The weakness of the school which is attempting at present to interpret Christianity as if it had consisted originally of scraps picked up here, there, and everywhere, is that it conceives Christianity as an amalgam of ideas and fancies, fortuitously collected and ingeniously pieced together, instead of perceiving it to be a series of experiences derived from a single centre and capable of repetition throughout all the generations of mankind. This centre was Christ. Whatever fullness of person- ality there may have been in St. Paul in his natural state, he became completely himself only when Christ took possession of his being. ' If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature : the old things are passed away ; behold, they are become new (2 Co 5"). From the moment of his conver- sion it was his continual aspiration to be able to say : ' I live ; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me : and that life which 1 now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me ' (Gal 2^»). Christ had for him a supreme objective value, because He had redeemed him from the curse and bondage of sin. At the moment when Christ first revealed Himself to him, his ethical life had come to an impasse, and he was convicted on the spot of being in absolute antagonism to God. But Christ reconciled him ; and, although he was never afterwards without the consciousness of being a sinful man, lost if left to himself, he knew that his ransom had been paid on the Cross. But Christ had for him an equally important sub- jective value. He was in him ' the hope of glory.' He was the atmosphere which he breathed ; He was to liim what the sunshine is to the bird. The world might be unkind and fortune fickle, but in Christ he had an unfailing source of exhilaration and a resource in all emergencies. This rela- tionship to Christ determined his relationship to God, as well as to his fellow-Christians and his fellow-men. These experiences have been repro- duced in countless instances from century to cent- ury ; and, the deeper anyone's experience of them is, the more facile and joyous will be the apprecia.-
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tioii of the thinker in whose mind they first took their full ami natural shape. Should they ever cease to he known as the actual experiences of men, the tjuestion about their origin will hardly be worth discussing.
There has of late been much writing on the relation between St. Paul and Jesus. Was the gospel of Jesus faithfully and fruitfully continued in the teaching of the Apostle? or did St. I'aul distort the original <;ospel, replacing it with a system of his own ? It has even been contended that St. Paul was the true founder of Christianity ; only this was something quite dill'erent from that intendeil by Jesus. Now, if .lesus and St. Paul were simply Jews of genivis, whose .specialty lay in religion, speculations of this kind would not be out of place. Indeed, the wonder would be that St. Paul, with his assertive and towering person- ality, did not consciously enter into competition with his rival. liut nothing can be more certain than that to St. Paul himself the question whether he or Jesus was the originator of the new religion would have appeared both blasphemous and ludi- crous. His favourite designation for himself was the ' slave ' of Jesus Christ. He was only a ' vessel,' to carry tlie name of Christ from nation to nation ; and the vessel was an ' earthen ' one, in order that the excellency of the power might be Another's and not his own. It cannot be denied that there was a vast difference between Jesus' mode of both conceiving and stating the truth and St. Paul's ; but the hitter's modes of expression can generally be translated hack, without difficulty, into those of Jesus, and the two views of the world do not exhibit serious discrepancies, when it is taken into account that the one speaker is conscious of being the Saviour and the other of having been saved.
(c) The apostle.— The sense of having received from on high a vocation or mission was strong in the leading men of the race to which St. Paul be- longed. Thus, Jeremiah records his own call in these words, spoken to him by Jahweh : ' Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou earnest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee ; I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations ' { Jer 1°). Anyone thus addressed naturally felt all his powers consecrated to a task, and this so steeled his whole nature that Jahweh could add, as we read in the same chapter : ' I have made thee this day a defenced city, and an iron pillar, and brasen walls, against the whole land, . . . against the princes thereof, against the priests thereof, and against the people of the land. And they shall fight against thee ; but they shall not prevail against thee : for I am with thee, saith the Lord, to deliver thee' (v.'*''). In Jesus this sense was particularly strong : He knew Himself to be the Messiah ; hence the name 'Son of man,' by w^hich He called Himself, as well as the other Messianic titles He accepted from others. In St. Paul there was the same sense of being chosen by God ; and from this was derived not a little of his strength. He even reverts to that old conception of Jeremiah, intimating that God had separated him from his mother's womb, to be a preacher of the gospel of His Son (Gal 1''). To himself it seemed that he had been born at a juncture in the world's history at which there was a special work to be done for God and man, and that he had been endowed with the gifts required for the purjjose ; consequently, all his faculties and opportunities must be devoted to this object. This made him feel himself to be a debtor to all unacquainted with tlie gospel (Ro I'''). His peculiar responsibility was, however, to the Gentiles, to whose evangelization he had been specially appointed. To this consciousness he gives very frequent expression {e.g. Ac 9'^ 13" 15' 22« Eo ll'»J5'», Eph 3^, 1 Ti 2', 2 Ti 1"). Even