ART. VI.-ON THE VALUE OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF PAUL; with an Analysis of his Doctrinal System.

I.

THERE has been a disposition in some portions of the Christian world to depreciate the practical importance of the writings of the Apostle Paul. This has arisen in part from a dislike or indifference to doctrinal considerations, the moral element of Christianity being more clearly and simply announced in the gospels. With these views, however, we must confess, we are unable to sympathize. In every respect the life and writings of this eminent Apostle appear to us entitled to the deepest attention. They are, in the first place, the oldest, and the most undoubtedly authentic, monuments of the Christian faith. Secondly, they exhibit the earliest application of the principles of Christianity to the practical concerns of life and the administration of the Church. They place before us the circumstances of a time, when the facts of Christ's personal ministry and the impression of his life and teachings were still so fresh and vivid in men's minds, that the want of a biographical narrative, as a basis for faith, like that which ultimately called the gospels into existence, was as yet hardly experienced. Lastly, the epistles form an invaluable appendix to the gospels. The one would have been incomplete without the other. Archbishop Whately has observed, that Christ came into the world, not so much to be the medium of a revelation, as the subject of one. On first meeting with this observation we remember being greatly surprised at it. Nevertheless it will be found upon reflection to contain much truth, of which the evidence and the illustration may be discerned in the epistles of Paul.

In these writings there is little or no reference to the actions of Christ on earth. The Apostle's contemplation of him commences with his death and resurrection, and continually holds him up to view as a perfected and glorified man, dwelling with God in the heavenly state, final union with whom is to be made the object of the believer's aspirations and endeavours. Without the ministry of Paul, of which the epistles are the product and the record, Christ would have vanished from the earth, a beautiful but transitory phenomenon in the land of Palestine.

The characters of Christ and Paul leave a very different impression on the mind, and seem to belong to very different spheres; yet both filled their place in the great plan of providence, and were essential to its completion. The ministry of Paul constiVOL. III. No. 12.-New Series.

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tutes the first link in the chain which has connected the subsequent course of human affairs with the superhuman and divine in Christ. A medium was needed to bring these two principles, the human and the divine, into contact with each other. Paul's mind and character furnished that medium; and in this consideration lies the key to the right understanding and just appreciation of his writings. Christ stood far above the humanity of his own age and country, in a relation of fraternal sympathy to the humanity of all ages and all countries. His being a Jew was an unimportant accident in his history. He belonged to the world, and not to Judea. But Paul was altogether the man of his age, and lived in its ideas, its feelings, its necessities, its circumstances. His Hellenistic habits and education placed him on the verge of the Jewish and Gentile worlds, and enabled him to carry Christianity out of one into the other.

Under these circumstances, his writings were called forth, and directed in their application. In producing them he had not a thought beyond the immediate necessities of the time. It is Providence, and not the deliberate intention of their author, that has converted them into such fertile sources of instruction for successive generations through thousands of years. Hence are derived their highest excellencies-their evident unconsciousness of ulterior objects-their solemn earnestness—their deep sense of present necessity-their evidence of undoubting conviction. Now, a man thoroughly in earnest to produce a great change in his own time, cannot separate himself from the ideas and feelings of that time; they are the instruments by which he works; they furnish the only access by which he can reach the hearts and minds of his contemporaries. With the single exception of the specific object which he is seeking to attain-which distinguishes him among his contemporaries, which furnishes the great business and interest of his existence, he is thoroughly one in feeling, opinion and conviction, with those among whom he lives. The popular life of his time thrills through his whole moral being; and his deep religious sympathy with its wants and its miseries, combined with the feeling, that God has given him the power to alleviate them-furnishes his inspiration, and endues him with the courage of a hero. The mind of such a man is not, and cannot be, that of a philosophical analyst. He cannot make the refined distinction of a later day, between the form and the spirit of a doctrine, or resort to the principle devised for him by the ingenuity of posterior theologians, of accommodation to existing prejudices. Every argument employed, every consideration appealed to, is to such a mind a reality, a truth; and it grasps it earnestly, and with deep conviction, as such. Strong

sympathy with popular feeling, and even with popular prejudice, except in the one point where change and reformation are immediately sought, seems to be an indispensable condition of rapid and extensive popular success.

