Resur- rection came to be grounded upon the demon- stration of the first Christian Easter, his own faith was fashioned, not at the sepulchre, but on the Damascus road. When he says, “‘ Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” he has in mind the glory that shone about him on that never-to-be- forgotten journey, and, it may be, every visional experience of Christ granted to him thereafter ; and he has them in mind as confirmed to him by the continuous inflow of a new life of moral and spiritual power—the power of the Holy Spirit. “At midday, O king, I saw in the way a light from heaven” (Acts xxvi. 13). He saw a Light and he heard a Voice; and in that hour he knew that a Power not his own had come upon him, and a command not to be disobeyed had been laid upon his soul. But that Light, uncomprehended, and that Voice, unrecognized, had always been with him. Was not that in part the secret of the inward, Christ Risen and Exalted 155 compelling authority of the heavenly vision? Must we not believe that somehow, in the deeps of Saul’s being that day, he knew that that mysterious One, shining down upon him, had had all along His own unheeded witness in Paul’s own heart? Must we not believe that what then shone upon him in blinding effulgence was not altogether distinct from the Light which had shone within him, an uncomprehended flame: and that that pale flame was now leaping up toward the down-shining glory? Is not this the way every new revelation authenticates itself to the soul of man—announcing itself to us as if it had known us before and known us deeply— giving us, also, a new clue to ourselves, awaking occult memories? Moreover, of late and with increasing fre- quency, Saul had seen something of the mystic play of that Light on the faces of others—on the faces of the followers of the Way. ‘There was unquestionably a strange shining about them. How bright it had shone in the face of Stephen ! And all the while that it was so shining, it was signalling, as it were, to that dim flame within Saul himself, and so troubling him that he was fain to keep the secret even from himself—so troubling him that a madness grew upon him to stamp it out wherever it showed itself. But it 156 St. Paul’s Life of Christ had been very hard to track down and stamp out that strange shining; and all the while that he was pursuing it, it was pursuing him. Until “at midday, O king, I saw. . .,” with a sight so sudden and so clear that it swooned into blind- ness. For that Light against which he had striven so long had at last outshone the sun at noon- tide, turning Saul’s day into darkness, that it might turn his darkness into everlasting day. And that Light was Jesus Christ. For the Glory had become vocal, speaking to Saul in his own Hebrew tongue and saying, “‘ Iam Jesus... .” And it was enough. Not more surely now did Saul know that he had been persecuting Jesus than that by the same token he had been con- tending against the Light. Jesus and the Light were one. After that, and after those days of darkness and trembling and prayer in Judas’ house, and after Ananias’ ‘‘ Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus... hath sent me,” and after the living touch of Ananias’ hands, and after the healing and the light and the brokenness and the joy, and the new, vivid sense of vocation and destiny (as if life had at last, and suddenly, leaped into its true meaning)—after all this, Saul needed no further evidence. He had no impulse to examine Christ Risen and Exalted P57 the tomb or interrogate witnesses. That the Lord had appeared to Cephas and the rest was no longer to be questioned. He had evidence enough. For it had pleased God, who had set him apart even from his birth, to reveal His Son in him ;. and he needed now no other testimony. The Light had found him; and that Light was Jesus Christ, living and exalted. As he puts it, the kindness of God our Saviour and His love toward man had appeared—had dawned upon him—not by works done in righteousness which he himself had done, but by a regenerating ex- perience, by the renewing of the Holy Ghost which God had richly poured out through Jesus Christ our Saviour (Titus il. 4-7). Henceforth Paul’s thought concerning the Resurrection was to pass through a mysticising process. But to say this as if it meant that for Paul the Resurrection was sublimated into an idea—that he was presently content to regard it only as a subjective mystery, the symbol of a spiritual principle and process—is surely a strange perversion. Paul’s thought is mystical because it is first of all historical; it is subjective because it is first of all intensely objective. For him the facts of the Crucifixion and Resurrection were so truly and tremendously facts outside of, and 158 St. Paul's Life of Christ independent of, all that was Paul—so objective and substantial and Divinely original—that every- thing else had to abdicate to them. Paul himself had to abdicate. What he was and thought and felt no longer mattered; what mattered was Christ Crucified and Exalted and that faith which laid hold upon Him. It was this very objectivity of faith which made, so to say, its own subjectivity—this flight out of experience which became in itself a new experience. “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. For the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” For Paul, indeed, the Resurrection of Christ was a fact emergent in three realms—the physical, the historical and the spiritual. On the physical side it was a fact like unto the recurring miracle of spring-time and harvest. Christ’s physical resurrection was the first fruits of that harvest one day to be reaped from the fields of death; and as to that harvest, God raises the dead as He does the wheat, which is sown in weakness and raised in power, sown in one body and raised in a more glorious body, according to the opera- tion of the Divine Law. ‘To open this Pauline Christ Risen and Exalted 159 saying so as to make it mean no more than the dissolution of the mortal body and the ascent of the spirit is hardly to open it at all, but to ex- change one saying for another. At one stage in Paul’s thought there is at least a direct connection, though not identity, between the mortal and the resurrection bodies of believers; and this has its bearing upon Paul’s thought concerning the resurrection of Christ. One is tempted to add in parenthesis—Is Paul’s thought here, in its general principle, so alien to us that it makes no appeal? We may sometimes wish that in all this Paul had been less a Hebrew and more a Greek; yet is there no unborn thought in us which leaps at times within the mental womb at the sound of the challenging apostolic word? Have we no kin- ship with this planetary dust and visible stuff of the world, that we should say, “A few more years and we are done with it for ever!”? Is there not that within us which would say, the rather: ‘‘ Dust of the earth, there is redemption for thee also! Thou and I shall meet again! Thou, too, art spiritual, and spirit shall reclaim thee unto the triumph of life!”? It seems, at any rate, that Paul is persuaded that the outward body of Jesus which was formed of the dust and perished on the Cross and was 160 St. Pauls Life of Christ buried—that that visible tenement of the spirit was reclaimed and changed and glorified through the working of Him who is able to subdue all things unto Himself; and he is persuaded of © this, not as of a thing for ever unique, but as the pledge and evidence of a universal law. Then for Paul, as we have seen, Christ’s Resur- rection was a fact in the realm of history—a fact of time and place, attested by many witnesses. And again, in the realm of the soul it was a fact both objective and subjective. Objectively it demonstrated that God had met the deepest needs of man’s spiritual nature—the need of pardon and acquittal—the need of a sure basis of fellowship with Himself—the need of an assured hope of immortality ; and subjectively it contained the principle and power of that inward death unto newness of life, through which the believer mystically re-lives the life of his Lord. ““ At midday, O king.” Has that noon faded from our sky? Are there some things, clearer for Paul than the sun, which for us have somehow become involved in thick shadows? It may be that in some respects it is with the Pauline faith to-day much as it was at Athens when the apostle unfolded his.divine philosophy to his curious-minded hearers. His discourse Christ Risen and Exalted 161 upon the Divine transcendence and immanence, upon the spiritual origin of the universe, upon the oneness of the human race and the Divine Providence in history, and upon the spiritual function of nationhood (Acts xvii. 22-29) appears to have been favourably received. But it is recorded that when he proceeded to speak of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, some mocked, while others with a more Athenian courtesy suggested the postponement of the dis- cussion—to some undated occasion. No doubt, had Paul spoken of Immortality, he would have continued to hold his hearers, but the Resurrec- tion lost him his audience: and in this the Athenian mind and the modern mind are not greatly dissimilar. ‘The world is still young, and the mind of man considerably younger. Our present exploration and interpretation of reality are still tentative and somewhat incomplete. It is even possible that our constantly changing modes of thought may presently enter a cycle in which the latest and fullest understanding of things will be found to intersphere Paul’s own position. In the meantime, driven by the stress of truth’s warfare to seek the innermost defences of certitude, we do well to distinguish between Paul’s interpretations and his vital experience. “* At midday.” It is true that Paul’s noon is L 162 St. Paul's Life of Christ not ours. Paul’s day is not our day, though the Light which made his day is ours also. ‘The Light is the same; but the latitude is different. The nomad generations of thought and faith have travelled far since the first Christian century, and the panorama of truth is approached and surveyed from a different quarter. It is plain, for instance, that the passing of the centuries has brought to us a wider outlook upon the spiritual Lordship and Kingdom of Christ than Paul could possibly have possessed through the Damascus illumination; on the other hand, what may be termed the physical facts of the first Easter are farther from us, involved in the haze of distance. ‘To say this is to acknowledge the will of God writ large in the very necessities of time and sense. Is there no room for a kenotic theory as applied to truth itself? Are there not truths which pass through a kenosis of their own, emptying themselves, so to say, of their regal certitude, that, thus abased and impoverished, they may presently enrich us with some new and wealthier assurance of the spirit ? Continually, then, it is to the living experience behind the Pauline interpretations that we have to look, confident that the light which has made that experience luminous for each succeeding age Christ Risen and Exalted 163 was, and is, no mere play of inner phosphorescence, but the outshining of something eternally real and glorious. Is it not here that our great doctors of grace have always found their certi- tude? ‘‘A man does not doubt things that are an integral part of his daily existence.” ‘‘ We have been in personal contact with God.... We solemnly declare that we have felt the power of the Holy Spirit over our soul as much as ever old ocean has felt the force of the north wind... . We find that in the little world within our soul the Lord Jesus manifests Himself so that we know Him.” Between the testimony of a modern apostle * and the original Pauline experience there is the vital continuum which, stretching through the centuries, constitutes the supreme apologetic of the Easter Faith. 2. ** RatisED ON THE Tuirp Day.” It was plain to Paul that the Cross was a stumbling-block which cost him a large con- stituency that otherwise might have been friendly ; the Cross was a stumbling-block, and the Stone rolled away from the sepulchre a rock of offence, and to set forth these two things was, in the minds of many, to babble of sheer folly. This was _ probably plainer to Paul than to any that were * C. H. Spurgeon. 164 St. Paul's Life of Christ apostles before him—plainer, perhaps, than to any leader of the Church save Apollos of Alex- andria. As for Apollos, was it not after his eloquent and popular ministry that Paul found it necessary to set forth all over again to the Corinthian Church not only the doctrine of the general Resurrection, but also the very proofs of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ on the third day? Beyond doubt Paul could see that this doctrine was getting for him many a rebuff, and that there were those within the Church who held it all too loosely; nor was it his way to antagonize men’s minds, but rather to seek the point of con- tact, becoming a Jew to the Jews and a Greek to the Greeks; but upon this question he was in no mood to compromise. That Christ, crucified and buried, was risen from the dead had been to him, too, a doctrine of sheer and detestable folly ; but it was precisely this point of controversy and derision which had become for him the point of contact with the Power of God; and therefore, against all calculations of prudence, he must pro- claim it in the simplicity in which he himself had received it. Let Apollos, then, with all his training in Philo (who would have no Resurrection), and with all Christ Risen and Exalted 165 his later training in the water-baptism and discipline of John, and with his still later and supplementary instruction in Christian doctrine under Priscilla and Aquila—let Apollos preach and teach according to the measure of faith given to him; Paul must preach Christ crucified and risen from the dead the third day. The new leader, whatever his doctrinal or ritual emphasis, is still ‘‘my brother Apollos ” ; Paul has planted and Apollos (with perhaps a Johannine rather than a Pauline emphasis upon baptism !) has watered, and it is well; ‘“‘ he that planteth and he that watereth are one” (1 Cor. i. 8); and they, also, who have learned to say, ‘There is no resurrection,’ whatever Paul may think of the logic of their position, are still to be entreated as saints in the Lord: but for all that— “* According to the grace of God which was given unto me, as a wise master builder, I laid a founda- tion; and another buildeth thereon. But let each man take heed how he buildeth thereon ”’ (1 Cor. ui. 10). For “* brothers, I would have you know the gospel I once preached to you, the gospel you received, the gospel in which you have your footing, the gospel by which you are saved—pro- vided you adhere to my statement of 1t—unless indeed your faith was all haphazard. First and 166 St. Paul's Life of Christ foremost I passed on to you what I had myself received, namely, that Christ died for our sins as the Scriptures had said, that He was buried, that He rose on the third day as the Scriptures had said; and that He was seen. . .” (1 Cor. xv. 1-5: Moffatt). This is Paul’s gospel. In itself nothing could be clearer, more objective, less mystical, more insistent in its emphasis upon external and attested fact. For in all this Paul must be true to himself and his own experience. 3. “‘ HE was SEEN.” It may have been a derisive criticism on the lips of Saul the Pharisee that Jesus had shown Himself alive after His Passion only to His friends. But when the day came for that last protective criticism and defiance to wither like Jonah’s gourd before the fierce light that beat upon the Damascus road, Saul came to understand that there was in this a sovereignty and selectiveness which belong to all the ways of God with man. For God hath His pressed men, and He will choose whom He will; as it is written: ‘‘ Him God raised up the third day, and gave Him to be made manifest, not to all the people, but unto witnesses that were chosen before of God” (Acts x. 40, 41). Christ Risen and Exalted 167 Is not Vision always for the few, albeit for the sake of the many? ‘To how many at any time does Truth appear, or Beauty, in any new revela- tion? ‘The seers have always been numerable as units in a multitudinous world. Shall we be wise to infer too readily that this must be so because of the rarity of excellence and the vulgarity of the mass? When Vision works mediately upon the many through the witness and dedication of the few, that ministry brings with it an added spiritual glory of its own. But more than that: Is there not a certain reticence of revelation, a certain sparingness of apocalypse, because there are delicate responses of the spirit which demand other conditions than the noontide splendour of some compelling, unveiled glory? Does not Truth love to be wooed in the twilight, also? Is it not the wisdom of God that faith should rest in the main upon the obedience and conscience of love? ‘‘ Lord, what is come to pass that Thou wilt manifest Thyself unto us and not unto the world? ”—“‘ If a man love Me, he will keep My word.” So the faith of the many must rest upon the free election, the moral choice, of that love which, seeing not the face of the Beloved, weaves its patient fidelities around the keepsake pledges of His word. 168 St. Paul's Life of Christ Yet Vision there must be, and a certain holy conscription in the cause of Truth. “And... He appeared unto Cephas; then to the Twelve ; then He appeared unto above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain until now, but some are fallen asleep; then He appeared to James; then to all the apostles; and last of all He appeared to me also— to this so-called * abortion ’ of an apostle ” (1 Cor. xv. §-8: see Moffatt). So runs Paul’s litany of witness. He was raised—He was seen. He was seen again and again. In what manner ?—what form? Paul will not enlarge upon that. As to that, let each witness speak for himself. For himself Paul will speak most clearly and fully. But in every case “‘ He was seen.”” He was-~so seen that they who saw became His witnesses for ever. As for Paul, he was a witness even under Divine subpena, for ‘‘ Woe is me if I proclaim not the gospel!” Paul was the last witness—‘ last of all.” He had apparently no thought that, for the future, and until the Glorious Appearing, any such proof would be given. Henceforth belief must rest upon other evidence: upon the word of testimony, upon the Scriptures of faith, upon conscience, upon the viewless epiphanies of the Christ Risen and Exalted 169 Spirit, upon the self-witness of the truth and the Power of God which accompanies it, upon the outshining of the Christ-illumined heart. For ‘we all mirror the glory of the Lord with face unveiled, and so we are being transformed into the same likeness, passing from one glory to another—for this comes of the Lord the Spirit. Hence, as I hold this ministry by God’s mercy, I never lose heart in it. ... I state the truth openly, and so commend myself to every man’s conscience before God. ... For God... has shone within my heart to illuminate men with the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ ” (2aG@orisy. 18; etc... Moffatt). Thus Paul could proclaim the incredible; for the incredible was a glory round about him and within him. The world and life and time were summed up and concluded. Christ’s Cross and Resurrection had made an end of all things, and made all things new. Henceforth Paul lived in Faith’s world, the transcendent and the only real world ; and he was invincible. 4. “* RECEIVED UP IN GLory.” ‘** Above, where Christ is,’ runs the Pauline phrase. The supernal world bore for Paul that all-suficing description. Christ was there, ‘‘ re- celved up in glory,” “highly exalted,” ‘ the 170 St. Paul's Life of Christ 99 66 Head of all principality and power,” “ interceding for us” before the Father, in the light un- approachable. Concerning the “‘ heavenly places” all that Paul had ever learned to believe, as a child in Tarsus and as a student in Jerusalem, had come to be simplified and illuminated in the light of this one effulgent conception. More- over, whatever may have been his original Chris- tian belief concerning death and the great awakening, it seems clear that he came at length to believe that Christian death was simply to depart to be “ with Christ.” It was at once a sleeping and a waking; not a state but an act— a discharge from the warfare of earth, a quitting of the pilgrim-tent for an enduring habitation in that ‘‘ Jerusalem which is above ”—“‘ where Christ igs Nor were those heavenly places, where Christ was gloriously exalted, far away. