62 Introduction

reaction in consequence of fusion; the same natural law operates in the interaction of the thoughts of a thoughtmaker with the minds of those to whom his thoughts are communicated. And, if we may carry on the same analogy, the Church of St Paul’s time was unable to take up, to hold in solution, the whole of the Pauline theology ; a considerable amount of it was held in suspension to be absorbed gradually by the Church in the course of the ages. (2) Again, as has just been pointed out, the religious thought of the Christian Society in which St. Paul lived was fed and stirred by other apostles, of whom we can name St. John and St. Peter. It is surely not unreasonable to suppose that these apostles spoke before they wrote, that what they published was the most perfect expression attainable by them of what they had been speaking about during the whole of their ministry ; that, in fact, Johannine literature was, for “the Church of the first century, the final: presentation, not the origination, of Johannine thought and expression. Is it too much to expect that those who study the writings contained in the New Testament should cease to think of the authOrs of them as solitaries who had no other means but books of acquiring ideas or a vocabulary, and who, in turn, only influenced the thought and phraseology of the men of their time by books or treatises composed at the close of their lives. It is strange that men cannot see the Church, the Society which conditioned, was not conditioned by, St. Paul, St. John and St. Peter. This consideration is intended to prepare the reader to be not astonished or perplexed by the occasional Johannine turns of phrase that occur in the Pastorals, and which are noted in the course of the exposition. (3) Furthermore, it must not be thought strange that the Providence of God, the Holy. Spirit Who guides the Church, should have called the apostle Paul almost wholly away from thoughts of the Church’s place in history and in the universe to the administration of, and provision for, the daily needs of the Church as actually experienced by man. Our own generation has not been without examples of men summoned from the library of the “great house” into less obviously inspiring chambers, which serve the more material, but not less necessary, needs of the household. Christians who think of the Church as a visible Divine Society with a life on earth contindous to the end of time, cannot think that St. Paul as reflected in the Pastorals is less worthy of admiration than St. Paul as reflected in Romans. Nor will they be offended if they find that his new preoccupation with ordinary Church life has left a trace on his idiom; if, it may be, he has caught some of the current