The grace of God came to him in the vision of Christ ; and God and Christ are always associated in his writings as the joint source of salvation, as when in 1 Th 1' he says : 'Paul, and Silvanus, and Timothy, unto the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ : Grace to you and peace.' The vision of Christ did for St. Paul what had been done for the older apostles by the Resurrection and the Ascension : it convinced him that, in the controversy with the rulers and the teachers of the nation in which Jesus had been en- gaged. He had from first to last been in the right and they in tlie wrong ; that, therefore, all His claims were justified ; that, though He had missed the throne of the Jews, He had tliereby been ex- alted to the throne of the universe ; and that now He belonged to a supernal world of light, the rays of which, seen by himself, had smitten him to the ground and blinded him for days. Formerly the death of Jesus on the Cross had been to St. Paul conclusive evidence that He had been an impostor, whose pretensions were put to shame ; but now it was manifest to him that the Cross must enclose a Divine mystery, compatible with all the life of Christ both before and after ; and this mystery was explained by the belief that He had died not for any sins of His own, but for the sin of the world, and that His sacrifice of Himself had been ac- cepted as a propitiation for the guilt of mankind. This was certainly a bold speculation ; but it was in harmony with all that he knew about Jesus, as it was in harmony with the conceptions of sin and sacrifice of which the OT is full. St. Paul had always been a man of conscience ; he believed in a God of righteousness as well as of love ; and the wonder and glory of the gospel for him consisted
in this, that God could be at once a just God and a Saviour.
This is the 'righteousness of God ' which, in the verse (I") which forms the keynote of the Epistle to the Homans, ' is revealed by faith unto faith : as it is written, But the righteous shall live by faith.' So grand and perfect is the work achievea by the grace of God and the sacrifice of Christ that, on the part of man, there is room for nothing more than faith ; and faith is no more than receptivity : it is man ceasing from his own works, in order that God may work in and for him. Anything additional to this attempted on man's part is a return to the error, from which St. Paul had been so marvellously redeemed, of seeking salvation through works. Such a simple means of salvation is, however, purely human, there being nothing in it for which any human being is not competent. It has nothing to do with such distinctions as Jew and Gentile, male and female, bond and free. It is universal j and the mere knowledge of it, when it came to his understanding, contained within itself the call to be the missionary of the Gentiles ; fcr he could not know a gospel so glorifying to God and so charged with blessing for mankind without feeling an irre- sistible impulse to make it known to the ends of the earth.
The above is the sum and substance of his apolo- getic or missionary testimony ; though it must be confessed that in any such condensed statement injury is done to St. Paul's thought, the natural tendency of which is to break out on every hand into additions and excursuses ; so that the student is like a traveller in a mountainous country who, while keeping to the central road, so as to take in the outline of the whole, is continually being tempted by sunny valleys stretching away into the distance, and perceives that what he took for the mountain- tops have mountains behind them still.
It has recently been contended by A. Schweitzer [Geschichte der paulinischen Forschun^, 1911) and H. Windisch ('Die neuesten Bearbeitungen der NT Theologie und die zwei Leitmotive des Urchristenthums," in ZWT xix. [1912]) that all the Pauline message must be framed in eschato- logy, and that, indeed, this is the most essential feature of the whole. When the same rule is applied to Jesus, as it has often been of late, it goes perilously near to converting Him into the apocalyptic dreamer that the Jews believed Him to be, and to justifying them for taking His life. The eschatology of the Gospels was, in reality, the body of humiliation which His position in history caused to cling to the teaching of Jesus. But this was a body destined to vanish away ; and in St. Paul we see it in the very process of disappearing. While the eschatological point of view clings to certain of his least important utterances, such as those on the relation of the sexes, it has little to do with his thought in general, which would have been very nearly what it is if his eschatology had been quite diflerent.