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, when the senses slept and the soul awoke, the journey could be made. ‘“‘] know a man in Christ who, fourteen years ago, was caught up to the third heaven ” (2 Cor. xil. 2). It was a timeless journey; and Faith could outrun Vision itself on that viewless path- way of the soul. Even while we are pent up in the body of our humiliation, faith can triumph over mortal experience and cause us to “ sit with Christ Risen and Exalted 171 Christ in the heavenly places.” Even while we are exiled, we are at home; for by the supply of Christ’s Spirit we may rise above the contradiction of sense and the testimony of our earth-bound nature, and affirm the transcendent life. And what of the activities of the Exalted One? Of His “devices with the heavens” not Paul himself can tell us: save this—that He is con- tinuing His reconciling ministry toward that con- summation when all enmity shall be destroyed, and the perfected Kingdom of Love shall be laid at the Father’s feet. But of His earthward ministry Paul is very sure. For one thing, the Exalted Lord was welcoming His people. Is not this the thought that steals like secret music into such phrases as “‘ for ever with the Lord ”—“ at home with the Lord ?—‘ with Christ, which is far the best”? ? Year by year Paul had seen the pilgrims of faith preceding him into the heavenly country ; and he knew that Christ was welcoming them there. Moreover, He was empowering His Church upon earth. He who had “ ascended on high ” had “ granted gifts to men ”’ (Eph. iv. 8). All apostles, prophets, evangelists were the gifts of the Exalted Christ. Paul could well testify of that! It was the Exalted One who had taken him and given himto men. But, above all, there was the truth, never far from the thought of 172 St. Paul's Life of Christ Paul, that the life of Christ in glory was the life of the Spirit, and that by His Spirit Christ was living in His people and in the Church, which is His Body. 5. Tne Spirit or Curis. For Paul, every man, but especially the believ- ing man, was a complex, not a simple, personality. Together with the individual ego there was the “‘not-I” of indwelling sin and the “ not-I” of the indwelling Christ. ‘‘If Christ is within you. .-. the spirit 1s living?’ (Rom. avin Moffatt); and ‘‘if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His” (Rom. vii. 9). Conversion was conversion to the Spirit of Christ ; and sanctification was through the same Spirit. All the Pauline doctrines of grace, the doctrine of Regeneration, of Justification by Faith, of Sanctification, the doctrine of the Church itself, are to be understood not otherwise than as a setting forth of that Life of Christ which belongs through the Spirit to the experience of men. The vital test was always the test of the Spirit. As many as were led by the Spirit of God, they were the sons of God. For obviously we may not regard the doctrinal and cultural standard of Paul’s epistles as indicat- ing the general level of the faith and culture of Christ Risen and Exalted 173 the early Church. Many, as we know, were weak in the faith, and all too strong in fantastic notions © and superstitions of their own; many had but the meagrest equipment of mental culture. For such no great levelling imposition of doctrinal conformity was possible; but the supreme test remained: “If any man have not the Spirit of Grist 4.577 And with Paul “ the Holy Spirit,” “ the Spirit of Christ,” were not simply equivalent terms for that Spirit of God which had always been abroad in the world; they stood for the Spirit of God as flowing through the exalted and liberated per- sonality of Jesus. The Spirit was the spiritual presence and power of Christ working in believing men a new, distinctive experience of life in God. For God, who in the fulness of the time had “ sent forth His Son,” had now “sent forth the Spirit of His Son, crying, Abba, Father,” in the hearts of men (Gal. iv. 4, 6). So we have Paul’s question to the Ephesians who had known only John’s baptism: ‘“* Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when vem Devicwed test Clearly.) they: ‘had beeny ledyot the Divine Spirit; else how could they have advanced to the point they had reached? Never- theless Paul must instruct them in the fuller faith and baptize them in the name of the Lord Jesus. ** And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, 174 St. Paul’s Life of Christ the Holy Spirit came upon them ”—the power of God mediated through the spiritual presence of Jesus—“ and they spake with tongues and prophe- sied ”’ (Acts xviii. 6). But this experience was not merely psychical. It seems clear that Paul came to have certain misgivings concerning any unqualified emphasis upon this aspect of the new experience, as distinct from its ethical manifestations. ‘The supreme manifestation of the Spirit was in the moral realm. ‘The harvest of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, good temper, kindliness, generosity, fidelity, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. v. 22, 23: Moffatt). None the less, the empowerment was distinctive ; it was the life of Christ in the heart, bringing to man’s nature that paracletion without which it must be for ever incomplete. For, as Paul well understood, man’s whole life is an outgoing. He must seek that beyond him- self which has the secret of his life’s fulfilment. Man has always been haunted by a sense of the unattained, and thus by a yearning for God. The difficulty has been that men have fallen back from the Divine lure as climbers have fallen back before the virgin heights, which have challenged them only to vanquish them. And in truth there is a sense in which the idea of the transcendent God is annihilating to the mind that views it over against man’s puny individuality. But Paul Christ Risen and Exalted A says, “‘ Ye are complete in Him”; and when he does so, he is thinking, not of a faltering climb up the heavenly steeps, or a searching of the unfathomable abyss (Rom. x. 6-8), but of Christ through whom we have access by one Spirit unto the Father, and in whom we may behold God and live. Through His Spirit we may here and now realise in some measure that enlargement and completion of experience which we seek; for in Him the flow of our desire is borne toward the consummating Sea, and the eternal tide flows inward to meet us. It is to this experience of the life of Christ in the heart that Paul would bring us. ‘ Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit.” It is Christ against Dionysus. For does not the allusion point to the god of the vine—that ‘‘ god within” which, according to the Orphic sacrament, dwelt in the blood of the grape, and gave himself for man’s surcease ? In the music and the laughter, In the vanishing of care, And of all before and after ; In the God’s high banquet, where Gleams the grape-blood flashed to heaven; Yea, and in the feasts of men Comes his crownéd slumber; then Pain is dead and hate forgiven.* * Euripides: The Bacche. Prof. Gilbert Murray’s Trans- lation. 176 St. Paul’s Life of Christ In this Pauline challenge, then, we may include the whole Pagan approach to life. For it was not only through excess of wine that men sought to open the sluice-gates of feeling. Why had sport and the gladiatorial arena such fascination for the crowd in Paul’s day? Was it not because for that vivid spectacular hour each man in the cloud of witnesses that overhung the arena felt himself to be more than himself? Every success of his favourites was his success, every failure, his failure ; so he cheered and laughed and wept and experienced a fine expansion. And so with the drama, with war, with love, with the droll ecstasies of buffoonery and laughter. Men are wrong, says Paul, not in seeking ex- pansion and high abandonment, but in the per- version of the quest; and all Paul’s doctrine of Christ, of His mediatorship, of His living Spirit, simplifies into the experienced truth that Jesus Christ by His Spirit brings to the perverted but divine thirst of man the authentic wine of healing and of life. For man’s thirst is for spiritual fellowship with his kind, consummated in the fellowship of the Living God; and through Christ we are led into that wide-embracing and supreme communion. ‘To this faith Paul would bring us, and with this experience he would leave us—strengthened with power through the Christ Risen and Exalted 177 Spirit in the inward man, so that, Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith, and we being rooted and grounded in love, we may apprehend with all saints the abyss of the Divine Mystery, and know the surpassing love of Christ, and be “ filled unto all the fulness of God.” For it is not any doctrine of Christ or of His Spirit which is the end of Paul’s teaching, nor yet Christ Himself; it is the eternal God, mediating His fulness through Christ to men. 6. Tue Lire or Curist 1n His Cuurcu. Paul knew nothing of individual perfection apart from a perfected society. ‘The “‘ perfecting of the saints’? must come through “‘ the upbuild- ing of the Body,” which is the spiritual society of all believers in vital union with the Living Lord. Thus and only thus shall they all reach “ the full measure of development which belongs to the fulness of Christ ” (Eph. iv. 13. Moffatt). There is, indeed, in Paul a vehement egoism and intensity of individual feeling. ‘There is that in him which chimes with Emerson’s “‘ He that finds»God a sweet, enveloping thought to him, never counts his company,” and with Browning’s— My God, my God, let me for once look on Thee As though naught else existed, we alone! * * Pauline. 178 St. Paul's Life of Christ But he has little in common with that religionism which must always see every man as if he existed alone, and have him concentrate upon an isolated experience. Paul recognizes that a spiritual Society is neces- sary to Christ Himself. ‘The divine life which 1s in Him is a continuous outgoing; it must “ fill all things.” And as for Paul, he knew that Christ was being straitened in him every day. That life of Christ which was being lived in him was too great for him to contain. It must have a fuller embodiment than any individual personality could supply; it must fashion all believers into a Body; it must express itself in a Society, and that Society must develop until it should actually become what ideally it was already—“ the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.” So, too, as we have seen, it is necessary to the growth of the individual believer. Paul will correct that individualism of experience which, ‘beginning explosively” and advancing into high frames, subsides into torpor because it revolves in a hypnotic circle, finding no vital outlet into an experience larger and more varied than its own. As Maeterlinck tells us of the strange collective wisdom of the bees, which becomes the medium for the Spirit of the Hive, and is somehow so much more than the aggregate Christ Risen and Exalted 179 infinitesimal intelligence of all its busy citizens, so Paul will have us find in the Society of Believers a capacity greater than that of all its individual members; an area of experience, too, and a reach of progress, attainable by no other means than through association. He must strive greatly for the saints, that their hearts may be paracleted through their being “ knit together in love,” since only through fellowship can they come into “ all the riches of the full assurance of understanding,” and thus come to know “the mystery of God, even Christ ’? (Col. 11. I-3). And indeed, says Paul, “ this is a great mystery —I speak concerning Christ and His Church” (Eph. v. 32). With this mystery Paul was faced on the very day of his conversion. ‘The vital union of Christ and His people was proclaimed to him in the words of the Lord Jesus Himself : ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?” and to the end it was the theme of his wondering meditation. He expresses it under many figures. The Society of Believers is a temple growing toward completion, Jesus Christ being the corner stone in which the whole structure is held together (Eph. ii. 20, 21). It is a house, once divided, but now made one through the breaking down of the partition-wall (Eph. u. 14) by Him who has purchased it for Himself. It is a Body “ fitly 180 St. Paul's Life of Christ framed and knit together ” (Eph. iv. 15); a Body with many members all interdependent and sharing the one Life (1 Cor. xi. 20); a Body whereof the Head is Christ (Col. i. 18). It is the Bride of Christ, one with Him according to God’s ordinance (Eph. v. 31, 32). It is Bread, made up of many particles but united in one Paschal loaf, which, in a mystery, is itself Christ’s Body (1 Cor. x. 17). It is the household (Eph. ii. 19) and family (Eph. i. 15) of God, whose Firstborn and chief Heir is Christ, in and with and through whom the whole brotherhood shares the inheritance (Rom. vil. 17; Col. i. 14, 15, etc.). Under all these figures Paul will set forth the truth that the Life of the exalted Christ is being lived morally and mystically in the Society of the faith- ful. It is when we turn our thought from éruth to fact, from the ideal conception to its actual embodiment in the little Christian communities of Paul’s day, that we meet the full impact of this apostolic faith. ‘‘ Why, look at your own ranks, my brothers; not many wise men (that is, judged by human standards), not many leading men, not many of good birth,”—but many that are “‘ foolish,’’? many that are “ weak,” many that are “‘mean and despised” (1 Cor. i. 26-28: Moffatt), many that are mere ciphers,—make up the tale of the little assemblies scattered over Christ Risen and Exalted 181 the Roman world. Yet these are the Body in which the Lord of Glory finds His new incarnation —these are the Temple, slowly growing toward completion, in which already the God of Heaven makes His habitation. Impatient of the brittle distinctions of a fixed and formal ecclesiasticism, men are seeking to-day to interpret this conception in terms of Humanity itself. There is the feeling that ‘man’? may denote something more than “churchman,” and that “ Humanity ” suggests something more vital and affluent than anything named in ecclesiastical terminology. And in so far-as-the term ‘‘ Church”? had come to be devitalized and mechanized, it must fail to repre- sent the Pauline conception ; while in proportion as ““ Humanity ” has been moralized and spirit- ualized, it approximates to it. For when we speak of fellowship with, and progress through, the common life of mankind, are we not presently driven by the sheer compulsion of facts along the pathway of the Pauline thought? What 1s Humanity? To speak of it as the aggregate of human individuals is merely an arithmetical definition. Morally and spiritually, Humanity is a movement, a prophecy, a hope. But, as a movement, it has not yet found its own general 182 St. Paul’s Life of Christ direction. The life of mankind is not a self- evolving circle, moving outward, in constantly increasing revolutions, around one great moral centre: it is a medley and clash of orbits, slowly, slowly being drawn into harmony. It is only here and there that the authentic Centre has been discovered and the invincible, true orbit swings out to proclaim it. Where we find this, there we find the movement that is Humanity. For do we not conceive of the race in terms of those sons of men who wear for us the aspect of sons of God? It is not to Cesar Borgia that we look but to St. Francis, not to “ King Bomba” but to Abraham Lincoln, not to Rasputin but to Gandhi. But if this is so—if it is our Francises and Lincolns and Gandhis, and kindred souls, that interpret to us the idea of mankind as a movement in whose progress we find our own fulfilment—then we are forced to recognize that the true Humanity is as yet no more than an ecclesia gathered out from the world of men; and the centre of that ecclesia is God in the person of Jesus Christ. It is they who share His Spirit who are the nucleus of that race of sons of God in whose fellowship and progressively unfolding life we find the full measure of our development. We may still affirm, with the most Pauline of modern dreamers, that Humanity is One, as God is One; that Christ Risen and Exalted 183 Progress is the law of its life, and Association the means of progress. But then that oneness is possible only by the life of God supremely manifested in Christ, and that progress is unto the grace and stature of His manhood, and that association is in and through His Spirit, whose fellowship is the spiritual Society of Jesus, the Church of the pioneers. 7. “'TuHe Bressep Hope.” Our oft-cited Italian apostle has a memorable passage in his writings testifying to his own great and fortifying hope in the ultimate sure appearing of the Rome of his dreams—the New Rome for which he had suffered the loss of all things. It was the dream, he tells us, of his youthful years, the generating idea of his every conception, bound up with the religion of his soul. ‘The Rome of the Czsars had passed; the Rome of the Popes would presently pass; but from the Rome of the People, regenerate, believing, illuminate, should one day spring “‘ the religious transforma- tion destined for the third time to bestow moral unity on Europe.” So he proceeds to tell us how he entered the city in the dusk of a March evening in 1849 “with a deep sense of awe, almost of worship ”—feeling “an electric thrill run through ” 184 St. Paul's Life of Christ him, “a spring of new life.” For it seemed as if the fulness of the time had come, as if the City of his dreams had come forth from the Unapparent, and stood at last upon the earth. Perhaps it was even so. Let those decide for us who know how to read, discerningly and spiritually, the history of the Rome of 1849. It seems as if it were so. It seems, also, that (for certain impor- tant reasons set forth by continental diplomacy) that Dream City then made manifest was with some promptitude rejected, condemned and—with the aid of cannon and bayonets and diplomatic notes—sent back to the Unapparent: where presumably it still remains. It had been so dismissed some ten years before our modern apostle penned his memorable passage, wherein he records his confident, mystical hope in the ultimate triumphant return of that City, and wherein he goes on to declare that, wherever fate might lay his bones, he believed that on the day of that new advent they would know once more that thrill which ran through him—that “ spring of new life”—when in the dusk of a March evening in 1849 he passed through the Porta del Popolo. Is all this altogether irrelevant and without suggestiveness? The Rome of the Mazzinian faith had appeared only to be betrayed and Christ Risen and Exalted 185 rejected; nevertheless he is mystically convinced that it shall one day gloriously return; and on the day of that great crisis and vindication of all the martyrs of the Spielberg and of a thousand scaffolds, dungeons and fields of battle—on that day his bones shall know some reminiscent, quickening thrill of exultation ! Deep in the soul of man, when once that soul has been touched to great and holy issues, and has suffered deeply, is there not always to be found in one form or another this invincible, spiritual hope, this apocalyptic of faith, this gospel of a Return? And so with the most sacred moperor all. \iFor,’?\ says Paul, :“ithe ierace’ of God hath appeared, bringing salvation to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously and godly in this present world; awaiting the blessed hope of the appearing of the glory of the great God and of our Saviour Christ Jesus” (sitet. 