substitute for, that ideal condition which is to come, the ideal in which all our striving and struggling finds its incentive and its restraint, its point of support and point of rest, its motive and its mitigation. It is just this combination of a faith which is self-sustained, and rejoices in the present and inward salvation, with a hope and effort which unweariedly reach out beyond themselves towards the high goal of perfection, which is the fundamental characteristic of the ethico-religious attitude of the Christian, as Paul, out of his own experience, has pictured it.

It is certain that Paul by his teaching laid the theological foundation of a new ethical system, which conceived the whole of the ethical life as a consistent development of one central motive which has its roots in the religious frame of mind. The faith" which worketh by love," while binding our personality to God, sets it on a basis of its own, makes it independent of the fears and cares of the world, and thus lays the foundation of an autonomy and an inner resoluteness of personal character which is in no wise inferior to the Stoic freedom. But the very same faith binds us at the same time by the strongest affection, namely, through love, to human society; in the first place, to the community of Christian brethren, and in the next place to humanity at large, and therefore does not permit the personality in selfish arάρкea and unfeeling άáleα, in proud self-sufficiency and indifference to the good of others, to withdraw itself from its social duties; it does not dissolve society into isolated individuals, as Stoicism set its "wise men" in lofty isolation above the society of struggling and

suffering humanity. Instead it gives men the strongest bond of union, of solidarity, of moral order--love, which, taking root in the pious heart, draws ever new nourishment from religious faith and hope, and finds the norm which it must seek to realise in the highest ideal, in God and His Son. For this reason Paul's ethical principle had a very different measure of success from the principle of Stoic philosophy which is in certain aspects related to it, and was able to work with animating and regenerating, healing and sanctifying, power upon evil and distracted humanity. Whereas Stoic cosmopolitanism merely made men indifferent towards the natural bonds and limitations of society, Christian love, on the other hand, wove new bonds around the divided nations and classes of mankind and made Jew and Greek, bond and free, man and wife, one in Christ (Gal. iii. 28).

THE THEOLOGY OF PAUL

CHAPTER XVIII

CHURCH AND WORLD

AT the outset, Paul confined the moulding power of the new new ethical principle to the religious community; its application to the various departments of ethical life he left to the future. The unity of the Spirit which inspires the believers in Christ binds them one to another into the unity of the body of Christ, i.e. the Christian Church. By "ecclesia" Paul understands primarily and habitually-in conformity with Greek usage, in which the word means the popular assembly-the single church in a given locality (Gal. i. 2; 1 Thess. i. 1; 1 Cor. i. 2; Rom. xvi. 1). In the second place, he uses the word in reference to the whole Christian Church, not only to the mother-church, which might still be regarded as a single local church (Gal. i. 13; 1 Cor. xv. 9), but also of the whole of contemporary Christendom. It is in this latter sense that he writes, for example, to the Corinthians (1 Cor. x. 32) "Give no offence neither to the Jews nor to the Greeks, nor to the church of God" or (xii. 28), "God hath in the church set some to be apostles, others to be prophets,” etc. But whereas

the social conception of the ecclesia widens from below upwards, rising into the comprehensive conception of the union of believers or "the Church," the doctrinal conception of the "Body of Christ" has as its point of departure the ideal whole, which has its special manifestations in the individual churches, and further, in the individual believers, in whom it manifests its one being in multiple form. The body of Christ is not constructed out of the individual churches any more than the body proper is constructed out of its various members: it is the logical prius of these, the one life of the Spirit, which proceeds from Christ as the Head, and unites the many members to itself. But this unity is still an ideal (the "invisible Church" of dogmatic theology), to which corresponds no outward form of unity of the Church as a whole, no organised federation of the various individual churches: of this Paul knows nothing. That which binds the believers to unity is the one Lord, who, as a person, is the head of the body, from whom proceeds all life, to whom all are united, and who as Spirit is the soul of the body, who fills all, and binds them as members to one another. This unity of the Spirit finds expression in the common faith and confession that Jesus is Lord, and in the fellowship of the love with which all mutually serve and help one another in doing and suffering, like the various members in the bodily organism (1 Cor. xii.; Rom. xii.). If, therefore, the body of Christ is primarily a dogmatic conception-the comprehensive effect of the Christ-Spirit in the unity of the believers whom He inspires, a macrocosmic Christ,

so to speak yet it is immediately connected with the ethical conception of the fellowship of all believers in a brotherhood which reaches across the dividing barriers of race and rank and sex, and, through the free personal bond of a common faith and life, makes "all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. iii. 28). Paul also compares the Church to a field belonging to God, in which one works in sowing, and another in watering (1 Cor. iii. 9); or with a building, or, more specifically, the temple of God, the foundation of which is laid in Christ, upon which foundation Christ's servants continue to build (ib. 10-17; cf. vi. 19, where the body of each individual Christian is called a temple of God). Once, too, there is found the picture which later (especially in Ephesians) receives further development, of the Church as the bride of Christ, whom it is the apostle's duty to present as a pure virgin to be led home by Christ at the Parousia (2 Cor. xi. 2). The purity of the Church here spoken of consists in her simple loyalty to Christ, that is, her complete devotion to Him, from which the Judaising teachers desired to seduce her. The holiness of the Church rests on the same foundation as its unity-its mystical union with Christ, and its being filled by the Holy Spirit.

This connection is effected, according to Paul, not merely by the spiritual act of faith, but also by outward ceremonies, by means of which fellowship with Christ and the Church is not only represented, but mystically established and constantly renewed. As ceremonies of this kind, Baptism and the Lord's Supper appear in Paul's teaching with a prominence which was to have a significant influence in the