It was while the Church was thus rapidly taking shape that St. Paul came into it; and, ii we may judge from the extant evidence, he quickly became the most powerful constructive force in it. But there were other agencies at work, human, as well as Divine and divinely inspired, and St. Paul was himself wrought on and shaped as much, or more, than he shaped others. Always a student but never a recluse, he shared to the full the common life of the un- exclusive early Church. He did not “dwell apart,” though always conscious that his innermost life was ‘‘hid with Christ in God”, And not only did his life move with the Church’s life, but it was brought into close touch with every possible human experience— except those of domestic life—to a degree rarely equalled by any other man. The label that correctly describes the contents of a given human personality to-day may be, in some cases, not misleading five or ten years hence; but St. Paul was not one of these constant quantities. His personality was not that of a Milton, self-determining, holding on its course ‘like a star,” unaffected by the storms of the lower atmosphere; he was as sympathetic, and therefore open to impressions from without, as if he had been a weak man. Of this impressionableness and craving for sympathy we have abundant evidence in the Epistles that are universally acknowledged to be genuine. Sucha man is likely to undergo changes in mental outlook, to become possessed by fresh ideals and conceptions, so as to be- wilder less agile minds; and, of course, new thoughts require for their expression words and phrases for which the man had no use before. In the case of St. Paul, this is no imaginary supposition. The difference between the Paul of Philippians and the Paul of 1 Timothy is not greater than, perhaps not as great as, between the Paul of Thessalonians and the Paul of Ephesians. The fact just noticed should put us on our guard against the easy assumption that the normal Pauline presentation of the relations between God and man is that found in the central group of his Epistles: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians.
There is, however, a difference between the Pastorals and the earlier letters for which the lapse of time alone cannot account, and that is a diminution in force. The letters to Timothy and Titus are certainly of apostolic quality; the ordinary reader, and still more the student, who compares them with the best of the sub-apostolic literature, can at once perceive the difference between what is inspired and what is merely interesting, edifying, and even noble. Neverthe- less, we miss in the Pastorals the exuberant vigour, the reserved strength of the earlier letters. The explanation of this may well be