While, however, it is this side of his greatness which first attracts the eye, closer intimacy reveals him as not less distinctively a man of heart. He could love, and he had the power of compelling love. So numerous were his companions and fellow-labourers, that the study of these is a subject whieli has more than once been treated by itself (J. S. Howson, The Companions of St. Paul, 1S71 ; E. B. Kedlich, St. Paul and his Companions, 1913). It is astonishing how often he is seen in tears ; and it is certain that the Ephesians at Miletus were not the only converts of his who, at parting, fell on his neck and kissed him, sorrowing because they were to see his face no more. By no author has this side of his character been so perfectly seized as by Adolphe Monod, whose little book, entitled St. Paul (1851), far outweighs in value many ponderous tomes. Yet this writer does not fail to point out that the feminine traits in St. Paul acquired tlieir significance from the strength of the masculine ones. When a woman weeps, it occasions no surprise ; but there is something pro- foundly moving in the tears of a strong man.
Still, St. Paul had not all the gifts. His bodily presence was weak and his speech contemptible. Whether his ' thorn in the flesh ' was connected with this natural defect, it is impossible to say ; but the way in which it is introduced, as if it were something sent to keep him humble, after he had received extraordinary visions and revelations, would rather suggest that it was additional to his congenital weakness ; and that it was sufliciently painful and annoying is obvious without the ex- aggeration of Farrar, who characteristically s]>eaks of it as his ' stake ' in the flesh (The Life and Work of St. Paul, 2 vols., 1879, i. 214). It has been supposed to have been epilepsy, because the sufferer says that the Galatians did not ' spit ' (4" oiSk i^eTTTiKraTc) at him, and in the ancient world it was common to spit at the sight or mention of epilepsy, as among ourselves some people ' touch wood ' in certain circumstances by way of deprecation. Similarly, the theory that it was a disease of the syes can be supported by his statement that the
Galatians would have plucked out their own ej-es and <'iven them to him (v.'"). Kamsay's notion, that it was malarial fever, has the recommendii- tion that he himself sullered from this in the same region of the world, and is of opinion that the .symptoms correspond [St. Paul t/if Traveller, p. 94). What it really was will probably never be ascertained. It is enough to know that the astonishing work done by this man was accom- plished not in the robustness of a healthy body or in the self-consciousness of one able at all times to have absolute conlidence in himself, but amid weariness and painfulness, shyness and. self-distrunt. To a sensitive mind any bodily weakness or de- formity must be a kind of torture, especially in the presence of strangers ; and St. Paul loved the gospel so entirely that he would have liked to give it the advantage of all the graces of voice and bodily presence which he lacked. Yet, in more ways than one, his very defects turned out to the furtherance of the gospel ; and with genial intui- tion Adolphe Monod, himself somewhat of an invalid, has divined how this could happen. A weak servant of Christ sometimes appeals to the sympathies of an audience more by his weakness than anyone could by strength ; the women, especially, in a congregation will do far more for an invalid pastor than for one in health ; and so it conies to pass that such a one can say, 'When I am weak, then am I strong ' (2 Co 12'°).
The idea, not infrequently encountered in recent works on St. Paul, that his liability to see visions and dream dreams was connected with his bodily weakness or some psychical derangement, seems a strange perversion of the facts. His own estimate of it at least was very difl'erent. To him it ap- peared a mark of superiority so distinguished that he had to beware of being puft'ed up through possessing it ; and there can be no question that it rendered to him extraordinary assistance and encouragement at critical moments of his experi- ence. It was akin to the official endowment of the OT prophets, and, if it is to be traced to any natural peculiarity, this must be sought in the psychology of prophecy.
(6) The Hebrew and the ffellenist.— To St. Paul, the Jew, very ample justice has been done, as the OT, from every portion of which he drew ideas and impulses, has always been known to his interpreters. But the same justice has not been done to the Gentile in hini. He may almost ■without impropriety be called a Gentile ; to the Greeks, he says himself, he became a Greek ; and it is possible that he may have done so more than he was himself aware.
This at least is being asserted by scholarship at the present time ; and the very latest speculations on Paulinism are in this direction. By the school which takes its name from the History of Religion, and whose leading aim it is to trace out every kind of connexion that can be discovered between Christianity and other contemporary religions, it is contended that, in the world of St. Paul's time and in the countries where his missionary labours were carried on, there was taking place an extra- ordinary religious ferment, the West acting on the East, and the East still more powerfully on the West. The atmosphere was full of notions and aspirations, these being connected not with the hereditary classical religion, with which scholarship has long been famili.ar, but with imported and illegitimate cults, with which scholar- ship is only now becoming acquainted. As a per.son of religious sensitiveness and as a Semite, St. Paul couUl not escape ; and not a few ideas of the later Paulinism are derived from this source. Indeed, if the: form in which Christianity first presented itself to his mind was due to Judaism, the last was due to Hellenism.