189. So sin did its uttermost and its worst. Yet how poor and empty was its triumph! The blow of the axe only smote off the lock of the prison and let the spirit go forth to its home and to its crown. The city falsely called eternal dismissed him with execration from her gates; but ten thousand times ten thousand welcomed him in the same hour at the gates of the city which is really eternal. Even on earth Paul could not die. He lives among us to-day with a life a hundredfold more influential than that which throbbed in his brain whilst the earthly form which made him visible still lingered on the earth. Wherever the feet of them who publish the glad tidings go forth beautiful upon the mountains, he walks by their side as an inspirer and a guide; in ten thousand churches every Sabbath and on a thousand thousand hearths every day his eloquent lips still teach that gospel of which he was never ashamed; and, wherever there are human souls searching for the white flower of holiness or climbing the difficult heights of self-denial, there he whose life was so pure, whose devotion to Christ was so entire, and whose pursuit of a single purpose was so unceasing, is welcomed as the best of friends.
Teacher's Apparatus.--English theology has no juster cause for pride than the books it has produced on the Life of Paul. Perhaps there is no other subject in which it has so outdistanced all rivals. Conybeare and Howson's _Life and Epistles of St. Paul_ will probably always keep the foremost place; in many respects it is nearly perfect; and a teacher who has mastered it will be sufficiently equipped for his work and require no other help. The works of Lewin and Farrar are written on the same lines; the former is rich in maps of countries and plans of towns; and the strong point of the latter is the analysis of Paul's writings--the exposition of the mind of Paul. Sir William Ramsay has made the whole subject peculiarly his own by the enthusiasm and labors of a lifetime. The German books are not nearly so valuable. Hausrath's _The Apostle Paul_ is a brilliant performance, but it is as weak in handling the deeper things as it is strong in coloring up the external and picturesque features of the subject. Baur's work is an amazingly clever _tour de force_, but it is not so much a well-proportioned picture of the apostle as a prolonged paradox thrown down as a challenge to the learned. The latest large German work, Clemen's _Paulus_, proceeds on the principle that the miracle is untrue, and the effect may be sufficiently seen in the account it gives of the first visit to Philippi. In Weinal's _Paulus_, pp. 312, 313, there appears a forbidding picture of the effects produced by the teaching of the subject in the author's country; in our country, on the contrary, it has long been among the most attractive subjects for both teachers and students. Adolphe Monod's _Saint Paul_, a series of five discourses, is an inquiry into the secret of the apostle's life, written with deep sympathy and glowing eloquence; and Renan's work, with the same title, gives, with unrivaled brilliance, a picture of the world in which the apostle lived, if not of the apostle himself. There are books on the subject which do honor to American scholarship from the pens of Cone, Gilbert, Bacon and A. T. Robertson, the last mentioned with a valuable bibliography. But the best help is to be found in the original sources themselves--the cameolike pictures of Luke and the self-revelations of Paul's Epistles. The latter especially, read in the fresh translation of Conybeare, will show the apostle to any one who has eyes to see. Johnstone's wall-map of Paul's journey is indispensable in the class-room.