the unknown. From the dread amazement which their doctrine induces, the refuge for every one is in the Brightness of Goodness that is in verity the Sovereign Soul, approached through humble supplication. In God Himself is the atonement; and in Him, preceding both our estrangement and the atonement, is an adorable, infallible Care.

CHAPTER VII.

PAUL AND THE GOSPEL.

UNDER the influence of Jesus Christ, a new worldprophet arose within the nation of ancient Israel. This was the Apostle Paul. The gifts which were bestowed upon him were great enough to make him rank with the most illustrious of his countrymen who had previously possessed the prophetic genius. But he had one gift which distinguished him from all these, namely, a power of appropriating, and of directing attention to, the revelation which in his time had been given to the world. He himself recognised

that his discernment of the revelation in Jesus was that which constituted his chief claim to be heard. And accordingly he came forward, with no want of confidence indeed, but simply as an apostle of Jesus. For him to live was Christ, he said. And he professed to proclaim nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified.

To understand St. Paul's reading of the gospel

full weight must be given to his personal prophetic gifts. He was no mere collector of historical evidence. To regard him as such is both to do himself injustice and to miss the significance of the message which he had to declare. He was, to begin with, a member of the inspired race, an inheritor of the faculty and habit of religious insight. Even as such, he stands out from the great writers of his time in the other nations. His frame burned with moral zeal; and he never questioned the reality of the One Supreme. But also he was inspired pre-eminently. He was an arouser of perception-a prophet, as Moses had been, as Isaiah had been, and as some of the Psalmists had been. Thus he was conscious of standing, like the writer of the 139th psalm, "before the face of God" (enopion tou Theou).1 And he based his apostleship on his experience of revelations-chiefly of one revelation, or special appearance of God.

It is reasonable to believe that there was a time in which his religious perception was guided by that Literalism which had come to prevail among his compatriots. It is recorded that he had been a careful student of the Pharisees' culture; and it is reasonable to believe that that culture had helped him to attain to genuine, if imperfect, glimpses of the Divine

1 Gal. i. 20.

Presence. Under it he may especially have grasped the solemn fact of man's moral relation to God, and so much of the being of God as secured to him, for ever after, the apprehension of One Eternal Sovereign. But from the guidance of Literalism he was suddenly converted. A new gleam suddenly shone on him.

The new gleam was a power of the kind that has affected the highest class of prophets as such. It came direct to his individual soul

from the Divine Presence. It thus contained an element which was unshared by others. But nevertheless it had something in common with a light which had certainly guided others. So that it combined the characters of a direct light and a general light. What was in common between the light which shone on Paul and that which led the others was the medium in which the revelation appeared to Paul. Paul discerned a special appearance of God in a medium in which God had been for some time seen by a group of Paul's contemporaries. It seems, indeed, to be beyond question that his perception was clearer and more commanding than that of any other; but his revelation was properly the appropriation of a general revelation, and a group of others perceived along with him. That group was the lately formed Christian Church. In common with a still

obscure body of persons who had more or less intimate knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth, Paul centred in the figure of Jesus his new perception of God.

Thoughtfully viewing St. Paul and his conversion, however, we must not conclude that his former leading had no influence on his later perception. Even in the first sudden action of the newly illumined eyesight, the old influences need not have been entirely dormant. And as his spiritual vision became fixed, it certainly owed something of its defining ability to his former spiritual guides. Thus some little analysis of the light which had formerly guided his perceptions, along with those of many earnest students of his time, may here be profitable. In it there can be detected at least three important constituents. One of these was the thought of a coming Messiah, a person having a unique participation in the Divine mind, yet of the nation of Israel, and of the tribe of Judah, appointed at once to glorify the people of Israel as the chosen of God and to rule the world in the name of God. A second constituent was the faith, held positively by the Pharisees, that after death the personal human soul would, if righteous, rise again! And a third was the half-Greek mental culture which prevailed among those Jews who were

1 Acts xxiii. 8; Josephus, Antiquities, xviii. (1) 3.