12,013 39sec) Moflatt).) (Fhe eraceot God hath appeared; so surely, and in due time, shall the glory of God appear also. For throughout Paul’s epistles, and throughout the nascent Life of Christ which they contain, there is this note of waiting, of expectancy, as of one who, busied with many things, is yet all 186 St. Paul’s Life of Christ the while listening for an appointed signal. And indeed, if we would learn how Paul’s growing knowledge of his Lord and Saviour was constantly criticizing and revising all Paul’s previous knowledge and all the preconceptions which he brought with him into the new faith, we can hardly do better than follow him in his revisions of that chapter of his Life of Christ which sets forth this Blessed Hope. ; For it seems as if at first Paul had not fully worked out all the implications of that distinction between the Mind of Christ and the Mind of Czxsar to which we have elsewhere referred (p. 67), or better, perhaps, between the Mind of Christ and the mood and temper of the Jewish Apocalyptic in which Paul as a Pharisee had been schooled. It seems a: ‘f at first it had been his way to offset the amazing humiliation of Christ in the days of His flesh with the thought of a swiftly approaching, imminent Day of Wrath, when He and His holy angels should take fiery vengeance upon all the troublers of His people. For ‘God considers it but just to repay with trouble those who trouble you, and repay you who are troubled (as well as us) with rest and relief, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven together with the angels of His power in flaming fire, to inflict punishment on those who Christ Risen and Exalted 187 ignore God, even on those who refuse obedience to the gospel of our Lord Jesus”? (2 Thess. i. 6-8: Moffatt). In that swift-approaching Day the Lord should “ descend from heaven with a loud summons,” the Archangel calling, and the Trumpet of God sounding its dread heraldry of doom. Then “the dead in Christ will rise first, and we, the living who survive, will be caught up along with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” For when “all’s well” and ** all 1s safe ”” were on the lips of men, then sudden Destruction should be upon them (1 Thess. v. ae tie Wiotratt): This, we may take it, was the tenour of Paul’s early preaching. Day by day he lived in expecta- tion of that blast of the Trumpet of God which should rend the heavens and awake the dead. He should not see death, but should behold the Glory of the Lord. And had not all this been “revealed”? in the rapt utterance of many a prophet, speaking in the assemblies of the saints ? Had it not been confirmed in many an ecstatic vision vouchsafed to the faithful of the Lord? To be sure, Paul could be critical of psychic “revelations” and pronouncements when these seemed to be contrary to moral judgment. Did not the disciples at Tyre counsel Paul “ through 188 St. Paul's Life of Christ the Spirit ” that he “‘ should not set foot in Jerusa- lem ” (Acts xxi. 4, 5)? Nevertheless was he not constrained in his own spirit to go forward (Acts xx. 22), refusing to be dissuaded? Did not Paul “ perceive ” that the voyage to Italy would be with much loss “not only of the lading and the ship, but also of our lives” (Acts xxvii. 10)? and did he not, through a later revelation, revise his presentiment—“ for there shall be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship ” (Acts xxvii. 22)? But if he could counsel the saints, while never disdaining prophetic revelations, to test them all, retaining what was good (1 Thess. v. 20, 21: Moffatt), was it ever in his mind at that time that this prophetic word, the Advent Testimony of the saints, was itself in need of testing? But indeed our Holy Scriptures are unsparing of all human infallibilities; and not even our Apostles shall be set forth as arrayed in pontifical inerrancy. If at first it appears to Paul that he will survive, to be caught up in the clouds with the resurrected saints, presently that expectation shall fade, and he will speak freely, not of his ascension, but of his death. And not only so, but is there not observable, also, a subtle, vital change in his setting forth of the Blessed Hope itself? Does it not appear that something of the Christ Risen and Exalted 189 apocalyptic imagery gradually dissolves, and with it something of that apocalyptic emphasis upon vengeance and wrath? In this matter, no doubt, the mind of Paul may easily elude us, andin our pursuit we may mistake our own mental shadow, or image projected upon the enveloping mist, for some authentic Paulinism. What we may be sure of in any case is that the Hope itself remained. The world, to Paul, was moving irresistibly toward a Crisis; time was assuredly hasting toward the Day of Christ. For not even the certainty of a living Christ and of a world invisible was enough for Paul. ‘There must be ever before him the assurance of a Return unto judgment and victory. There was always the inwrought conviction that Christ’s salvation must be on the grand scale, or not at all. It must mean something for the world as a world, and not merely for a company of elect initiates. Christ had come into history as such, and therefore history was not drifting toward some uncertain conclusion or non-conclusion; it was pledged to a divine climax. Here, on this earth, righteous- ness must achieve its crisis, and Christ, long rejected, be crowned as Lord. “Tell me that I am to work patiently, because in a little time my task will be over, and I shall enter into rest or 190 St. Paul’s Life of Christ enjoyment, and you seem evidently to imply that my work is for myself; that if this one thread of my destiny can be fully spun out, I shall have gained all I have been aiming at; which is not true in any sense, unless I have been living an utterly unchristian and detestable life; not true even then, since I cannot by my will sever myself from those with whose life, by God’s eternal law, mine is intertwined”? (F. D. Maurice). It was inevitable, then, as the great Anglican just quoted proceeds to show, that the inwrought conviction and blessed hope of the Return of the Lord unto world-victory should have overshadowed, in minds full of self-denial and ruled by a Christian view of God and the world, all hopes that terminated merely upon their own blessedness. And shall it be in vain—the sport of Fact, the jest of Time? Impalpable, the New Rome, against all the imposing architecture of faithless fact, the solid masonry of unideal reality. But which was, and is, the surer and mightier—the Rome of disillusioned Pio Nono and Continental diplomacy, or that other Rome, thrust back into the shadowy realm, the Mother City of the dreamers of faith who, against all hope, would await its sure return? Impalpable against all the established power and menacing actuality of regnant Czsar—against all the Cesars that Christ Risen and Exalted IgI have been and now are, and those yet to come— this Christ who shall return, this Hope of His Returning. But in which direction lieth the invincible, divine authority? Even so; come, Lord Jesus. VII THE LIVING CHRIST AND THE DOCTRINES OF GRACE We have said that, apart from the Living Christ, Paul had*no assurance of reconciliation, no doctrine of Grace, no word of Justifying Faith or of the Righteousness that cometh down from heaven. It may be well, then, before we conclude our present study, for us to turn to one or two of these outstanding doctrines of the Pauline evangel; for we may be very sure that in that Life of Christ written upon Paul’s heart and mind these doctrines had their own vital, ineradicable place. 1. IntRopuctory.—* We know in part.” We may well believe that when the appointed presbyter read for the first time Paul’s declaration as to the partialism and impermanence of all prophesyings and of all knowledge, he paused long enough to make sure that here was no slip of the amanuensis’ pen. Paul on his own limi- tations as a seer and a teacher; Paul insisting upon the fragmentary character of mortal know- 192 Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 193 ledge, his own included, and upon the incomplete- ness of all prophesyings, his own included; Paul confessing to a sense of bafflement and enigma; Paul likening all present understanding and doctrine and instruction to the crude thought and lisping prattle of children—all this made strange reading. It may be that even now this Pauline confession seems a thing to be passed over as hardly in keeping with dogmatic and eccle- siastical requirements. Have there been no suc- cessors of the Apostles and champions of the faith who would seem to have fashioned the broken arcs of the Pauline certitudes into the perfect round of a systematised infallibility? Never- theless, Paul is at pains to make it clear that, with all his visions and revelations of the Lord, and with the constant supply of the Spirit of God, his knowledge is fragmentary and his prophesyings fragmentary likewise. No doubt it was the divineness of those visions and the fulness of that inspiration which wrought in him that same conviction. One characteristic, then, of our present know- ledge, and therefore of our present teaching (says Paul), is their partialism. “We know bit by bit,” and prophesy accordingly. We do not know anything completely. How can we, until we N 194 St. Paul's Life of Christ know everything completely? Our philosophies are broken arcs; our little systems are full of gaps. Our knowledge is child-knowledge—dart- ing out in flashes here and there, but baffled continually, and unable perfectly to interpret even its own findings. But Paul proceeds to put it more strikingly. What is this bit-by-bit knowledge of ours? He says it is looking-glass knowledge. “ At present we only see the baffling reflections in a mirror” (1 Cor. xiii. 12: Moffatt), What we see is the seeming of things—their surface-reflection—and we catch only such fleeting images as come within the angle and focus of our minds’ mirror ; and these same reflections frequently bewilder us. So says our Apostle (had he ever heard of Plato’s Cave?); and who will dispute him? Plato’s Cave or Paul’s Mirror, it is the same; and has philosophy attained to a clearer affirmation? We all recollect how Alice, taken up with her looking-glass and seeing the show of many things therein, vehemently desired to get through to where those engaging images lived and moved in their own actuality. She got through! We do not, for the present. We must needs deal with appearances. What is a flower—a tree—a moun- tain—a man? Who can tell? We see through a glass darkly. Not that the world is a palace Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 195 of mocking illusions. Paul will make no such suggestion as that. ‘The universe keeps faith with us; and though, as Paul’s unknown disciple hath it, ‘ what is seen hath not been made out of things which do appear,” so that the essential stuff of reality is distinct from all outward seeming, yet there is a true correspondence between the one and the other. For as Paul himself will boldly put it, “‘ the invisible things of Him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made” (Rom. i. 20). Our looking-glass knowledge, then, is valid for us as far as it goes. God is not mocked, neither mocketh He any man who keepeth faith with his own soul. We have been set in this realm of shadow-play and appearance, not for our discomfiture, but for our schooling in the truth of things: as the quaint poet has written— We play at paste Till qualified for pearl : 2 * x 2 X The shapes, though, were similar, And our new hands Learned gem-tactics, Practising sands. Nevertheless, to return to Paul’s figure, we are limited to our looking-glass. And Paul would clearly have us understand that, when we pass from the realm of common things to the higher 196 St. Paul’s Life of Christ reaches of knowledge, it is the same. We learn by pictures and semblances, here a little and there a little; we piece together as we may our frag- mentary reflections. Is it otherwise, for example, with our idea of God? We understand that it is well if a child can say, “‘ God must be like my father.” When presently he goes to school, there comes the austerer thought that God may be like the schoolmaster> One day he enters a Court of Justice and beholds the awful Presence, robed and pontifical, presiding there; and that night in bed he will wonder if God is like that Judge. He is looking in the looking-glass, and the reflec- tions baffle him; yet that mirror is going to help him, if he learns how to use it, and without it he could not learn at all. Truly, it is so with us all. God is great beyond all our conceiving; and to assemble all our authentic definitions is but to collect such reflections of His glory as our minds can mirror. Behind all the doctrine of God and of Christ, in that ever-unfinished Life of Christ written upon Paul’s heart and mind, lay the sense of infinite reaches of truth which he had never yet attained unto. ‘‘ We know in part.” Is not all religious knowledge a progress through symbol toward reality? It is mirror-work, says Paul, and beyond it is that state wherein we shall see, not by reflection, but face to face. Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 197 Yet—let us repeat it—Paul will have us under- stand that there is a true correspondence between things as they seem and things as they are. We may know only in part, but we do know. Does not he suggest to us that, when we come to the higher states and intuitions of the soul, we attain even here to a realm of experience which belongs far more to reality than to surface appearance, far more to the eternal than to the ephemeral? Here in this present mortal state we may relate ourselves to the things that abide—that “last on’’; we may look through the things that are visible and temporal to the things which are unseen and eternal. When Paul was a little child at his mother’s side, and began to interpret her heart-throbs as she drew him to her breast, and began thus to understand that there was such a thing in his universe as Love, even that love which seeketh not its own and suffereth long and is kind—when little Saul did this, he began to lay hold upon something more than the outward seeming of things; he began to attain to something which belonged to the essential, eternal side of things ; so that in all his later years (and, we may dare to say, even after that final sword-stroke cleft the way for him through all this mortal shadow-play into the supreme light) he had never to unlearn 198 St. Paul’s Life of Christ that lesson about Love, or drop the idea of it as a lost illusion, or as a symbol of something other than itself. Love is Love; and even in its earthly manifestations it offers us an experience which passes beyond all the seeming of things into the eternal substance of life. It lasts on; it leads us into the Arcanum, into the secret place of the Most High. For in the Temple of Truth there is the mysterious Innermost, even the Holy of Hollies. There burns the Shekinah glory; there, beyond all seeming, is the Real, the Eternal; and in that Innermost dwell God and the supreme Beatified. Then, too, there is the Outer Court, where Faith begins, finding its altar of worship and of hope; and thither they may not come who are content altogether with the phantasmagoria of time and sense, moving in gross elements and following the illusions of the carnal mind. But there is also, between the Innermost and the Outer Court, a Holy Place which they may enter who have been priested by faith, by prayer, by sorrow; and there, too, they. may behold, though not the immediate Glory, yet a veiled shining of it, transfiguring the veil itself into a garment of light. Paul had come to that Holy Place; and his Hymn to Love is the song of one who had attained to the enduring side of life. Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 199 But there was something more. If there had been nothing more, there would hardly have been as much. We know in part, says Paul; we dwell in the realm of appearance; but in this realm God Himself hath appeared. “ Without con- troversy, great is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh.” Divine knowledge begins not with the mystic attainment of the soul, ascending through purgation and _ self- discipline to illumination; it begins with the self-revelation of God: and now in His supreme Son He hath come into this region of semblance and symbol. We see as in a mirror, but He Himself stands before it; and we behold the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus. Dusky barbarians who have lived, and their fathers before them, on some lone island in un- frequented seas may well suppose that their little reef is the whole inhabited world. But one day a white man lands upon their shores, and dwells among them and learns their speech, and tells them of the strange world beyond the great waters; and from the time of his coming they may no longer mistake the part for the whole. Though as a people they may not clearly under- stand nor wholly believe nor greatly care, yet in the darkest minds there must henceforth be some hint of a yonderland and of knowledge beyond 200 St. Paul’s Life of Christ their ken ; and the tradition must remain, and the rumour must spread. So Christ supremely has brought to us and left with us the tidings of the Yonderland and the larger truth. We may no longer mistake the part for the whole, nor escape the rumour of eternity. All this was part of Saul’s gospel, written into that Life of Christ which he bore with him in his heart. For God hath “ saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before times eternal, but hath now been manifested by the appearing of our Saviour Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality a AEC Piece @Auid INE sc hued best 8 nun do) There awaits us, then, as Paul would show, a Heaven for the mind, as also for the heart. We have before us and within us the promise of that state wherein our fragmentary and immature knowledge shall be completed in the fuller wisdom of the eternal years. We shall pass beyond this present mirror-work into immediacy of vision. When shall we thus attain? Paul does not tell us. ‘‘ Then,” says he, sweeping eternity with a gesture. It is idle to interrogate him. It is idle to ask, ‘‘ Shall we pass at once Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 201 into the pure Absolute of truth?” What seer will define and annotate his visions? ‘“* There is a spiritual body,” says he. Does not that commit us still to a realm of symbol and semblance? With such questions we may not pursue our seer. It is enough for us to know that, in all his doctrine and counsel, Paul as a Doctor of Grace had it ever before him that he knew in part and prophesied in part, and that when that which is perfect should come, then that which is in part should be done away. And he had it ever before him, also, that that which is perfect should come ; and he would have us comfort one another with this word. And for the rest, it was no small comfort for Paul to know that he did know in part, and only in part. And is it otherwise with us? There are times when we must needs cleave to this same evangel of our own ignorance. If all the facts have now been called in, if what we see and feel in our poignant hours—the pain, the tears, the grave—marked the term of things, and were all there is to know, then indeed were we desolate. It is our comfort at all such times to know that we do know only in part, in broken fragments, and that what we see is but the baffling reflections in a mirror—clouded, how often, with sighs and tears, and shaken from its true angle by the shocks of grief! All this is our 202 St. Pauls Life of Christ comfort, once there has been brought to us the rumour and hope and assurance of that know- ledge which passeth all understanding and is full of glory. ‘‘ There,” says Augustine, in his own Pauline way, “shall be the great Sabbath which has no evening. . . . There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. ‘This is what shall be in the end without end.” 2. Tue Divine SoveEREIGNTY. Paul’s Life of Christ is rooted in his conception of Grace; and his conception of Grace is rooted in the Sovereignty of God. Upon this doctrine our evangelical fathers, who, perhaps, understood Paul rather better than we do, dwelt much and often. And the doctrine is this: That God reigneth; that He worketh all things after the counsel of His own will; and that of Him and through Him and unto Him are all things, to Whom belongeth the glory for ever. And as to man and his salvation, God is sovereign in this also, since it was He who sent forth His Son, and since, also, all man’s repenting and believing, his justification and sanctification and final glory, are on account of the same sovereign grace of Him who worketh in us both to will and to do His good pleasure. All this our fathers believed and taught; and Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 203 all this Paul believed and taught before them. And as for Paul, we know that this doctrine of the Divine Sovereignty was with him in Tarsus and in Jerusalem no less than in Damascus and Antioch and Rome; only we know also that in Tarsus and in Jerusalem it was as the rock of Kadesh before its fountains were unsealed; it was not until Paul came into his evangelical illumination that he drank of that rock and was refreshed. For the supreme demonstration of the sovereignty of God and of its holy purpose was in the life and death and exaltation of Jesus Christ. Paul, as we have seen, never ceased to marvel at his blindness and the blindness of all that dwelt at Jerusalem and their rulers, that they knew Him not, of whom all the prophets had testified aforetime, but desired of Pilate that He should be slain. But there was a greater marvel yet, namely, that in all their blindness they could do no other than fulfil all the things that were written of Him. For He died for our sins according to the Scriptures, even as according to the Scriptures He rose again. It was all according to the Scriptures, which is to say, according to the