^f " All things to all men." St. Paul is always in the face of a listening crowd. Every word, therefore, hits ! He uses speech like a rapier, ready and rapid, which is quivering with personal characterization and the heat of the moment. He is aware of every objection that friend or foe can be framing, and he fore- stalls them, and he retorts. It turns this way and that. It has sharp recoils, and rushes to seize an advantage, and hastens to
press a point that tells, and daring, venturous strokes that beat
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back a possible counter-stroke, and then brimming bursts of sympathy that overmaster by their very suddenness. And then, again, not only debate is in his power, but also the townsman's delicate skill, what is called by the townsman's own name — his urbanity. We have only to recall the exquisite letter to Philemon on his runaway slave. Here is the gentleman, in the finest sense of the word, felt speaking ; here are the polished tone, the veiled irony, the irresistible reserve, the quiet humour, the social grace, that all tell of one who, without risking his self-respect or his sincerity, yet by sheer force of trained social sympathy can throw himself into another's mind, can understand and allow for his prejudices, and see with his eyes, and so win him to do what he desires.1
I.
The Adaptability of St. Paul. "I am become all things to all men."
1. The great gift which St. Paul had received of God — next in order of importance after that of God's grace and truth — was the power of making himself at home with all classes, races, and degrees of men. A practical capacity like this cannot be learned like an art or a trick ; it must be rooted in and spring from those affections and sympathies which are at the base of human character. Nor, although this gift was undoubtedly developed and shaped by grace, can we suppose it to have had no place in the character of St. Paul until he became a servant of Christ. Nature must have contributed to it at least somewhat of the raw material. As a Jew, we may be sure, Saul of Tarsus — apart from the limits which Eabbinical narrowness would have assigned to his sympathies — could already have said, with the heathen poet, that, being a man, he deemed nothing human strange. His broad and genial humanity must have belonged to the original outfit of his nature : for in him, the sympathies of our race lived with extraordinary freshness and power.
2. The Apostle himself has traced this versatile sympathy in three of its fields of operation.
(1) " To the Jews I became as a Jew." — In the Apostle's eyes the Jews were the race which had come nearest to God, and
1 H. Scott Holland.
i CORINTHIANS ix. 22 239
had most decisively rejected Him. And yet how tender and affectionate he is in his dealings with his poor countrymen, or with Christians who shared, less excusably, their hereditary prejudices ! It might almost seem at times as if he had turned his back upon the Cross, so careful is he not to wound the sensitiveness of the adherents of the old religion. Eecognizing circumcision as a national mark of distinction, while utterly denying its necessity to salvation, he circumcised Timothy, who had a right to it by his mother's side. Owing allegiance as a Jew to the Mosaic Eitual, so long as God suffered it to exist, he took legal vows, and was scrupulous in paying them. In arguing against Judaizers he allegorized the story of Hagar and Sarai, dealing with the Old Testament precisely after the manner of the Jewish Eabbis. And even when he is compelled, by virtue of his Apostolic commission, and by the imperious truth which fills and rules him, to utter the stern and awful sentence, that by their infatuated rejection of the true Messiah, who was the crown and promise of their history, they had rejected their God, how does he soften his message by all the resources of sympathy and affection !
(2) "To them that are without law, as without law." — St. Paul, the Apostle of revealed truth, the preacher of that One God who is known to and approached by man only through our Lord Jesus Christ, how does he make himself at home with the men and thoughts of the heathen world ! Eead his Epistles, and see how he can sympathize with the happy conqueror in the Greek games " who receiveth the prize," or with the old Latin idea of the city or state, imagined as a political transcript of the human body. How does he study each detail of the dress and accoutrements of the soldier who watches him as he writes to the Ephesians ! How interested he is in the details of the admini- stration of the empire when addressing the Eomans ! How tenderly does he survey the heathen world at Athens, as " feeling after God " as though on its way to " find him " !
(3) " To the weak I became weak." — There were " weak " Christians, as the Apostle gently calls them, who clung to observances, or who entertained scruples which were at variance with the import, freedom, generosity of the Gospel. And of that Gospel, in its unstinted liberty and grace, St. Paul was the