St. Paul is vindicating the Divine origin and authority of his apostleship against those who had questioned his title to occupy an apostle's place. He claims that the words he speaks were given to him by the direct communication of Heaven, without the interposition of any human or intermediate agency : he bases his right to have his spiritual authority recognized upon the intimacy of the relationship in which God has met him ; and he recalls, by way of substantiating his claims to apostolic status, the circum- stances which had made his conversion and his call entirely exceptional and unique. No earthly voices of counsel or instruc- tion, he says, had intruded themselves upon him; no earthly presences were at hand when his new Christian allegiance began to determine his course and shape his inward life. Flesh and blood had revealed nothing to him; even they who possessed experience in these things — they who were Apostles before him — had no share in the moulding of his destinies; but he had
332 THE INNER REVELATION
retired into the Arabian desert, and had listened there, in the silences and solitudes, to the heavenly voices that had told him what God would have him to do. " Who shall dare," he seems to ask, " to question the validity of such an ordination as that — an ordination wherein no hands of men, but the invisible touch of God, consecrated me, and wherein the anointing and sanctifying influence was the breath of the Eternal Spirit ? " In secret God had spoken to him. It was as he had stood in God's unveiled presence that his spiritual inspirations had come.
How have I seen in Araby Orion,
Seen without seeing, till he set again. Known the night-noise and thunder of the lion,
Silence and sounds of the prodigious plain !
How have I knelt with arms of my aspiring
Lifted all night in irresponsive air, Dazed and amazed with overmuch desiring,
Blank with the utter agony of prayer 1
Shame on the flame so dying to an ember!
Shame on the reed so lightly overset! Yes, I have seen Him, can I not remember ?
Yes. I have known Him, and shall Paul forget?*
I.
A Destiny.
"It was the good pleasure of God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb."
This may be viewed as the utterance of adoring humility on the part of the Apostle, combined, however, with the strongest possible assertion of the Divine origin of his mission. A similar statement of God's arbitrary selection of a particular human being for a particular function is found in Isa. xlix. 1, " The Lord hath called me from the womb ; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name " ; v. 5, " That formed me from the womb to be his servant " ; and again, with yet more striking resemblance, in Jer. i. 5, " Before I formed thee in the belly I » F. W. H. Myers, Saint Paul.
GAL. I. 15, 16 333
knew thee ; and before thou earnest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." It is difficult to beheve that this conviction of the Apostle con- cerning himself as the object of God's predestinating purpose, and perhaps even the form of its expression — for compare the words in the next verse, " that I might preach him among the Gentiles " — was derived mainly from Jeremiah. The Apostle feels that all the while that he had been pursuing that career of persecuting impiety and passionate Pharisaism, the Almighty had kept His eye upon him as His predestined Apostle, and had been waiting for the fitting hour to summon him forth to His work.
^ Mr. Gladstone's character, as Lord Morley's biography brings out well, was in one respect exceedingly simple. His life became immensely powerful and influential; but it all flowed from one source — the moral crisis, almost in the form of a religious " awakening " or " conversion," through which he passed in his Oxford days. For immediately upon this there followed the consecration of his whole life as the life of a layman, and yet to be lived from the highest motives. His opinions, rehgious and political, changed afterwards from time to time. In religion, from Evangelical and individualistic, they became more High Church and historical. In politics, from Conservative they be- came avowedly Liberal. But while such subsequent revolutions changed the direction, they do not seem to me to have added to the amount of the force which at that date began to move. Up to the age of twenty-two, Gladstone was like a hundred other lads around him. From that age till he died at eighty -nine he lived in the lavish expenditure of power generated in him by one year — perhaps one hour — of conviction. But that force was a moral force; and for seventy years thereafter it poured itself with amazing volume into each new channel of opportunity which seemed to him a path of duty — much as if his chief guide in life had been the ancient indiscriminatiug exhortation, " Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." ^
1. So nicely balanced, and so carefully hung, are the worlds that even the grains of their dust are counted, and their places adjusted to a correspondent nicety. There is nothing included in the gross, or total sum, that could be dispensed with. The same is true in regard to forces that are apparently irregular. Every particle of air is moved by laws of as great precision as the laws