determinate counsel and fore- knowledge of God. The Jews’ rejection of Him and the Gentiles’ acceptance of Him were 204 St. Paul’s Life of Christ according to the Scriptures, and in no single event or circumstance of the Gospel could Paul, now that his eyes were enlightened, fail to see the out- working of the sovereign purposes of the Most High. Not least of all was it plain to him in the ordering of his own life. In the light of the Life of Christ there was no truth which he could more plainly read in his own life than this truth of the sovereign, electing, over-ruling purpose and grace of God. To begin, then, at the beginning: when Paul says “God” he means God; not a seedling Divinity in process of germination, or a gradually evolving Being in quest of “ experience,” but Gop, than whom Paul can think of nothing higher, and great beyond all his conceiving; Gop, the Perfection of all being, infinite in holi- ness and wisdom and power, who seeth the end from the beginning and doeth all things according to the purpose of His will. Paul will ascribe to Him all foreknowledge. An unprescient God, says Augustine, deeply learned in Paul, were no God at all. God has so foreknown all things as to be beyond the possibility of surprise or misjudgment. God so loved the world, not with a blind benignity that can be abashed, taken unawares by some un- Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 205 expected treachery, but with an all-foreknowing love which, marking every apostasy, still elects to love. Such foreknowledge and such love Paul does not profess to understand. ‘“O the depth of the riches. .... How unsearchable . . .!” But God is God. So Paul will ascribe to Him predestinative purpose. Divine foreknowledge is servant to Divine Holiness and Grace. Every attribute of God is active. Whom He did foreknow them He also did predestinate. ‘This is not the un- moral fixture of fate or the coercion of almighti- ness; the omnipotence of God halts, self-limited, at the threshold of personality ; it is that election which belongs to the moral sovereignty of Father- hood, to the infinite, unfailing resourcefulness of Holy Love. ‘* For whom He did foreknow He also did predestinate, to be conformed to the likeness of His Son” (Rom. vill. 29). Even in human fatherhood is there no_ predestinative instinct? In us it is fallible, tentative, based on imperfect knowledge and limited resource, yet it is there; the love of parenthood is always predestinative in its moral impulses and solici- tudes. In God it is supreme, the Righteous Father’s foreordination of His children unto holiness. For Paul speaks of no other pre- destination of grace than that which shall lift 206 St. Paul’s Life of Christ our nature at last, not by constraint, but will- ingly, into the glory of that moral perfectness which is in Christ. Paul will also ascribe to God what our fathers knew as Effectual Calling. The sovereign, eternal purpose weaves itself into the processes of time, finds us, encompasses us, weaves around us its holy conspiracies, troubles us, lures us, draws us to itself. Predestination is a fact outside our experience; with the divine Calling we have ourselves to do; but always the doing begins with God, and in Him is continued and perfected. Paul, that is to say, knows nothing of that pietism which begins with itself, providing a formula and discipline to which God may be expected to react. ‘‘ It is God that worketh in you both to will and to work for His good pleasure ” (Phil. 11. 13). “Show me,” says Luther to Erasmus, “any one instance of a man who through the pure efficacy of free will ever in the smallest degree either mortified his appetites or forgave an injury: on the contrary, I can easily show you that the very holy men whom you boast of as free-willers always in their prayers toGod .. . had recourse to nothing but grace, pure grace. So Augustine often, who is entirely on my side in this dispute.” And so, no less often, Paul. Augustine had his parable of God in Monica; Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 207 and so, it may be, in his own mother, had Paul. For how does the mother pre-dedicate her child unborn to all that is good and honourable and true! And as that little life unfolds in child- hood and youth, how does that dedicating, pre- destinating mother-love weave its sacred con- spiracies of grace around it—its holy enticements to nobleness and truth! For whom she did pre-dedicate him she also calls. It is the way of mothers; it is the way of God. It is God, then, that justifieth also, and it is God that sanctifieth and it is God that glorifieth, even as it 1s God that foreknoweth and fore- ordaineth and calleth with an effectual calling. And Paul, with Isaiah and Jeremiah entirely on his side, is very bold, and speaks of the Potter and the clay (Rom. ix. 21). But then certain of our own poets have shown a like boldness— Ay, note that Potter’s wheel, That metaphor! and feel Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay. * x aE * Time’s wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.* We bound dizzily to the wheel of life; but it is God, says our modern poet, who fixed us ’mid this dance of things, amending the lurking flaws, to turn us forth at last “‘ sufficiently impressed.” * Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra. 208 St. Paul's Life of Christ There arises, of course, the ancient question. But is it not the fact, as our Calvinistic fathers were wont to insist, that we know we are free, and that we know, too, by the deepest, highest intuitions of the soul, that God is sovereign? “We assert,” says Augustine, “‘ both that God knows all things before they come to pass, and that we do by our free will whatsoever we know and feel to be done by us only because we will it. But that all things come to pass by fate we do not say; nay, we affirm that nothing comes to pass by fate.” For, says he, “it does not follow that, though there is for God a certain order of all causes, there must therefore be nothing depending on the free exercise of our own wills, for our own wills themselves are included in that order of causes.” Which still leaves us in a mystery! But then is not truth made up of Opposite proportions? Paul was centrally free; that is what made him Paul; but then, it was presumably not of his own choice that he was born a Hebrew of the tribe of Benjamin, and not a fetish-worshipping barbarian, nor by his own election that he was arrested on the Damascus road... . “It was the good pleasure of God, who separated me, even from my mother’s womb, and called me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me.” We are free, and yet, when Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 209 we try to follow out the clue of that same free- dom, we find ourselves saying ‘‘ God . . . God”’; and thus it is that the sense that we are free-born children of the Father and the sense that we are formed as clay at the Potter’s wheel can exist together; as it is written: ‘“‘ But now, O Lorp, Thou art our Father; we are the clay, and Thou our potter, and we all are the work of Thy hand ” (Isaiah Ixiv. 8). And in all this is there no rest of heart in the knowledge that the Divine purpose is set toward bringing us at last into God’s ideal for us, and not merely into our own ideal for ourselves? In our best thought concerning ourselves there is much of egotism and error; we know only imperfectly what it is that we ought to be: but the Divine foreordaining grace marks us for God’s own thought for us, and therein lies our peace. It is not to be denied, indeed, that men and nations may oppose the purposes of God; what our fathers denied, and Paul, also, is that where Grace abounds, Sin, which is self-will, shall much more abound; what they denied is that in the end, when the long history shall be summed up, it shall be said: “Sin reigns.” They put it all the other way, declaring that first Gana) last it must be said, ‘God reigns)’ Grace reigns.” For whom He did foreknow He also +07 210 St. Paul's Life of Christ did predestinate, and whom He did predestinate them He also called, and whom He called them He also justified; and step by step, through many a conflict and dark rebellion, and through the central, crimson tragedy of all, the Divine purpose moves forward to its sure fulfilment. ‘¢ Gather in thine elect,” prays Mr. Spurgeon, ‘and then, O Lord, elect some more!” : which serves to show that there is a dark side to the Pauline doctrine, and that the devout mind may flinch from its own logic. Does not Paul himself flinch from it, raising the impetuous, austere question: ‘‘ What if God, willing to show His wrath . . .?”? (Rom. ix. 22); and then, with an angel-touch upon the loins of his logic, proceeding haltingly to the blessedly lame conclusion : “What if God, willing to show His wrath... endured with much longsuffering vessels of wrath fitted unto destruction?”?? Upon that darker side Paul will not dwell, disrelishing, as it were, his own thought, and coming to his doxology only when he has concluded: “ God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that He might have mercy upon all” (Rom. xi. 33 et seg.). And so Mr. Spurgeon in his Tabernacle will pray his strange prayer, with Luther to comment upon it in advance; for, says Luther, the prayer and affection and practice of a good man may have Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 211 more of divine truth in them than all his dis- putation and polemic. Andi if there is, as indeed the Scriptures show, that darker side to the Divine Sovereignty, yet the darkest of the dark- ness is not so dark but it has this light shining at the heart of it, That the Judge of all the earth shall do Right, and that He who is the Potter to our clay is also the Father of our spirits. But all this we have considered principally because it belongs to the rootage of Paul’s whole conception of the Gospel and of the life of Christ. It is all of grace, for it is all of God; and God is sovereign, sovereign in Creation, sovereign in Redemption, sovereign beyond Redemption in that consummation of all things wherein He shall be all in all. Less than this can we ourselves believe? If there is no assured Eternal Sovereignty in the universe, but only a struggling and harassed God, of whom the best that may be said is that he means well—a God who has got into strange difficulties in trying to realize himself, and must needs be helped out through the good endeavour of his creatures—then are we not bound with him in shallows and in miseries? A harassed God and - an unintelligible world were too great a burden for us to bear. Our hearts cry out for Him who 212 St. Paul’s Life of Christ liveth and reigneth for ever. It is the assurance of that holy Sovereignty which alone can embattle our hearts against the shocks of the World and of Time and of the Devil. 3. Law anp GRACE. The Life of Christ in His saints is interpreted by Paul as an experience of Grace, as distinct from the experience of Law. Every man, according to Paul, is born under Law—the Jew admittedly, for he had Moses ; but the Gentile also, for he showed the word of the Law written upon his heart. And so our Scandinavian forefathers, feeling after a like conception, would tell their children of the three mysterious Sisters who sought to the cradle of Helgi at his birth—the three Sisters with their three fateful tablets whereon with pen of iron the future of young Helgi was to be inscribed. And the last of these Sisters was Weird, which is Fixed Destiny, and the second Werdandi, which signifies Becoming; but the first of the ‘Three was Skuld, which is Obligation (whence, according to some, our English “‘ should”). And indeed the shadow of Skuld, of Duty, does fall upon every cradle; and accord- ing to what is foreknowingly written concerning a man on that first tablet, be it obedience or Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 213 truancy, will be the nature of what is inscribed next upon that tablet which records what he is becoming, and at last, with relentless iron pen, upon that dread tablet which records what he shall finally and fixedly have become. At least, that is always and everywhere the language of the Law. Skuld comes first. Duty—Obligation— this, said our northern forebears, is the first and great word uttered over every child of earth. Skuld, said the Norsemen, Nomos, says Paul; it is much the same. In our modern world, as we know, this con- ception of the universality of Law is variously emphasized or slighted. In the realm of science, and regarded as the expression of the eternal consistency of Nature, it is fully accredited; in society, and regarded as the expression of the supremacy of Duty over Interest, of moral prin- ciple over utilitarian expediency, it is doubtfully received ; in religion, and regarded as the formu- lation of didactic Righteousness, it is still largely proclaimed as in itself an evangel sufficient for all moral and spiritual purposes. Are we not at times content to interpret Christ Himself as our highest and divinest Law? As to our social and political life, it may be that in the good providence of God there will yet be given to us another John the Baptist, crying in 214 St. Paul's Life of Christ this greater wilderness of Europe and calling us back to that true, righteous Authority and universal Duty without which our national and international affairs become a fracas of contending interests, and our statesmanship a mere gamble upon the roulette-whirligig of events. For the present, as a modern seer has said, although here and there in this disordered Europe of ours “some dissatisfied thinker may have sought a path . . . into the realm of ethics, the realm of the purely human, the realm of the absolute, such men of might have never been honoured as the solar centres’? of our modern ameliorative and economic movements, ‘‘ but have invariably been accorded a scant esthetic toleration, as dull and lesser lights.”” Hence Paul has become a problem for theologians rather than a prophet in a living world. “In the centre of the stage atheistic materialism has been enthroned,” its strength lying not in moral law nor yet in love, “ but in discipline,” its revelation not “the ideal, but atilityy? In the providence of God, then, we may yet have our new Prophet of Fire who shall proclaim the Law to us and shall be heard. Every child of Adam under the Law, every class under it, every nation likewise; all our apparatus of * See Walther Rathenau; Jn Days To Come, p. 57. Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 215 government properly an instrument for the furthering of this same eternal Law; our whole Humanity set here on this planet for no other purpose but unitedly and progressively to seek it out and fulfil it—surely we have need to be called back to all this. But when we have got thus far, what will | happen? When throughout all classes and peoples this sense of regnant Duty, of common obligation under the Law prevails, what will happen? According to Paul, what will happen is that something will break down; and it will not be the Law. According to Paul, we have yet to face the stubborn Human Fact; and that fact seems to be that, whilst our fundamental human duties are written upon our hearts already, the trouble is that we do not do them, and that not all the proclaiming of them in the world, vehemently to be desired though that may be, can ever be more than a necessary piece of schooling to lead us on to something far greater and better. This, indeed, is a point which we are slow enough to take. ‘Find me,” said Abraham Lincoln, ‘‘a Church which stands for the two great commandments of love for God and love 216 St. Paul's Life of Christ for our neighbours, and knows no other creed but that sublime summary of human duty; and I will join it heart and soul.” And so there have been those who have nobly bidden us proclaim the Duties of Man, so sure that education in those complete duties, followed by appropriate performance, would bring in the golden years. Followed by appropriate performance! But therein lies the. human problem. Paul would apparently object that merely to go to men and tell them that their supreme duty was to love God and their neighbours would be a piece of moral pedagoguery, in itself inadequate to the situation. Duty? The Law? It is a hammer which smashes our idols and lays our glory in the dust. If, indeed, a man have a niggling conception of Duty, so that for him it means hardly more than living within the accepted proprieties, then he may cultivate an easy complacency, and fancy that his virtuous, sublime head is among the stars: but if the whole-souled, whole-hearted love of God and Humanity be duty, then how high and how stern are those same stars above him—myriad eyes of solemn scrutiny and rebuke ! A heroic and poetic love for Humanity is not without allurement, for Humanity in the abstract can be conceived without the irritating and Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 217 frustrating idiosyncrasies of individual men and women; even its sins, being general and viewed on the grand scale, have about them a certain tragic appeal; they are not mean and provoking, like the faults of our neighbours. But then it is not with Humanity in the abstract that we have to do. We cannot lay our hands on its mighty shoulders and say, “Il love thee.” It is in our neighbour that the race stands before us. We touch Humanity only through men and women ; and if we love not our neighbour, whom we have seen, of what value is our love for Humanity, which we have not seen? It is our neighbour, however, who discomfits us. Often we are ill- sorted; and what if he be unneighbourly, un- lovely, spiteful, dull? It is here the Law searches us. And then, how often is our love even for the excellent of the earth itself a sort of egoism, an investment at high interest? So that the Law, according to Paul, is our schoolmaster, to humble us and drill us in the hard and bitter lesson of our own insufficiency ; and in the day when the nations convoke their long overdue solemn assembly to consider this whole matter of their duty to God and to man— in that day they shall learn what Paul learned some two millenniums ago, namely, that there is something which the Law cannot do, which 218 St. Paul’s Life of Christ legislation cannot accomplish; and that not by reason of any inherent imperfection, but by reason of the Human Fact, the fatal warp, the infirmity and incapacity of man. ‘“‘ What the Law could not do,” says Paul in a memorable passage. What could it not do? It could not get itself done. It is true, there is a sense in which history and experience appear to contradict so sweeping a generalization. [he Law does in a measure get itself done. ‘* Forasmuch,” says Luther, “as the Law stayeth us with the threatenings and promis- ings thereof, we do often abstain from evil things and do those things which are good; howbeit we do them not for the love of goodness and hatred of evil. ...” Paul himself will recognize as much. He who is under the Law, says he, is a servant, not a son. And even so, a servant 1s one who serves with some measure of obedience. Moreover, in every age there have been those who, being servants, have yet not been hirelings, but have laboured with the devotion of sons. Is there not in every heart some invigorating inter- penetration of the Divine Will, some capacity for response to it for its own sake? But Paul is thinking of that obedience to the Law which is a deep, inward, secure, all-justifying fulfilment of its righteousness; and that, he says, shall not Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 219 be found in us. ‘“ Do not write to me,” says Mazzini, “about ‘the consciousness of having done my best!’”