that we are present at the birth of some mighty principle which can reach maturity only at the end of time. Great theological statements concerning man’s salvation—not of the relation of Christ to the universe—are formulated, not daringly sketched; the conceptions of the mutual relations of God and man which are involved in these statements are not new to the author; he has mastered them com- pletely, and presents them with a finished expression which leaves the reader satisfied. Take, for example, the statement of the wide- ness of God’s saving purposes in 1 Tim. ii. 4-6; the summary of the working out of the Incarnation in 2 Tim. i. 9, 10; the analysis of the saving process in Tit. iti. 4-7. Here we have theological principles in their classical expression; they do not need exegesis, they only demand to be ‘‘ marked, learned, and inwardly digested ”.
Again, the- apostle, in these letters is not only not creative; he is displayed to us as receptive of the thoughts of other makers of Christian theology, his contemporaries. When St. Paul wrote the Pastoral Epistles, his own work as an originating constructive theologian had come to an end; and there comes into clear view— what had been hitherto veiled—the effect on him of the action of the religious life of the communities in which he lived. It is a truth, ἡ obvious when stated, yet sometimes ignored, that the thoughts about religion current in the Christian Society of the first century, had not been generated only by St. Paul, but by St. John and St. Peter and others whose names and achievements we can only conjecture. When we were young, we used to picture the Palestine of the patriarchs as a land in which no person or thing except Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their flocks were of any significance; they dominated the landscape as do the saints in medieval pictures. When we grew older, it was almost disturbing to one’s faith to realise that to the busy merchants and peasants of Palestine, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were not persons of unusual importance. Yet, as always happens, the truer account, unpalatable at first, is found to be more suggestive and helpful than the older fancy. In like manner, a realisation that St. Paul did not dominate the Church of his time, as his history in the Acts and his epistles so largely dominate the New Testament, will be found a helpful consideration.
The Church is a greater thing than the greatest saint or theologian in it; and St. Paul could not have helped, even if he would, being influenced by the Christianity, as actually lived, of the men and women around him; and that in three ways at least. (1) His own theology came back to him not quite the same as it had come from his brain. It is not only the elements of matter that are subject to