Compare, for example, the different results that have attended the labours and writings of two very eminent men in the last century, Wesley and Priestley. The former addressed himself to the heart and conscience, and appealed for this purpose to convictions that were inherent, though slumbering, in the general mind. What has been the consequence? Myriads now bear his name, and exhibit in their numbers, their zeal and their organization, one of the most remarkable moral phenomena of the age. The latter, with the purest motives and the highest views, directed his instructions to the calm reason of mankind; went before his age instead of sympathizing with it; blended his religion with the speculative principles of a philosophical school, rather than with the feeling, the habitudes and the convictions, of our actual humanity: but, instead of leaving behind him a large and flourishing church, while he has scattered the seeds of extensive good, and excited impulses that must ultimately lead to valuable results, he has hardly created the materials for building up a sect.

Let us apply these general remarks to the case of Paul. His doctrinal system we shall examine in its details by and by; for the present we may assume it as a fact, which stands out conspicuous from his history and writings-that the great idea, which had seized and which governed his mind, and which he ascribed to divine revelation,-was the resurrection and ascension of Christ, to become the Saviour of Jew and Gentile who believed in him, and the expectation of his approaching reappearance from heaven, to raise the dead, to judge the world, and to gather the faithful into the kingdom of God. Possessed with this idea, Paul went out into the world. It was the animating principle of his whole being. It imparted its own spiritual fervour to the entire circle of his existing feelings and opinions, which seemed to furnish him on every side with illustrations of its importance and evidences of its truth.

We have no ground to infer from reason, or the language of Scripture, that any revelation ever has altered, or ever could alter, the intellectual conditions under which men's minds must admit and apply the influences of moral and religious truth, the forms and measures of which always bear a relation to the standard of the contemporaneous civilization. What we call revelation, seems rather the infusion of a divine strength into moral conviction and moral impulse-the direct quickening from

heaven into clearer consciousness, a more energetic life, and a purer form, of those fundamental principles of religious belief which are planted deep by the hand of the Creator in the original constitution of the human soul, than the distinct communication to the understanding of any fresh measures of objective truth; in other words, it is a moral rather than an intellectual influence.* If this be a correct view, the utterance of an individual, whether in speech or by the pen, under the influence of a revelation, must necessarily clothe itself with the opinions and feelings of the time-must come into operation and produce its effects through the medium of those opinions and feelings, without any clear and habitual consciousness of the distinction between that which is a divine impulse, and that which is only the human instrumentality through which it acts. Paul indeed appears occasionally to have been sensible of some such dis

In the New Testament we find nothing corresponding to the idea which our scientific theology has attached to the term 'Revelation,' as a system of new truths, accompanied by miraculous sanctions, and required to be admitted on that authority into the understanding; but rather, in the various passages, where either the verbal or the substantive form of the term occurs, the notion of a direct influence of the spirit acting on the mind in a particular instance—to determine the will, to suggest a thought, to strengthen a conviction, to disclose a view, or to place in a new light men's relation to God, to Christ, and to each other. Comp. Ephes. iii. 3, 5. Gal. ii. 2; i. 12. Rom. xvi. 25. Philipp. iii. 15. 1 Cor. ii. 10. Matt. xi. 25. Luke x. 21. Matt. xi. 27. Luke x. 22. The manifestation of a moral influence, Gal. i. 16. Very frequently the appearance of Christ from heaven at the last day is called aжоκάλvs. 2 Thess. i. 7. 1 Peter i. 7, 13; iv. 13; v. 1. Luke xvii. 30. In this sense, the last book in our Canon is called the Apocalypse.