? It would seem that the soul most deeply learned in Duty is least likely to find enduring satisfaction in its own meritorious fidelities. And, according to Paul, it is when we are brought to this pass, recognizing that it is not in us to ground our peace upon our own justifying righteousness, that we are ready to receive that other Word which the Law can never utter. We begin to feel our need of a Religion of Humanity which shall bring to us something more than a lofty and exacting rule of life—a religion which shall speak to our actual condition, and meet our inmost need. We feel our need of a Word concerning God which shall tell us, not that the Law does not matter and that our out- lawry need not trouble us (which were to con- demn us to a pale inferno), but that back of the holiness of the Law and our own inward incom- petence there is that in the nature of God which can yet holily meet our case, and open to us the way of peace and righteousness. We feel our need of a religion of redemption. And this it was that proclaimed itself to Paul when the Life of Jesus Christ came to be written upon Paul’s heart. ‘There is indeed, as we have 220 St. Paul's Life of Christ said, a way of regarding Christ by which He, too, appears as but a new and demanding embodiment of the Law, set before us for our despairing imitation. ‘The moral perfectness of the historic Jesus, viewed by itself, becomes such a Law unto us, higher than Sinai, awful in the pure, cold whiteness of its unattainable summit. But it was not so that Paul learned Christ. He knew Him as the mediator of the new Covenant, the wounded One whose wounds were the seal and pledge of uplifting grace. In Christ crucified and exalted Paul came to see that God is for us, though our own sins and our own hearts and our own con- demning conscience cry that He is against us. He is for us, and He is for the Law also; He is for us without rift or schism in His inexorable holiness ; He is Just, and in His justice He is the justifier of the ungodly. All this Paul came to read in that Life of Christ written savingly upon his heart; for the first, supreme message of that Life was that at the heart of the Divine Holiness was Fatherhood, Priesthood, Atonement, and that henceforth Paul might take up the Law, not as a servant, but as a son, not in order to earn accept- ance, but because he was accepted—bought back, reconciled, the child of the Divine Sorrow, of the Eternal Love. ‘The kindness of God our Saviour, and His love toward man, appeared, not Christ and the Doctrines of Grace. 221 by works done in righteousness, which we did ourselves; but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost, which He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour; that, being justified by His grace, we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life” (Tit. ii. 4-7). And from that hour, when Paul learned what Grace meant, reading that lore in the wounds of Jesus—from that hour he knew that it had pleased God to commit unto him the faith of the future, which should grow and fill the earth. For there are in religion these two things which cannot be shaken : the Law of God, that commands us, and the (Spicer of (cod, thatiredeems (us; and) sévery earthly government and tradition shall be shaken until that sure commonwealth shall at last arise which is built upon that foundation, patterning after the authority of God’s Law, which com- mands a perfect righteousness, and the passion of His Grace, which seeks and saves the lost. ‘To-day, indeed, “‘ the tears of faith ”? may be “‘ dried up in the fire of the mechanistic will”? *—in the fire, that is to say, of that zeal which impels man forward, not toward any kingdom of righteous- ness, but toward some mechanical, makeshift * Rathenau, In Days To Come, p. 285. 222 St. Paul's Life of Christ state, the outgrowth of the material mind wherein the soul is overlooked and forgotten; but the soul of mankind takes its own sure revenge of all systems and eras that would contemn it, and in the day when man’s soul shall awake in Europe, the Law shall once more be our tutor, to bring us unto Christ, that we may be justified by faith. 4. JUSTIFICATION BY Fattu. We are justified, says Paul, by faith. That is to say, the life of Christ in the heart of man begins as an experience of reconciliation to God; and this experience includes an assurance of acquittal and reinstatement. And as for this assurance, it - is not to be wrought out of any disciplinary exer- cises or meritorious deeds which a man himself may perform, nor by means of any esoteric formula or trick of consciousness, but comes of an act of faith, by which a man steps out of experience, and casts himself upon God. It may be, indeed, that there has grown up in our time the suspicion that Paul made more of this doctrine than we have need to make of it. There is the notion that it was rightly important for Paul as a Jew, in continual conflict with the old juridical and ceremonial conception of religion and in expectation of an imminent Divine Assize, but that it is somewhat off the main line of things Christ and the Doctrines of LSP dCe Maes for us. However, the historical, evangelical fact appears to be that sooner or later we have to return to it. Paul’s doctrine was verified first of all in his own experience and in that of the Church of his day. Notably, it was verified anew by Luther, to become the creative word of a new era. It received a fresh authentication in the Evangelical Revival. ‘‘ Generally,” says John Wesley, ‘‘ when these [evangelical] truths, justification by faith in particular, were declared . . . after a few days or weeks there came suddenly on the great con- gregation . . . a violent and impetuous power which— Like mighty wind or torrent fierce Did then oppressors all o’errun.”’ Dale thought he detected in Moody’s later preach- ing a shifting of emphasis from justifying faith to repentance, and to repentance ‘“‘as though it were a doing of penance instead of a metanoia” ; and he believed that it impaired the evangelist’s effectiveness. ‘‘ In 1875 he preached in a manner which produced the sort of effect produced by Luther, and provoked similar criticism. . . . Men leaped out of darkness into life, and lived a Chris- tian life afterwards. ‘The ‘do penance’ preach- ing has had no such results ”’ (Letter to Dr. Wace, 1884: see Life of Dale, p. 530). It is strange how, through succeeding ages, this Pauline 224 St. Pauls Life of Christ doctrine has broken out anew, to re-orientate the thought and re-fashion the lives of men. The human fact, then, seems to be, that if there is one thing above everything else to which men are for ever returning, it is this matter of justifi- cation. We are for ever seeking to get on good terms with ourselves, with conscience, with memory, with the ghosts that trouble us, with God; and the lawyer mentioned in the Gospels who, ‘willing to justify himself,’ posed his ingenious question, is own brother to us all. We have, it seems, the ineradicable feeling that things have gone wrong—that we have gone wrong. We have the feeling that sooner or later we must face ourselves. We know, also, that we must face other people—not simply socially and with wordy by-play, but in some deeper and more searching way; and with most of us there are some people whom, for shame’s sake, we had rather not meet again. So there is the past,—the past which ought not to have been, and that other, perhaps more rebuking, past which ought to have been, and might have been, but which we have put out of the way. What if after all we can put nothing finally and irrevocably out of the way? What if the past is solemnly revocable? What if some- where in God’s great universe these things await us to confront us again? So, too, there is the Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 225 future—the future which, with its relentless logic, exposes all our fallacies, and carries our follies and worse than follies to their damning conclu- sion. And thus, within and beneath and beyond all, there is the feeling, variously interpreted, that we must meet God. It is not perhaps the fear of a dread Assize, wherein we shall be arraigned for our bold rebellions; it is rather the haunting fear that, in the supreme solitude and silence of Truth, our sins shall appear, not as audacious treasons, but as things squalid and abject and inexpressibly mean. There is even the fear of the Divine Forgiveness. . . . In one way or another, then, we are all seeking to come to terms with conscience and with life. We would fain arrive at some state of justifica- tion; it may be by dramatic expiations, or by attempting to depress our ideals to the level of our attainments, or by advantageous self-com- parison with our fellows, or by divers inventions of the subtle mind. Sometimes it may seem to us as if we have drawn ourselves up to the very edge of attainment—as if we were holding on, breath- less, to the crumbling verge of ultimate satisfac- tion—as if but one more effort were needed to set our feet upon steadfast ground; nevertheless Paul’s word finds us in the end: ‘‘ We have all Ma ercome shorte soc P 226 St. Paul's Life of Christ But, according to Paul, it is through the recog- nition of this very fact that the divine life in the soul is begun—that Christ is formed within us. We are justified, says he, by faith—by the faith, that is to say, which lays hold upon that right- eousness perfectly wrought out for us in the very heart and nature of God, and freely bestowed in Jesus Christ. For according to Paul’s gospel, for a man to look believingly to Jesus Christ, in whom God hath commended His love to the world, was for that man at once to be freely justified from all things, and to have peace with God and access unto all grace, and to rejoice in the hope of the glory yet to be revealed; so that henceforth he should work, not toward a fair standing with God, but by reason of it, and not upon a fair hope of acceptance, but upon the assurance of it; always coming back to this—that that good standing and that assurance rested not at all upon his own gifts and graces, nor upon any state interior to himself whatsoever, save only that faith which cast him wholly upon the name and nature and covenant- promises of God in Christ. There was, indeed, nothing that was so much to the mind of Paul as to stand before sinful but Christward-turning men and lavish upon them these evangelical encouragements, nor was there a sotted libertine or vice-stricken slave, nor yet a blameless stoic or Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 227 immaculate Pharisee, to whom he was not pre- pared to proclaim justification complete, immediate and eternal, as the free gift of God that cometh by faith and by faith alone. He was prepared to do so because in that very way it had pleased God to reveal His Son in Paul himself; and thus he knew by experience that Justifying Faith was but another name for the advent and life and ministry of the Living Christ in the heart of man. We understand, therefore, that in all this Paul speaks, not as a schoolman with a theory to pro- pound, but as an apostle with good news to pro- claim. Salvation, as he is careful to show, is not an abstruse thing, an engaging problem for the erudite ; but “ whosoever calleth upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Nevertheless his doctrine of Justification by Faith is not simply a bow in the cloud, a word in the air, a pronounce- ment to be repeated upon authority; but he is prepared to contend for it as pillared upon sound judgment, a doctrine rationally related to his whole conception of God and the world. For one thing, it is all of a piece with his understanding of that vital principle of substantial and legal and moral union which unites all the generations of the children of men. “You are you, and J am I”; but that, Paul 228 St. Paul’s Life of Christ would say, is by no means the whole story. Not so easily may we rid ourselves of each other. We are not apart, like pebbles tossed together in the tidal flow; we are one, like waves in the com- munion of the great deep. Paul is never able, for instance, to dissociate himself in his mind from far-off Father Adam standing there on the dim margin of the world and outlined against the dawn of time. Adam’s fall, it seems, was more than Adam’s fall; it was Paul’s also, and so with every other child of Adam’s errant race. There is a vital continuum. ‘The many are involved in the one, the one in the many. And has the passing of the centuries brought discredit upon this whole conception? No doubt we have now decided that Father Adam is a personage somewhat more remote and elusive than Paul was disposed to believe. Do we not prefer to speak of the Dawn Man—ELoanthropos ? But if it pleases us to say EHoanthropos where Paul says Adam, what of the difference? Paul’s doctrine remains. Who to-day can unravel the web of personal and social responsibility interwoven about every smallest act? ‘There is no isolated deed or desire ; but somehow all human history is involved in it. Dawn Man and twentieth-century man, we are bound up together. “A man,” says Emerson, working from very different premises, Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 229 but reaching the Pauline conclusion, “‘ is the whole encyclopedia of facts. ‘The creation of a thou- sand forests is in one acorn; and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the mani- fold world.” ‘There is no religion,” says our oft- quoted Italian prophet, “ without faith in the solidarity of the human race”’—nor yet, as he will show, an intelligible basis for any ethic higher than the ethic of the jungle. So we come back to Paul. ‘In Adam all die.”? The Dawn Man, dreaming and waking, questing and questioning, learning to put names to things, and communing in his own wondering way with earth and heaven —the Dawn Man fell, listening, it would seem, to some inferior and cunning voice that spoke against the high voice which held the secret of his voca- tion. In some such way the Dawn Man let us down: we have been letting one another down ever since. It is not the whole picture; but Paul will affirm it as part of the picture. In the teachings of Paul’s Master we have an extension and further application of this same principle of affinity and solidarity. It is an appli- cation of a challenging sort, and one which Paul 230 St. Paul's Life of Christ himself, if he had the Saying before him, must often have pondered. “‘ He that receiveth [wel- cometh| a prophet in the name of a prophet shall have a prophet’s reward; and he that receiveth [welcometh] a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall have a righteous man’s reward” (Matt. x. 41). Does not this appear an arbitrary imputation of moral values beyond all justifica- tion? But what if the prophet and his host, the righteous man and he who receives him, are not two, but one? What, that is to say, if between them there is some deep underlying affinity and moral union? It is no light thing to discern a prophet while yet he is an innovator at large; no light thing to welcome him whose words are battles, and whose presence brings with it the rumour and challenge of war. To do so argues a certain kinship of spirit. Paul himself could never forget how the Galatians had welcomed him, nor what it argued as to the kinship of their own spirits. ** Although it was because of an illness . . . that I preached the gospel to you on my former visit, and though my flesh was a trial to you, you did not scoff at me nor spurn me; you welcomed me like an angel of God, like Christ Jesus. You con- gratulated yourselves” (Gal. iv. 13, 14: Moffatt). Does not the prophet, so welcomed, stand for that attitude and faith and character which his Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 231 welcomers would fain attain unto? Does not the righteous man, so received and rejoiced in, stand for that righteousness which his disciple would appropriate? And although that be but desire in the one which is attainment in the other, yet is not such desire the seed of attainment, and shall not God read the harvest in the grain? A strange world this, then. The prophet 1s more than himself: the righteous man is more than himself: they who receive them are more than themselves. ‘There are subtle contacts, inter- penetrations, correspondences, affinities. It is so throughout life. No man, says Paul, liveth to himself, nor may he perform even that last and most individual and isolative act of death without involving others. He must die, also, socially. It is at this point that Paul finds the saving truth concerning the life and death and exaltation of Jesus. For Christ belongs not less to all men than does Adam or any son of Adam since the world began; and if there is this wide com- monalty and partnership in transgression and failure, there is also the same in obedience and righteousness. If Adam is Everyman, then is Christ Everyman, too; and all His obedience and righteousness are for the race. 232 St. Paul’s Life of Christ And this is not to suggest a mere mechanical or legal interpretation. After all, we have shared a common failure in the Dawn Man, not merely because we are united with him in psychic sub- stance, or in legal status, but, according to Paul, because we have all in very fact put ourselves in line with him. ‘“ Death hath passed upon all men for that all have sinned,” even though all have not sinned’ after the similitude of Adam’s transgression. In the same sense—that is, by a personal act—we must put ourselves in line with God’s Righteous Man. We must receive Him— welcome Him. And what is this receiving of Christ, this casting of ourselves upon Him, this cry for Him, this drawing of the heart toward Him, but the evidence that that all-justifying righteousness which in Him is in perfect fruition is already in our own hearts as the quickened seed, itself the gift of God, whereof the harvest shall be hereafter ? Make Christ, then, and not the Dawn Man your Everyman, says Paul in effect. Claim your kin- ship in Him. Recognize that He belongs to you and you to Him. Live in that faith, and He Himself will inhabit it and will live in you. But then how far do our little annotations and explanations of Paul fall short of his vision and Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 233 passion! How apt we are to fritter away his inspiration with our petty ingenuities of exposi- tion! And especially when it comes to expound- ing Grace. Until Grace in our theorizings becomes no more Grace, but some strange alloy—some Divine recognition, perhaps, of our own inherent but not yet developed righteousness. Yet let us be very sure that, whenever we come to that, Paul must break out upon us. For it is not by God’s faith in our own inherent and germinal righteous- ness that we are justified, but by our faith in God’s complete and perfect righteousness, freely be- stowed and vitally communicated in Christ. And even if in its outworking in our own experience it must be by our will and endeavour, and there- fore to that extent our own, yet even so, and as if against the testimony of our very consciousness, it is all of God and all of grace. For, as Sweden- borg in his mystical philosophy hath it, it is not possible for the Lord, as Love and Wisdom, to indwell any moral being, unless he who so receives love and wisdom feels them to be his own; other- wise he were no more than the conduit of a life with which he had no vital relation: and yet, so far as he believes that he possesses these things from himself, so far he denies his true nature, for he denies in effect that his life comes from the Lord. For in truth, “ the union of the Lord with 234 St. Pauls Life of Christ man and of man with the Lord takes place by means of those things which are the Lord’s in him” (“ The Divine Love and Wisdom,” Part II., par. 115, 116). And so Paul: “For by grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of your- selves ; it is the gift of God. . . . For we are His workmanship’ (Eph. ii. 8, 9). If, then, that faith by which we receive God’s Righteous One is unto justification, because it witnesses to our nascent affinity with Him, bearing in itself the seed of a righteousness yet to be revealed, it is none the less of grace; for we are joined to Him by means of that which is the Lord’s in us. So to return: we need to be justified. We are burdened; we are full of dispeace. Would we then justify ourselves? Would we come boldly to the tribunal of our own conscience, and of that supreme, ultimate Conscience of sovereign right- eousness, and claim the merited award of approval and peace? Not by that way has peace ever come to any soul of man. What flashes and delusive gleams of hope have ever encouraged us upon that road have been like the witches’ flat- teries in Macbeth, winning us with honest trifles to betray us in deepest consequence. Yet if this be a moral and not simply a sentimental universe, there is no other way open for us save one, and Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 235 that the way that is not of our own making— even the way of grace. And, interpret it as we may, the fact remains that for Paul the Life of Jesus Christ in His saints begins and continues in an act and attitude of faith—even the relying, against all the habits and subterfuges of the mind, for our acceptance with God solely upon the foundation of what He has provided out of His own nature; the cleaving to an experience which is not our own, but Christ’s, but which yet is verily ours in Him. So for Paul, Faith is but another name for Christ ; it is His heart-name, the name by which He lives in the hearts of His people. Moreover, in these days, when we have a proper concern to bring every doctrine to the test of its social applications, it remains to be added that this doctrine of Justification by Faith has applications and implications that are searching and far-reach- ing enough. For we are to be imitators of God, even of Him that justifieth the ungodly. Have we been wronged? Have we been defrauded? Has any nation wrought iniquity against our nation—any class against our class? ‘Then it is for us, the aggrieved party, to take the reconciling initiative, seeking the justification of the trans- gressors. Not, indeed, of their transgression ; 236 St. Paul’s Life of Christ how condemnable that is we must show them by taking the burden of it upon ourselves, and pay- ing homage in our every act to that righteousness which it has violated. But we must seek to justify them, to provide them with a new approach to us, a new standing with us, until, through their quick- ened discernment of our good-will, they are put out of conceit with their offences against us, and come to believe in us and to share our spirit. A hard way, surely !