namely, that they had enjoyed personal intercourse with Jesus, nevertheless involved the disadvantage that their view of Jesus was limited by the standard of His outward life, in which He showed Himself a devout and law-abiding Israelite. Of the essential originality of His character and of the side of His work which conflicted with Judaism, as it had historically developed, no complete understanding had ever dawned upon them; and, as a consequence, even the decisive fact of His death could not open their eyes to these things. Their desire was to get away from this offence of the cross as quickly as might be, to excuse it, to justify it; and for that very reason they did not come to the to the point of deliberately facing the full significance of the fact, the breach of principle with Judaism which it involved, and drawing the necessary inferences. As they themselves had gradually and without any decisive breach with their Jewish way of thought come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah, so it appeared to them that in the future the belief in Christ would be perfectly compatible with Judaism. The idea that they could come to be mutually exclusive opposites, alternatives of which one or the other must be chosen, had not entered their minds. If there had been no advance from this conservative attitude of the first disciples, it is clear that Christianity would never have torn itself loose from the fetters of Judaism, but would have remained a Jewish sect, and in the political upheavals of the ensuing period, which culminated in the overthrow of the Jewish State, Christianity would have been carried down with it in its fall.

It was therefore of the utmost importance for the whole future of Christianity that its cause received the accession of a man whose eyes were open, in consequence of his character and training, in a way in which those of the original disciples were not, to the new elements in the belief in the crucified Christ Jesus to the universal, non-Judaic elements which were present in the character and spirit of Jesus, and which had found expression to some extent in His life and teachings, but still more in His death. It was Paul who saved the life-work of Jesus from the danger of remaining in bondage to Jewish traditionalism and thus coming to nought, by setting free the belief in Christ from the religion of the Law, and thereby making it, for the first time, an independent religion, and a religion for all mankind. For this achievement of permanent importance in the history of the world, God had, as Paul himself says (Gal. i. 15), set him apart from his mother's womb, and called him by His grace. For, as in the case of every historical hero, his inborn disposition and the outward circumstances and experiences of life combined in a marvellous manner to provide the means conducive to the furtherance of his life's task.

Paul was one of those rare personalities in which an extraordinary depth and tenderness of feeling is united to keen understanding and energetic will. Born of Jewish parents whose tendency towards a strict Pharisaic observance of the law seems to have been only heightened by the careless life by which they were surrounded in a Gentile commercial city like Tarsus, Paul had received through inheritance and upbringing the best characteristics of the Semitic

race: the deep sense of dependence upon God and of obligation towards God. In every experience of life, great or small, joyful or sorrowful, he recognised the providence of God, the purposeful working of His gracious will, which moved him to thanksgiving and self-dedication. To have peace with God, or, in the language of his school, to be just before God, was at every period of his life his highest aim and highest good. But a passionate disposition stood in conflict with this tender, deeply earnest conscience, a choleric, irritable temperament, a nervous, easily excited sensibility. The grim picture which at a later time Paul draws of the strife between flesh and spirit in which the better will of the inner man is so often worsted by the overmastering impulse in the members, is certainly not entirely derived from general considerations, or from the experience of others; it is a confession of his own experiences, the experiences which the strict Pharisee Paul had undergone in his efforts to attain a legal righteousness by rigorous asceticism. These were the experiences which later wrung from him, even in the recollection, the cry of pain, "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?" (Rom. vii. 24). But the severity of the struggle, the painful sense of incapacity to reach the ideal goal of righteousness, did not weaken his zeal for the law, but rather raised it to a passion. That at which he himself had toiled so hard must stand to others also as the highest, the unassailable; and whoever assailed it was an enemy of God and must be rooted out. This zeal of the true Pharisee still remained with him in later life, the only difference

being that the object of his zeal was then no longer the Law, but the truth of the Gospel, as he had apprehended it.' It was for the same reason, too, that he saw in the Jewish-Christian opponents of the Gospel downright enemies of Christ and of God, ascribed the worst motives to their opposition, and pronounced an inexorable anathema upon them (Gal. i. 8; Phil. iii. 2, 18 f.).

And yet this passionate zealot possessed also a tenderness of feeling, an intensity of sympathy, a selfless altruism, a capacity for loving self-devotion, such as are scarcely to be found elsewhere among men of action, and which seem indeed to be the special property of the noblest type of feminine

1 Cp. the excellent characterisation of Paul in Orello Cone, Paul: the Man, the Missionary, and the Teacher, p. 28: "His nature was of the eager, tempestuous sort in which intensity of conviction and resoluteness of purpose are leading characteristics. He could do nothing by halves. His aim, once clearly before him, became the dominant power of his life and pushed him to its realisation, without fear of consequences and without self-regard. As a Jew, he believed that the Christian sect was an enemy of his religion, an offence to God, and a menace to the institutions of his race, and he threw himself into the cause of an unsparing extermination of them. On the other hand, 'When it pleased God to reveal His Son in me,' he writes, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood, neither went I up to Jerusalem to them who were Apostles before me.' This consciousness that he had a revelation, a divine commission, induced immediately a resolution to act independently of all human counsels, and to preach the gospel in his own way—a resolution to which he adhered with all the intensity and energy of his determined nature throughout his life. Opposition, persecution, the attempt to estrange his churches from him, could not prevail to turn him from his great purpose, the mission to the Gentiles, nor to shake his conviction that the Gentile Christians were entitled, without submission to Jewish ordinances, to an equal rank with the Jews in the coming Messianic Kingdom."

character. He himself compares his love for his churches and his tender concern for the well-being of each individual Christian with the tenderness of a mother or a nurse. In his letters, from the severest censures and threats he will turn again and strike the most moving chords of the heart, and he woos the trust and affection of his wavering converts with the selfless humility of tender and forgiving love. The man who wrote the incomparable hymn of love in 1 Cor. xiii. must have had a nature in which love glowed still more warmly than zeal.1

But this glowing warmth of heart which made Paul the greatest missionary of Christendom, was united in him to a remarkable energy of mind. What he felt, he made also an object of reflection, in order to grasp it in his thoughts and exhibit it as truth to himself and to the world. Thus it was that he created for the young Christian community a doctrinal form, a comprehensive view of the world, a "Theology." No doubt his thinking was very far from being scientific in the modern sense of the word. In this, as in much else, he was a true son of his race; his thinking remained throughout practical. He based his reflection on the received authorities, he combined the new revelation with that which was laid down in the Holy Scriptures of his people. We shall see

1 Cp. Norden, Kunstprosa, ii. 509: "Those two hymns on the love of God and the love of men (Rom. viii. 31 ff.; 1 Cor. xiii.) gave back to the Greek language what it had lost for centuries, the fervour and enthusiasm of the initiate mystic inspired by union with God, such as meets us again in equal perfection only in Plato and, finally, in Cleanthes. How this speech of the heart must have struck home to the hearts of men accustomed to listen to the foolish garrulence of the Sophist."