The following observations from a French writer, though very different from the views usually entertained on this subject, may furnish matter for reflection, and certainly cannot be considered as sceptical in their tendency. "A toutes les époques critiques des sociétés il s'est fait de ces grands mouvemens d'idées dont rien ne rend raison, si ce n'est la force des choses, ou, pour mieux dire, la puissance de la vérité, qui se découvre d'elle même, et tombe vive et nue dans les intelligences qu'elle eclaire. Il est peu de siècles qui n'aient eu leur révélation; mais c'est particulièrement au premier âge du monde qu'a dû se deployer plus näive et plus pleine cette faculté de simple vue, cette intelligence d'un seul jet, dont l'homme dans sa nudité native avait un si pressant besoin.-Autrement la société, sans idées, sans ces idées vitales qui etaient nécessaires à sa conservation et à son etat, n'eût pu que se dépraver et perir. La première loi de son existence était d'avoir immédiatement des principes positifs d'action; il était de la sagesse divine de les lui donner en la constituant, de les lui donner par grace prompte et spéciale.—Le rôle de revélateur a dû succeder pour Dieu à celui de créateur. Comme pére des lumières, il s'est fait sentir aux ames et les a inspirées ainsi s'est passée la révelation, ainsi du moins l'entendons nous. : Les idées venues par revélation sont essentiellement vraies-parce qu'elles sont la pure et simple expression des réalités qui les font naître. Ce ne sont pas des connaissances, quoiqu'elles aient de la vérité au fond: c'est plutôt de la poesie; elles en ont tout le caractère." Damiron, Essai sur l'Histoire de la Philosophie en France. Tom. ii. p. 241-44.

Might we not expect, that many difficulties in theology would be diminished, if the psychology of the religious principle were more thoroughly investigated? At present the prevailing notions of revelation and inspiration render such an investigation hardly possible.

tinction, but his language shows that he felt it was attended with uncertainty.* In fact, the unconsciousness of which we speak seems almost indispensable to that perfect sincerity and earnestness of mind without which there can be no success ;-necessary to create an element of sympathy,—a medium of communication between the informing and the recipient mind,-without which zeal and eloquence would be consumed in vain. But this same circumstance, which is the cause and condition of immediate success, is the occasion of obscurity, and a source of error, when the instructions that flowed originally from inspiration, on being reduced to writing, become for distant ages a rule of faith and practice; for, while the moral necessities of mankind continue unaltered, the whole intellectual and scientific constitution of the mind has undergone, in the interval, the greatest change; so that the form and outward application under which important moral convictions are brought home to the mind and conscience, can no longer remain the same that they were two thousand years ago.

Our moral convictions have often to contend against the obstructions which imperfect knowledge and a reason oppressed with prejudice oppose to their free development. In moments of moral enthusiasm and religious inspiration, we catch glimpses of high and solemn truths, the full and unconditional recognition of which would compel an utter renunciation of many practices and some opinions, to which we mechanically and almost unconsciously conform, and from the influence of which we cannot deliver ourselves. Feeble and speculative minds are paralysed for great practical efforts by the consciousness of this invincible contrariety between what they sometimes perceive might be, and what they observe actually is. But the ardent and the energetic defy the inconsequentialities which they are perpetually encountering; obey all the convictions which come forcibly home to them, without inquiring whether, if pushed to their results, they would fully harmonize; and thus give effect and ascendancy to great moral principles, which, once rooted in society, outlive, cast from them, triumph over, and finally extirpate, the less perfect conceptions of God and duty, which in the first instance were sincerely and honestly associated with them, and without which they would never have obtained an entrance into the minds of men. We shall attempt to show hereafter, that there are some principles taught by Paul, and furnishing the vital power of his instructions, which, drawn out into their legitimate consequences, would prove utterly subversive of others, which he

* κατὰ τὴν ἐμὴν γνώμην· δοκῶ δὲ κἀγὼ πνεῦμα θεοῦ ἔχειν. 1 Cor. vii. 40.