—so hard that no nation, almost no community, has ever attempted the like. According to Paul, it is the way of the Cross. 5. Cue Girr or RIGHTEOUSNESS. “Whoever thinks he can rely on outward privilege,” says Paul, in one of his great auto- biographical passages, “‘ I can outdo him. I was circumcized on the eighth day after birth; I belonged to the race of Israel, to the tribe of Benjamin; I was the Hebrew son of Hebrew parents, a Pharisee as regards the Law, in point of ardour a persecutor of the church, immaculate by. the standard of legal righteousness. But for Christ’s sake I have learned to count my former gains a loss; indeed, I count anything a loss com- pared to the supreme value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake I have lost everything (I count it all the veriest refuse) in order to gain Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 237 Christ and be found. . . in Him, possessing no legal righteousness of my own, but the righteous- ness of faith in Christ, the divine righteousness that rests on faith” (Phil. ui. 4-9: Moffatt). And concerning this “‘ divine righteousness that rests on faith,” the first and principal thing is that it is of God, even of Him who calleth the things that are not as though they were, and, being of God, is reckoned unto us. For Abraham, who is the spiritual father of all them that believe, being fully assured that what God had promised He was able to perform, believed God; and his faith was reckoned unto him for righteousness. Now it was not written for his sake alone that it was reckoned unto him; but for our sake also, unto whom it shall be reckoned, who believe on Him that raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. Our Evangelical fathers, as we know, were much taken with this doctrine ; and they knew it by the name of Imputed Righteousness. And the doc- trine as they interpreted it was this: that there is another righteousness which a man may wear besides that of his own weaving; and that other and better and most glorious righteousness is the righteousness of Jesus Christ, woven throughout 238 St. Paul’s Life of Christ of His own obedience. Of a man’s own righteous- ness, woven of his own outward correctness and blamelessness, our Evangelical fathers had a poor opinion. They held that it was a livery quite unpresentable before God, the stuff of it poor in warp and woof; but the righteousness of Christ was perfect. And as Justification is an act of God’s free grace, wherein He pardoneth all our sins and accepteth us as righteous in His sight, so the Imputation of Righteousness is an act of that same free grace, wherein God imputeth to us the righteousness of Christ, received by faith alone. Every man, therefore (said our fathers), who is united by faith to Jesus Christ is apparelled in the white and glistering raiment of His perfectness, and is accepted in the Beloved. Our fathers, it seems, got this doctrine from the Apostle Paul, by way of Augustine and Luther; and Paul got it in part from the Old Testament and in part from the Gospel tradition, and in part, no doubt, from his own reasonings and reveries and communings with his living Lord. And one is disposed to believe that it was a doctrine which lay very near to Paul’s heart. As we read his Epistle to the Romans and his Second Epistle to the Corinthians and, again, his Epistle to the Galatians, we see for ourselves how he delights to dwell upon this righteousness which is by faith— Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 239 this gift of righteousness, this righteousness which is Christ’s and is reckoned unto us. Itis more than possible that Paul, being such a man as he was, could hardly have endured at all, had it not been that he had this assurance that in God’s sight he stood already in the perfectness of Christ. It is more than possible, that is to say, that this doctrine, in so far as it was wrought out by the Apostle at all, was wrought out of the necessities of his own heart and conscience, and out of his consciousness that God was meeting those necessi- ties out of His own fulness in Christ. Perhaps it is not too much to say that, morning by morning, this was Paul’s waking thought, and, night by night, it was the pillow on which he laid his head —this, and the warrior-joy of his vocation as one under orders from the living God. Now we have already seen that Paul was not easily brought to this state of mind. There was a time when he was full of the notion of his good family, and his exemplary upbringing, and his outwardly blameless life, and his correct opinions and practices. In all these things he had carried his head very high, and would have scorned the idea of wearing any other righteousness than was spun and woven of this material. What came in to discomfit him was his sense of interior failure 240 St. Paul’s Life of Christ before the intense demands of the spiritual Law. ‘“‘Sin sprang up, and I died.” “I died.” No word shall we find more poignant than that to set forth the fatal woe of a heart torn by inward schism. And so in the fulness of time and in his utter extremity, the Lord who quickeneth the dead revealed to him that righteousness which 1s of Christ by faith. But once he had inwardly beheld the perfectness of Christ and known it for his own, how he despised the image of his former pride, and how his own righteousness, that once had seemed so goodly a garment, came to appear a mere beggar’s clout, a foul and worthless thing, to be cast away for ever! ‘Thus did Paul find his way home; and thus did it please the Father to bring forth the best robe and put it on him, and rejoice over him. But we have already seen enough in our previous studies to know that we shall miss the whole secret of Paul’s own rejoicing if we forget that Paul wore Christ’s righteousness, not as an extraneous thing, but as something that was vitally his own. If we go back to Paul’s earliest days, we may safely conclude that there was one in Tarsus who through all those days imputed something to little Saul which went far beyond all his childish thought and understanding ; and that one was his Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 241 mother. We may safely say that, in her own way, and from his earliest years, Saul’s mother was continually imputing righteousness to him. She watched him at play, and saw hints and gleams of what no one else ever saw or dreamed of seeing. She listened to his childish prattle, and heard in it what no one else ever heard or dreamed of hearing. She remembered his sayings, and pon- dered them in her heart; and when he would scribble little indecipherable epistles, as children will, and lay them in her lap, she would discern in them other and greater epistles which he was yet to write. She would bend over him asleep; and, in that stillness and sweet mystery of Heaven which hovers over the cot of every sleeping child, she would feel in her heart an occult touch and tremor, as from the wing of some angel of destiny. For, as we know, a mother’s sight is second- sight; it is insight and foresight. All mothers are at this holy work of imputing righteousness and all good and beautiful things. Our mothers see good in us which no one else sees; they clothe us in virtues beyond all actuality, and we live and move in their presence in the consciousness of that high investiture. And moreover it is possible, despite all the world’s unbelief, and the evidence of our failures, and the witness of our own con- Q 242 St. Paul's Life of Christ demning hearts, that somehow our mothers—who are greater than our hearts—are right. What they have in-seen and foreseen concerning us may somehow be there, even though we can demon- strate that it is not there. It is our own best, unrealized selves; and we wear this love-woven garment of imputed righteousness wherewith they clothe us as a precious, sacred panoply against the world’s coarse disbelief and our own despairs. We wear it as a hope, a promise, a prophecy, of that most real, unrealized best. ‘There is indeed nothing more sacred, more wonderful, more holy than the way a mother will go on imputing right- eousness even to her most abandoned and scape- grace child. And so we must understand that when Paul came home to God and found in Him this atmo- sphere of imputed righteousness—found that God was beholding in him a goodness which was not his, even the very perfectness of His supreme Son —we must understand that the triumph of it all, if we may dare to put it so, was that God was right. God by imputing Christ’s righteousness to Paul was pledging it to him as something that should presently be actual and manifest in him. He was loving Paul out of the pit, even as Jesus had imputed righteousness to shifty, unstable Simon, and had loved him out of the pit. ‘“ Thou Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 243 shalt be called Peter ”—‘*‘ Thou shalt be called Rock—my rock-man, my man of granite.” And there and then unsteadfast Simon put on his new great name for a robe of righteousness, woven out of the intercession and the grace of his Master ; and from that hour he knew, too, that his Master was right, and secretly, slowly, he began to take on the granite quality. Paul’s doctrine of imputed righteousness, then, is all of a piece with his conception of the Life of Christ—with his conception of the believing man’s living union with Christ. “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”? Apart from that, Paul has no doctrine of any gift of righteousness what- soever. As spring lives in the buds and the swelling seed, as summer lives in the fruit and ripening grain, so Christ lived in Paul, not cancel- ling his selfhood, but bringing it into fruition. (For the self which Paul speaks of as a thing renounced and crucified is not that of his individual consciousness, but the self of his egoistic ambitions.) And because Christ lived in Paul, and because Christ’s virtue was hourly passing into Paul’s life, Christ’s perfect righteousness was Paul’s there and _ then to rejoice in before God. And, moreover, we may understand how this 244 St. Paul’s Life of Christ directly helped forward the process of Paul’s actual spiritual development. In the sick-room it is our wisdom, whenever we reasonably may do so, to weave for the invalid thoughts of health, and to apparel him in those health-thoughts as in an electrical robe—a robe, so to say, of physiological righteousness: for, by so doing, we quicken his recovery. And so we may recognize that that imputation of Christ’s righteousness which was made to Paul was all the time communicating to him something of its own virtue, leading his thoughts from that plague of the heart which still vexed him, and which yields to no inward brooding, to that perfectness pledged to him in the living Christ. ‘Thus it was the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus that was for Paul the healing vision which restored his soul; so that he might have said with the Psalmist : ‘Thou art the health of my countenance and my God.” And then, once more, we may subject this doctrine of grace, also, to the test of its practical applications. Is it not written that, if we would prosper in the world, we must first learn the grammar of the world? Now part of the grammar of the world is this: that we should regard every man Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 245 as a rogue until we have proved him honest. The grammar of the Law, however, 1s in this respect somewhat higher: for does not the Law regard every man as honest until it has proved him a rogue? But the grammar of Grace is highest. As much as in you lies, says Grace, regard a man as honest, even though you have found him a rogue. This is to be interpreted, not foolishly, but according to the sanity of faith. ‘That is to say, Grace would have us to impute righteous- ness, not simply recognizing the manifest good, but appealing to the goodness that is’ not discover- able, and reckoning to men a virtue beyond their attainment. Let runaway Onesimus be reckoned still worthy of the virtue of his name! “ He is profitable to thee and to me” (Philemon 11). Here is a reformatory principle of wide application, capable, it may be, of re-fashioning much that austere Law, far removed from any doctrine of Grace, has built into our present Criminal system. And is there no room for a liberal application of this Pauline doctrine among those who love us and whom we love? Sometimes romance dies all too soon. In our early, glamorous days did we idealize much, to be idealized much in return, and thus was there a strange shining about us, a sort of sweet extravagance and beautiful folly— not without its tender, reminiscent charm, it may 246 St. Paul’s Life of Christ be, for the elect among our elder folk? For so Love makes children of us again; and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. But now we have put away childish things ; now we are more sober ; now we are aware of each other’s faults, and can point them out with accuracy and lucid analysis. Our love, we understand, is no longer fanciful ; and we like to think it may be all the better for that— more chastened, wiser, more patient. But if the glamour has faded, we have lost something rich and rare which we cannot afford to lose, and which, it may be, we have no need to lose. We ought to go on idealizing and being idealized. We should love each other, not alone for what we are, but for what we shall become. We should regard one another as arrayed in that beauty and perfectness which have now to be imputed, but which shall yet be brought forth and made fully manifest. So we have need to remember that this divine righteousness is cast over us always, sleeping and waking, living and dying, to be honoured in all our behaviour. If we will have it so, says the daring seer, we are one by faith with all the noble of the earth—Shakespeare’s mind and Lord Christ’s heart, they are for us. “ All things are yours,” Says a seer yet more daring; “‘ whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, Christ and the Doctrines of Grace 247 or things present, or things to come; all are yours ; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.” If it is denied to us, it is because we are replete with ourselves—so “‘ replete with very thou” that we want for nothing, and need all. But for all who have lost conceit of themselves, and vehemently desire fellowship in a righteousness woven on a larger loom and to a grander pattern than theirs— for such, the message of Paul is that that Right- eousness is theirs in communion with all the poor in spirit who call on the name of the Lord. VItl THE CHRIST BEYOND THE AGES ‘“’THEN cometh the end, when He shall have delivered up the kingship to God, even the Father : when He shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For He must reign until He hath put all enemies under His feet. . . . And when all things shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him, that God may be all in all.” And if we inquire of Paul as to his authority for this so great and strange declaration, what answer can we expect but this: ‘I received of the Lord that which I delivered unto you”? Not otherwise can we account for this ‘‘ brave text,” this “‘ generous word,” * this saying that calls to us out of the excellent glory ere it loses itself in light. For Paul’s mind and spirit must press onward beyond all finite conceptions to the illimitable and eternal. After the Blessed Hope, what then? After the Complete Redemption, what then? After the putting down of all enmity, the death of Death, * See Emerson, Circles. 248 The Christ Beyond the Ages 249 the final victory of Life and Love, what then? Paul must meditate upon this so intently and so prayerfully that presently, as with the Last Supper, so here, there comes to his fixed and brooding mind an “ opening,” and an in-shining of mystic light as from the presence of the Lord. So that Paul can say: ‘I received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, how that the Lord Jesus, when all things shall be subdued unto Him, shall take of His kingdom, having perfected it, and lay it at His Father’s feet ; likewise His own self also, and be for ever subject unto Him that hath put all things under Him; that God may be all in Alki I meanwhile who drew Near to the limit where all wishes end, The ardour of my wish .. . Ended within me * x * * x Already of myself aloft I looked ; For visual strength, refining more and more, Bare me into the ray authentical Of sovran light. ‘Thenceforward what I saw Was not for words to speak, nor memory’s self To stand against such outrage on her skill. As one who, from a dream awakened, straight All he hath seen forgets; yet still retains Impression of the feeling in his dream ; F’en such am I: for all the vision dies, As ’t were, away ; and yet the sense of sweet That sprang from it, still trickles in my heart. Thus in the sun-thaw is the snow unsealed. . .. O Eternal beam ! 250 St. Paul's Life of Christ (Whose height what reach of mortal thought may soar ?) Yield me again some little particle Of what thou then appearedst; give my tongue Power, but to leave one sparkle of thy glory, Unto the race to come, that shall not lose Thy triumph wholly, if thou waken aught Of memory in me, and endure to hear The record sound in this unequal strain.