abolition of the law. But to this writer, brought up in a more latitudinarian school and of a quieter temperament, the law was not this inexorable taskmaster, but rather a system of type and symbol foreshadowing the perfect fellowship with God secured by Christianity and revealed in Him. Both writers have the same question before them: What gives Christianity its power to bring men into harmony with God and thus constitutes it the universal, permanent religion? What precisely is the relation of this new form of religion to that out of which it sprang and which it supersedes? Paul boldly enounces the incompatibility of faith and works, of grace and merit, of Christianity and the Law. This writer, adopting a method anda view more likely to conciliate the Jew, aims at exhibiting the work of Christianity as that towards which the previous economy had been striving, that the two are essentially connected, and that without Christianity Judaism remains imperfect.
So that Pfleiderer’s remark is justified, when he says, ‘this is a thoroughly original attempt to establish the most essential results of Paulinism upon new presuppositions and in an entirely independent way—a way which proceeds upon lines of thought regarding the constitution of the universe which were widely spread amongst the educated people of that time, and which necessarily had far greater power of diffusing enlightenment than the dialectic of the old Pauline system which was so highly wrought up to an individual standpoint.” ?
Here and there the ideas and expressions of Paul seem to be coloured by the Alexandrian system and manner of thought, which, as Pfleiderer says, influenced the entire educated world of the time; but in the mind of Paul there lay a deeper soil in which had been sown the governing ideas of Palestinian or Pharisaic theology. The work and person of Christ are presented under different categories by the two writers: the priestly function, which is absent or almost so from the letters of Paul, dominates the thought of the Epistle to the Hebrews. In keeping with this, the idea of sacrifice which colours the whole of the latter Epistle, only occasionally emerges in the Pauline writings. So too it is the kingly state of the risen Christ which occupies the one writer, while in the mind of the other it isa priestly exaltation that is conspicuous. And thus the δικαιοῦν of Paul becomes in Hebrews ἁγιάζειν, or καθαρίζειν or τελειοῦν ; and the leading religious terms “ faith’ ‘“‘grace’’ and so forth have
1Cf. Ménégoz (Théol. de lep. aux Heb., 190) ‘ L’un abolit la Loi, l’autre la transfigure ”; and p. 197, the one was revolutionist, the other evolutionist. See also Holtzmann, N.T. Theol., ii., p. 286 ff. Werhaltniss zum Paulinismus.
2 Paulinism, E. Tr., ii., 53.