* So Paul will proceed to show how the redemp- tive Life of Christ, begun in renunciation, must likewise be completed in the same. He will show how in the end Christ shall seek a new self-empty- ing, knowing no sweeter joy than the joy of that last uttermost self-oblation unto the glory of the One God, whose life is an eternal outpouring of His Godhead upon all His worlds. ‘‘ Then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him ”’; and for that joy that is set before Him, He who endured the Cross bears also the Crown, that at last “God may be all in all.” “ All in all”— not in the null and void beatitude of an oblivious Nirvana, but in the jubilee of a redeemed universe, wherein all shall say, “‘ God is all to us, and we are all to Him, and, in Him, to each other.”” Thus does Paul’s always unfinished Life of Christ reach its endless end: for beyond that not he nor any seer has ever seen; beyond it is the Light Un- approachable. * Dante: Paradise, xxxiii. The Christ Beyond the Ages 251 And so, as we bring our study to a close, let us once more confess that such a Life of Christ as Paul has outlined for us may often leave us groping as fora lost clue. It may be, as we have said, that Truth—that Revelation—also hath its kenosis. It may be there are times when Revelation empties itself of something of its authority and strips itself of its august, regal certitudes, passing into im- poverishment for the deeper enrichment of our faith in days to come. Does it not seem to be so in this present age? ‘To-day the figure of Christ wears once more the peasant garb of the Teacher of Galilee. It is ‘‘ the historic Jesus ”’ that we see, the lover of God, the teacher of men, the critic of Church and State, the friend of the outcast and the oppressed—He, rather than the Lord of Glory. And if this be so with us, we must be true to ourselves, even to our limitations. Nothing could be less in keeping with the spirit of Truth than to attempt to force the faith of any genera- tion into affirmations that are not its own and are alien to its confidence. In yielding to such pres- sure men lose all contact with Truth’s authority, reflecting the reflections of others; in resisting it they are apt to react polemically toward a con- trary bias, and thus again to have their own angle of direct reflection disturbed. Organizations committed to certain fixed traditional forms must 252 St. Paul's Life of Christ always have the right to exact an appropriate sub- mission of those who voluntarily serve them; hardly, however, in the name of Truth, but rather in the interests of an agreed rule and discipline. For Truth is of the Spirit; and even a correct form may be held not in Truth but in perjury. The divine quest and perpetual discovery must proceed through the Spirit of God and the instincts of the soul of man; and Faith, heeding the voices of the past and of the future also, must fashion its own certitudes from age to age. But the voices of the past must be heeded; for “ the past is never merely the past,”’ but holds for us something of the timeless treasure of God. The past is that divine scripture which is profit- able for teaching, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God, with present guidance and forevision, may be furnished com- pletely unto every good work. As for our Life of Christ—far different from Paul’s, it may be, is that Life which the modern mind in its present mood would write for us. It would celebrate, perhaps, the sublime genius of the Child of obscure Galilean origin, portraying His matchless and baffling personality, expounding and comparing His marvellous ethic, and concluding upon His inevitable and fruitful martyrdom and_ pos- thumous influence. But then does never Paul’s The Christ Beyond the Ages 208 Christ return to trouble our dreams and haunt our hearts as with the sense of a lost music, a vanished glory? Shall not the most modern among us do well to recognize a certain background of mystery from which there may at any time emerge for him those august disclosures of majesty and great glory whose rumour still lingers around him from bygone ages of faith? Is there not always about Jesus Christ something beyond our conceiving? When we would define Him, do we not find that He has escaped us—that it is not He that our cun- ning definition has captured, but some too intel- ligible little Christ of our own? And do these so intelligible Christs completely satisfy us? Do they feed us in the wilderness, comfort us in the storm, ransom us out of our hells, wash us and make us white in their own blood? In the end shall we not find that there is no Christ in whom our hearts can rest but He who dwelleth in the bosom of the Father—the Christ of eternal grace and eternal redemption, who, supreme among the sons of men, hath died, the just for the unjust, that He might Brine us To Gop? ANNOTATIONS THE JERUSALEM WHICH IS ABOVE Tue crowning woe of Euripides’ Medea and Hecuba was that amid all their sorrows they were citiless, and therefore orphans of the world. A Frenchman might say of Paris, or an Italian of Rome, or a New Englander of Boston, or an Englishman of London, “she is the mother of us all.” Thus, for an Englishman, London is like no other city; it is not even like itself; it is the symbol and embodiment of something far more than itself. It was not otherwise with Saul of Tarsus and his Jerusalem, save that with him such loyalties struck deep into springs of mystic feeling hardly to be traced in the civic consciousness of modern patriotism. We understand that this power, varying in degree and in quality, but always notable, which great cities exercise Over us, is in manifest agree- ment with the genius of man. We are made for fellowship. Our consciousness of others is as fundamental as our consciousness of ourselves. ‘The beaver does not construct its habitat more instinctively than man sets himself to fashion a R 257 258 St. Paul’s Life of Christ society. Not communion with Nature, not even communion with God, may take the place of human fellowship. Poetry, Science, Religion may enrich and transform society; they may not cancelit. ‘The solitaire wars against the universe, seeking an impossible peace; at best what he wins is benumbment. ‘To be inwardly quickened is to know oneself spiritually socialist. So in all civilized ages the highest aspirations and en- deavours of man have been toward a City. But let us repeat it:* the \reverencesongam Englishman for London or a Frenchman for Paris or even an Italian for Rome is hardly to be compared with the passion of an old-time Jew for Jerusalem. For him it was the Holy City, the centre and symbol of a living unity and a divine destiny; and in exile his heart turned to it as the heart of the saint turns to God.“ If I ;forget thee, O Jerusalemi eee So we shall not easily conceive the desolation of heart which came to Hebrew Christians, nurtured in boundless devotion to Zion, when it became plain to them that their city was apostate, that her initiative had passed from her, that her glory was departed. The heaven- piercing, awful cry which went up from the Jewish hosts when in the final hour of Titus’ attack they beheld the Temple itself whelmed Annotations 259 at last in the general ruin—that cry was fore- echoed in their hearts who, years before, had learned the inner and spiritual truth. Jerusalem was already fallen, the Temple already forsaken. No living Jew could have felt it more than Paul; and when we find him in Galatians liken- ing Jerusalem in allegory to Hagar, the bond- woman, and not to Sarah, the mother of the free, we may know that the pen that indited the similitude was dipped in blood. “I could have wished myself anathema. .. .” Even now are we wholly without a clue to a sorrow so great, so consuming? Our hearts are hungry for the enduring Commonwealth, for the age of healing and of peace; but our civiliza- tion is still in thrall to evil interests, our cities profaned with defiling idolatries. London— Paris—Rome—Berlin—Vienna: these, too, have known the visitation of the Son of Man, and have made their tragic refusals, despising the things which belong unto peace. Is it a light thing for the generous, valiant heart of youth to-day to learn that these storied cities of our modern world, on which men’s dreams have so hopefully rested—that these cities have despised the glory that might have been theirs? When one thinks on these things, and the question forces itself upon us, ‘“ What ought 260 St. Paul's Life of Christ believing men to do?” one turns again to Paul and to the believing men of old. The Jerusalem which is above, says Paul in a memorable passage, is free, and is the mother of us all. There is a similar declaration that be- longs to the seer of Patmos. And we may be glad that the Book of Revelation came to be included in our canon, if only for this—that it expands Paul’s own saying into a triumphant vision of that same Jerusalem which is above and is for ever free, and is the Mother City of all the pilgrims of faith. Moreover, it is good that we should remember that it was a vision beheld by a Hebrew seer after the old Jerusalem had passed in blood and fire and vapour of smoke. It was as if he had said: ‘“* The old Jerusalem is fallen; but that, after all, was the shadow-city; the true Jerusalem is on high, impregnable, in yonder unapparent realm of faith and hope and aspiration. There is our City; and she shall not only take us to herself— she shall betake herself to us: she shall be estab- lished here in the midst of the years.” John will see her as a bride, Paul as a mother, but it is the one City: and the point to be noted is, that here we have the victory of faith over dis- illusion, the song of the sons of the morning which challenges the night. And so, when the Annotations 261 barbarians were sacking Rome, Augustine was writing his City of God. Is not true patriotism always pledged to in- tangible realities? Do not its loyalties always reach upward to invisible commonwealths? Was ever the Zion the prophets loved entirely a visible thing? The pride of Lebanon, the might of Jordan, the glory of Hermon—were even these altogether substantial and tangible, and not at all the reflex of some grace and beauty not of earth, the mirrored splendour of some heavenly counterpart? Was ever the Athens of Athenian devotion a city made with hands? ‘“ Fix your eyes,” says Pericles, “‘on what Athens might be, and make yourselves her lovers.” Lamennais, seeking beyond his nineteenth-century Rome and Paris for that Commonwealth whose call from afar had summoned him to pilgrimage, is presently (he tells us) “caught up, above the region of shadows,” until he is lost in the Source of all love and wisdom and power; “then,” says he, “I felt what Country is.” There must always, it seems, be a City which is above, or our hearts fail us. There must always be an Athens which might be, an unrealized New Jerusalem, an _ Eternal City more glorious than the Rome that is now, or ever has been. Our ‘‘ common states that stand in caution, twilight cities dimly wise ”’ 262 St. Paul's Life of Christ can be truly served only by that Band of Lovers who behold them, not in their own light, but in the light of their heavenly counterpart and original. ‘The patriotism which moves only amid ephemeral facts, with no bond or covenant with ideal realities, must fail us in the important hour. It has no defence against the disenchant- ments of time, the tyranny of present fact, the assault of events: It is written of certain pilgrims that they looked for a City which hath foundations. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned: but they desired a better country, that is, an heavenly; and not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, they were persuaded of them and embraced them: wherefore, it is added, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He hath prepared for them a City. That they should have sought a City “‘ which hath founda- tions’ is also, as we have already had occasion to observe, a characteristic of this higher patriot- ism. For we shall hardly be sustained upon a hope so ethereal that it dissolves into vain rhap- sody. But the “ Jerusalem which is above” is no phantom-city. ‘“ They stand, those halls of Zion.” Age by age they who for a while have Annotations 263 worn, as we do now, the livery of mortality have passed thither and entered in. Shall we not believe that they love this earth with the love of the Son of Man, and that with Him they weave their ministries around us? ‘ There is still,” says Bishop Hall in his Christ Mystical, ‘and ever will be, a secret and unfailing corre- spondence between heaven and earth”; and as for us, left here to tug with many difficulties, ‘“we cannot forget that better half of us.” ‘Where we are,” said Garibaldi, repeating an ancient word, “there is Rome.” Can we not say of the faithful now made wise with the wisdom of the immortal years and purified beyond stain, “ Where they are, there is our true Commonwealth ’?? Where Lincoln is, there is the true America. Where Lamennais is, there is the true France. Where Paul is, there is the true Jerusalem. Where Christ is, there is the Earth of the Redemption, the City of Man, the City of God. The heavens, as John Pulsford would say, are always seeking to come down. So we have need to set our hearts to the ancient, holy faith that the Divine City is waiting to descend to us. In the face of the contradictions of time and our own inconstancy, we might well despair, if all 264 St. Paul's Life of Christ the seeking of better things were on this time- ward, mortal side. But, as it is said that a man’s vocation seeks him more truly than he seeks his vocation, so the seers would teach us that the Divine City, which bears in itself the vocation of mankind, yearns toward the world beyond all the world’s desire to attain to it. The Jerusalem which is above would not be the mother of us all, had she no mother-yearning to make her way to us, and the more so because of our distresses. But is she not ever descending? For her descent is into believing hearts, that from them she may be built up and made manifest at last upon the earth. ‘This must be our hope as we dwell in the Hagar cities which now are, and are in bondage. And Hagar too, and her children—are they not also beloved? For them even now is the well-spring in the wilderness; and when the Queen-Mother cometh, with Hagar it shall not be as of old, but she shall find favour and a new liberty, and repent her of her rebellion, and bring her glory and honour into the royal house, and be glad. “The poet has said: O Beloved City of Cecrops! Canst thou not say: O Beloved City of God? ” | Annotations | 265 PAUL AS GOD’S PATRIOT In his Epistle to the Romans Paul asserts the inwardness of nationality as applied to his own race. He is not a Jew who is one outwardly ; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly (Rom. ii. 28). Nationality, that is to say, is not simply a fact, but a vocation. ‘Thus to be a Jew was to be an advantaged person, chiefly by reason of the historic revelation committed to the steward- ship of the Hebrew race. But Paul was not prepared to know a man as a Jew simply because he was of Jewish blood and had submitted to the rites of the Jewish faith. The question went deeper; the question was, whether or no he had a spiritual apprehension of his share in the national vocation, whether or no he had a heart sealed unto the holy covenant of God. “ Cir- cumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit and not in the letter.” The statement may be taken as looking toward the truth that there is but one abiding patriot- ism—the patriotism of the spirit, and but one fatherland, the fatherland of the soul. The true children of Abraham are they who in all ages and in all lands have shared Abraham’s spiritual faith, and, like him, have reckoned themselves 266 St. Paul's Life of Christ strangers and pilgrims upon the earth. But this may be so interpreted as to deny that patriotism and nationality as we know them have any place in the Providential ordering of the world; and though there are passages which seem to bear out that view, it is hardly to be accepted as the Pauline thought. Paul indeed has shown us that, when he came to know Jesus Christ as Lord, he learned that in Him the divisions of race and class which divided the world were abrogated. In Christ there was neither Jew nor Greek, bar- barian nor Scythian, slave nor freeman. But to take this declaration as a denial that any Provi- dential and spiritual function can pertain to racial or social groupings as such would be to have Paul deny also the place of sex and of family life in the Christian order. For Paul makes the same statement in respect of the sexes: in Christ there is neither male nor female. Yet nowhere do we find a more religious recognition of the spiritual value and sacredness of these relationships than in the Pauline writings. In general, then, we may understand that what he claims is that all such distinctions, without necessarily being can- celled, are transcended. In Christ, redeemed Humanity rises above all barriers that would divide it. All distinctions must be viewed in relation to the supreme unity in which they Annotations | 267 meet; and any distinction incompatible with that unity must fall away. Thus it is a spiritual conception of Humanity and of the universe which supplies the perspective for Paul’s thought concerning all racial and social relationships. It 1s, of course, easy to read into the Pauline doctrine and outlook conceptions which belong to a far later orientation—easy to forget that the apostle’s thought was interwoven with an apocalyptic faith which has largely dropped out of mind; perhaps, also, it is easy, on the other hand, to assign to him limitations which were never his—easy, in our zeal for a historical realism of interpretation, to overlook the workings of religious genius. For does not inspired genius introduce the incalculable ele- ment? ‘* Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” But in any case we have the idea of Humanity as such—of what we should now speak of as the fundamental solidarity of the race—suggested in Paul’s discourse at Athens (Acts xvii.). In this discourse (which certain evangelical commen- tators are curiously pleased to depreciate, as if in this instance the apostle had spoken below the level of his inspiration) we are given in cameo form the Pauline philosophy of the world and of human history. Here, for instance, we have set 268 St. Paul's Life of Christ forth: (1) The oneness of God, transcendent and immanent, the sole creative reality. He “ made the world and all things therein.” As the Trans- cendent One He “ dwelleth not in temples made with hands”; as the _ Immanent One, it is “ in Him ” that “we live and move and have our being.” (2) The spiritual origin of the universe, as having its source and sustenance in God. He “made the world”; ‘‘ He giveth to all life and breath and all things.” (3) The oneness and spiritual nature of Humanity. God hath made of one all nations of men; and all men are His offspring. (4) The recognition of nationhood as belonging to the Divine order. God is the Creator of nations. (5) The Divine Providence in ethnic development and national history. Ordaining mankind to dwell “on all the face of the earth,” God determined the “ appointed seasons °—the epochs of racial and national activity—and the boundaries of racial settlement \—“ the bounds of ” the nations’ “* habitation.” (6) The Divine vocation of all nations. The Providential purpose was that the nations were “to seek God,” even though it might be a half- blind and groping quest—“ if haply they might feel after Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.” (7) The beginning of a new world-epoch with the coming of Christ. Annotations 269 The nations had lived largely in spiritual ignor- ance, and those dark ages of ignorance God had overlooked; but now in Christ had dawned for mankind the age of enlightenment, and the light had brought with it a new responsibility. ‘There must be a renewing of the mind of the race. God “commandeth men that they should all everywhere repent.” (8) For the age of light brings with it an era of judgment. “ He” who ‘determined the appointed seasons” of old “hath appointed a Day in which He will judge the world in righteousness.” (9g) The judgment which shall try all hearts and test all human standards centres in the Divine Humanity of Christ. God will judge the world “ by a Man whom He hath ordained.” (10) The assurance of this is the fact of the Living Christ, risen and exalted: “ whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead.” So, to return, Paul would view the nations against the background of Humanity, and Human- ity against the background of a spiritual universe whose source is the One God of heaven and earth. God hath made of one all nations; and though the relationship is so myriad-fibred as to be past all conceiving, we are slowly learning that 270 St. Paul's Life of Christ that aboriginal unity has gone on through the ages, weaving us all into a complex web from which no single life-thread may be disengaged. We may not number the foliaged mass on every bough of the giant oak that has been putting forth its branches through a hundred summers ; but we understand that every bough is related to every other, and that it is the same with each leaf in their multitudinous communion; we understand that together the branches are or- dained to serve the growth of the tree; that for each is the task of feeling after the light, for each the mission of transmuting the solar energies for the life of all. So God grows trees; so, accord- ing to Paul, He grows Humanity. Humanity 1s the oak, the nations are the branches, ordained to organize the life of Humanity, ordained to feel after and transmute the truth of God into human experience and service. As a tree that put forth leaves but no branches would be smothered in its own foliage, so Humanity with- out the organizing function of nationality would be an inert smother of individuals. It is difficult to see how the world could have progressed at all but for this organic grouping of the peoples: for in this way variety of type has been secured, and an intensive culture. Paul’s conception, in which the same creative and overruling power that Annotations 271 kindled the stars and brought forth life ordained the nations also, is hardly to be traversed. Where we of the modern world have fallen behind Paul is in our understanding of the voca- tion and function of nationhood. It may well be that the great era of Nationality, as distinct from a banal nationalism, is stilltocome. ‘To-day, in ways more complex than in Paul’s time, organized self-interest subverts patriotism to its own ends, sundering the world into rival and jealous groups; a Mammonized nationalism be- comes an end in itself, and Humanity a rhetorical term without moral appeal. Yet in spite of the evil of the times, the highest conscience of mankind stands with Paul for a spiritual interpretation of the universe, for the oneness of the race, for the Divine vocation of the nations. That Humanity is upon earth for the worship and service of God in the develop- ment of the world; that to the nations belongs the mission of co-operating to that same end; that to each nation it is given in its own way to “* feel God in life,” and make its own contribution to the exploration of Divine Reality—no faith with any serious claim to be a world-religion could now refuse obeisance to these conceptions. Even the Pauline declaration as to the Providen- 272 St. Paul's Life of Christ tial ordering of the national frontiers has strangely survived long ages of imperial conquest, the cynicism of predatory alliances, and the jobbery of recurring eras of “‘ reconstruction.” Above all, and more and more, it becomes plain that Paul’s proclamation of a new world- era, whose creative word is the revelation in Jesus Christ, was no fantasy of fanatic faith, but prophetic truth. If history has confirmed any moral and spiritual conception, it has confirmed the declaration that in Jesus Christ God has spoken a new word to the race, calling all men everywhere to repent. The sign of the Son of Man is in the moral firmament of the world. The truth as it is in Jesus becomes more and more surely the common standard by which the con- science of mankind makes and tests its appraise- ments. In the spiritual commerce of the nations, the currency which remains firm amid the shocks and moral bankruptcies of the times is that which bears the authentic image and superscription of Christ. It is in Him that the world is feeling toward spiritual unity. The small boy with a “‘ jig-sawed”’ map of the two hemispheres to piece together begins to recognize that the task of reconstructing a jumbled world is not easy. But in a happy moment he turns his pieces over, to find that the picture- Annotations 272 scheme on the reverse side is that of a man. That picture, too, has to be put together; but the task is more appealing, and the work is pre- sently done. ‘Then once more the set is turned over, and, behold, a reconstructed world—every country in its place, “ part fitly joined to part by that which every joint supplieth.” So it is that in the Man of God’s appointing we have the clue by which every nation may be built into the spiritual unity of a redeemed Humanity—“ grow- ing up,” as Paul puts it, “ into Him.” The creative and Providential sovereignty of God, the spirituality of the universe, the oneness of mankind, the Divine vocation of the nations in the spiritual service of the world, the redemp- tive revelation in Christ as the basis upon which the mind of man must be remade, the soul of the peoples quickened unto a living unity—this is the faith which, though rejected of the general will, is witnessed to already by the conscience of the peoples. We await a new Age of Faith, in which, in the power of these conceptions, patriot- ism shall be re-born and dedicated to the crusade of the Divine Commonwealth. For lack of it the world is still tormented, seeking peace and finding none; and righteous authority is lost amid a tumult of conflicting interests. “Thomas S 274. St. Paul’s Life of Christ Hughes writes to Charles Kingsley during the Crimean War, and draws a fervid comparison between the British forces in the field and Crom- well’s Ironsides. But Kingsley will not have it so. Individual faith, he replies, will be found in those trenches before Sebastopol, even such private belief as gives men fortitude amid personal perils and hardships; but no great national faith will be discoverable, no covenanting sense of God and His sovereign purposes for England and for mankind; and Cromwell’s men may be sup- posed in their own grim fashion to have had something of that. Was not Kingsley right? For lack of such a faith as beholds Humanity in the light of the living God and interprets nation- hood as sealed with the blood of the New Cove- nant, we are fallen into distempers and moral lassitude. It may be that we have need to return to the Pauline emphasis. ‘“‘ He is not a Jew who is one outwardly”; nor, by the same token, is he an Englishman or an American or an Italian or a German who is one outwardly. That a man should be of English blood and English birth, that he should lie in English, loaf in English, and in English generally evade his obligations, does not, according to the Pauline showing, make him an Englishman. But he is an Englishman who is one inwardly. He understands what Annotations 275 nationhood means who has learned (as Paul learned, in the school of the living Christ) that its seal and passport are of the heart, in the spirit. He is high-born who is born into that faith—for whom the very name Humanity is woven of prophecies of the Holy Commonwealth that is to be—for whom the name of Country and Fatherland chimes like the bells of the sanctuary, calling to worship and to service. “| say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my con- science bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continued sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were anathema from Christ for my brethren’s sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh... . Brethren, my heart’s desire and my supplication to God is for them, that they may be saved.” So speaks God’s patriot. And he will not give them up. He must go out into the darkness, and wrestle like Jacob until break of day. Throughout the closing chapters of the Epistle to the Romans we overhear as it were the gasps of this mighty wrestler. ‘“‘ Hath God cast away His people? God forbid! God hath not cast away His people which He foreknew ! ”—‘“‘ By their unbelief they were broken off . . . and if they continue not in their unbelief, they shall 276 St. Pauls Life of Christ be grafted in: for God is able to graft them in again.” —“ Have they stumbled, that they should fall? God forbid! but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles. . . . Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and their loss the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fulness? . . . For if the casting away of them is the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be...?” And thus upon this Wresthng Jacob dawn breaks at last.— ‘“ AND so ALL IsRAEL SHALL BE SAVED. ... For God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that He might have mercy upon all. O the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! ... For of Him, and through Him, and unto Him, are all things. To Him be the glory for ever!” Such is the inwardness of the true patriotism : a passion and an agony, triumphing through to invincible, divine hope; a world-vision and dedi- cation, with a Cross for its centre and summit, and beyond it the Great Dawn. THE SAINTS TO JUDGE THE WORLD ““ Know ye not,” says Paul to his unruly and troublesome Corinthians, “ that the saints shall judge the world? ” (1 Cor. vi. 2). He puts the Annotations 277 question rhetorically, as if they should have known it from the first; but if they did, they gave little sign of it. ‘This, indeed, was Paul’s implied con- tention. They were giving all too little sign of it. It would appear that some of the brethren were in danger of reversing the true order, calling in the world to judge the saints. Paul goes on to declare that the saints are to judge angels also; and, as we have seen in our foregoing studies, it is an indication of the change which has been wrought since Paul’s time in our mental dialect that this saying comes to us now as if in an unknown tongue. Fortunately, per- haps, we are not here committed to any discussion of the management of angels; it is enough that we should confine ourselves to this other saying, that the saints are to judge the world—to direct the affairs of the earth. Perhaps the thought is still a little unfamiliar and challenging. At one time and another the notion has been entertained that the world is somewhat beneath the serious attention of the illuminated ; and there is the commoner opinion that the saints themselves are the wrong kind of people for the task. Neither of these objections finds support in Paul. For one thing, it seems clear that in Paul’s 278 St. Paul's Life of Christ view the world was worth managing. And it does indeed appear that it was made to be managed. ‘“‘Who is to manage it?” continues to be the problem of human society; and around the various answers to that question we may write the entire history of civilization. ‘The Pharaohs, the Assyrian War-Lords, the Cesars, the Popes, have all made their bid for it. To-day Democ- racy is the highest bidder. ‘To-morrow it shall be—what? We may continue to hope it will still be Democracy; but, upon any understanding of the case, the subject may hardly be dismissed as of no moment for religion. In his Epistle to the Romans Paul has a celebrated passage ideal- izing civil government as the ordinance of God (Rom. xiii.). However we may interpret that passage, it is clear that the whole subject of the direction of earthly affairs was one for which Paul had a spiritual concern. He understood, as our Puritan fathers understood, that here, no less than in other worlds, is the proper sphere for sovereign righteousness. Even when he is most manifestly in thrall to the expectation of imminent, heaven-rending cataclysm, he is worlds away from the mood of exalted indifference to this earth and its affairs. ‘The world of the Divine incarna- tion and redemption; the world in which the saints were being proved, and in which the Annotations 279 mystery of iniquity was working; the world which should shortly echo to the trumpet of God, summoning the dead from their graves— such a world was at least not to be held in contempt as unworthy the attention of the illuminated. And then, as to the saints being the wrong kind of people for the undertaking, it is worth inquiring what is meant by the saints. Who are they? Ill-informed and fanatical visionaries? Hectoring folk, much given to repenting of other people’s sins? Or, perchance, Newman’s pale pietists, fleeing the common ways of men—his “humble monk and holy nun who... have calm faces and sweet, plaintive voices and spare frames and gentle manners”’? Or the just men of the earth who need no repentance—the proud and privileged aristocracy of virtue? According to Paul, the saints, whatever their individual characteristics, and whatever their variety of type, are in the main very human folk, who have come into a new experience of Divine reality, a new and joyous spiritual allegiance, and a certain liberating disillusionment. ‘They are such as ‘‘ worship God in the spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.” ‘The saints are they who are awake in a somnolent world, the sons of the morning, the children of light. They are the 280 St. Paul's Life of Christ pioneers of the new order, the fore-types of the new Humanity. They differ from the men of the old order, not because they are remote from the world, but because (since the earth cannot be completely seen from its own level) they have a clearer discernment of its meaning, and because they bring to it new values, new motives, the passion and power of a new life. They are not paragons; they have by no means arrived; but they have heard a call which summons ther toa new warfare with themselves and with the evil that surrounds them. Spirituality, according to Paul, is the “ pneumatic ” quality; and if in our drab, commercial age that word has for its main suggestion the accessories of the workshop and garage, even that grotesque suggestion is illus- trative. For spirituality does not take a man’s life off the common road, but enables him to take the road in better style, imparting a new resiliency. ‘The difference, in short, between the men of the old order and the men of the new is something subtle, impalpable—a breath, a spirit. It is like the difference between the technique of the executant who relies upon a mechanical accomplishment and the touch of the maestro who, using the same instrument, distils music from some viewless world of his own inspiration. But the difference, being impalpable, is none the Annotations 281 less vital; for, with the saint, the Breath, the Spirit, is of God Himself. Bearing all this in mind, and coming to the management or mismanagement of the world as we have it in these times, it is clear, at least, that Paul’s contention is of some relevance. It seems that in these last cycles we have lost some heady illusions, and are by so much sobered and mentally clarified. The French Revolution, for instance, was a yeasty brew which at one time threatened to turn the heads of the very elect. It was not, it seemed, the saints who should judge the earth, but the natural man, of the earth most defiantly earthy. Back to Nature and on to the Rights of Man and forward to the Social Con- tract! ‘The formula was enchanting; and Man stood forth godlike in his reasoned self-sufficiency. O times In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law and statute took at once The attraction of a country in romance! When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights When most intent on making of herself A prime enchantress . . * * 2 2 x Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth The beauty wore of promise. . . . If ever Paul’s ‘“‘ natural man’ could have 282 St. Paul's Life of Christ fashioned Paradise from a formula, the Encyclo- pedists would have done it. But the dream passed. Since that time we have had our Homeric 748, and many another hour, more recent still, when the earth has seemed plastic to the hand of man, and great formule have been with him to seal the world for a better Eden. But at the crucial point they have all failed; and Adam remains unparadised. Even our most blessed formula of government of the people, for the people and by the people cannot completely avail for Adam; for it throws him back upon himself, which is always the one problem that defeats him. It must always defeat him, unless and until some- thing happens to Adam—until he is breathed upon with a new breath of life. Evermore we who believe in Democracy are being driven to the issue, Which Democracy? ‘A people ruling,” exclaims Herodotus’ Athenian — ‘the very name ‘of it is beautiful!” -“ An acknowledged insanity,” says a later Athenian of the same thing. But Democracy as such is neither beautiful nor mad; it is a potentiality. And do there not emerge at length two radically different types—the Democracy of the flesh and the Democracy of the spirit ? Annotations 283 _ If the world is to come finally under the direction of that Democracy which lives for, and by, bread alone, shall we be content? If there is to be no scripture nor history but what shall be of economic interpretation, no knowledge but what comes of comparing material things with material, shall we attain at last to the perfect wisdom and prosper? Will even our bread be reasonably secure? Our hope is in an order of a different sort—a Democracy which is not merely an organization, but a communion. Our hope is not in a calculated contract, contrived out of a cunning adjustment of temporal interests, but in a Covenant whose ordinances rest upon eternal sanctions, and are written of the Spirit in the hearts of the peoples. Apart from this we cannot look for any enduring commonwealth which shall evoke those mystic loyalties of the soul, without which sacrifice has no motive and martyrdom no meaning. And without these resources of the spirit, the State is defenceless against the chances and changes of fortune, and must slowly corrupt itself with lying demagoguery, or, more swiftly, with terrorism and violence. We are coming to see that the stability of States belongs in the last resort to the soul of the people, and to those unapparent forces which are regnant in the region of the spirit—belongs, that is to say, to an invisible 284. St. Paul's Life of Christ kingdom, which is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. And if this is true, if we are to look for an order which shall establish a spiritual conscience over the whole area of human affairs, labouring for man, not because he is a short-lived animal with an appetite for happiness, but because he is a pilgrim of eternity, and holding the earth sacred not as man’s only possible Paradise, but as an appointed stage in his probation and education— if this is true, then the future, as Paul says, is with the saints. Even now it is the saints of Humanity, and not its magnates and Cesars, who do judge, and always have judged, the world. When we read in St. John that Jesus at the close of His earthly life declared that the world had been judged, and that in time to come the Divine Spirit would work in men the conviction of that judgment, we understand the saying to be demonstrably true. Those things which Jesus criticized and condemned have remained con- demned; and those things which won His approval are more and more claiming the homage of the race. And so with the saints, who have reflected His mind. ‘They have brought to bear upon the world those standards of judgment Annotations 285 which have irresistibly asserted themselves against the organized prejudices and passions of their age. Newman in his Historical Sketches has a classic passage on the spiritual conflict of the saints. ‘“ Punctual in its movements, precise in its opera- tions, imposing in its equipments, with its haughty clarion and its black artillery, behold the mighty world is gone forth to war—with what? With an unknown something which it feels but cannot see; Which flits around it, which flaps against its cheek; with the air, with the wind.: It charges and it slashes, and it fires its volleys, and it bayonets, and it is mocked by a foe who dwells in another sphere, and is far beyond the force of its analysis, or the capacities of its calculus. The air gives way, and it returns again; it exerts a gentle but constant pressure on every side; moreover, it is of vital necessity to the very power which is attacking it.” If it is true that Newman was content to find his illustration in the flight of Pio Nono to Gaeta and his return (after the cannon of the French had done their convenient work) to say Mass over the tomb of the Apostles, while we are disposed to seek it in some of those dreamers of the world whom Pope Pius and his like, princes spiritual and temporal, were not always inclined to favour—if this is true, 286 St. Paul’s Life of Christ yet Newman’s underlying contention is none the less valid. It was John Huss in his Constance prison, not Pope John on the throne, Savonarola and not Lorenzo, John Bunyan and not the authorities that arraigned him, John Woolman and not the Virginian planters, Lamennais and not Louis Philippe and his masters, Rathenau and not Stinnes, who were and are the real judges of their age. ‘The world has always been at a loss to vanquish-a power which is “ beyond the force of its analysis or the capacities of its calculus.” Moreover, the judgment of the saints is never barren criticism—the imposition of an external criterion—but is always regenerative—the declara- tion of quickening, creative truth. And when at last, through the purgation of faith and repent- ance, the peoples shall attain to the illumination and empowerments of their apostles—in that Day of the Lord the world shall indeed be savingly judged, and the enduring Commonwealth estab- lished on the earth. We may note in conclusion that all Paul’s hopes for the saints and for the right order- ing of the earth were bound up with his faith in the supreme initiative and activity of Heaven. Annotations 287 It is indeed little that we can do, Our infirm purposes, our shaken hopes, our activities limited alike by the medium we have to work upon and by our own defects—these may seem at times a wholly worthless contribution to offer. Yet if we believe in a spiritual world intersphering our earth, a world in which Christ bears at His girdle the keys of all authority, and in which “‘ the last wish of the martyr, the silent, unheard belief of the fettered prisoner,” are realities which count with God and are potent for the uplift of men—then we shall not despair. It was this certainty of Paul’s which sustained him. He had no thought of things drifting aimlessly toward some indefinite conclusion. To him it was clear that spiritual energies were massing in the unseen, and that Christ was in- visibly at work, preparing the consummations of history and of time. It was this hourly faith of Paul’s that back of all his journeyings and preach- ings and organizings and buffetings of Satan, and back of all that could be done and suffered by all the faithful of the earth, were the sure and sovereign ministries of Heaven—it was this faith that nerved him for the conflict against all the contradiction of the world. For him the supreme initiative lay, not with Jerusalem nor Antioch nor 288 St. Paul's Life of Christ Rome, but with that most free and glorious “¢ Jerusalem which is above ”—the Mother City of the soul. And less than this we, also, dare not believe, if we are to endure. rs ¥ i y a My we iy an Wy) i ' Ne Nes mali Heb. Se all Wibieansstticaniac RH Date Due . ) m4 on LD PARR AO BS2651 .G85 St. Paul’s life of Christ, cal Seminary—Speer Library | tu Vin | 1 101e 00013 845