The Life of St. Paul | Page 3

of the greatest elements of
Christian character were exhibited with a decisiveness which no one
can mistake, just as the most prominent characteristics of the painting
of Rubens can be appreciated by every spectator.
5. A Great Thinker.--Christianity obtained in Paul, secondly, a great
thinker. This it specially needed at the moment. Christ had departed
from the world, and those whom He had left to represent Him were
unlettered fishermen and, for the most part, men of no intellectual mark.
In one sense this fact reflects a peculiar glory on Christianity, for it
shows that it did not owe its place as one of the great influences of the
world to the abilities of its human representatives: not by might nor by
power, but by the Spirit of God, was Christianity established in the
earth. Yet, as we look back now, we can clearly see how essential it
was that an apostle of a different stamp and training should arise.
6. Christ had manifested forth the glory of the Father once for all and
completed his atoning work. But this was not enough. It was necessary
that the meaning of his appearance should be explained to the world.
Who was he who had been here? what precisely was it he had done? To
these questions the original apostles could give brief popular answers;
but none of them had the intellectual reach or the educational training
necessary to put the answers into a form to satisfy the intellect of the
world. Happily it is not essential to salvation to be able to answer such
questions with scientific accuracy. There are tens of thousands who
know and believe that Jesus was the Son of God and died to take away
sin and, trusting to Him as their Saviour, are purified by faith, but who
could not explain these statements at any length without falling into
mistakes in almost every sentence. Yet, if Christianity was to make an
intellectual as well as a moral conquest of the world, it was necessary
for the Church to have accurately explained to her the full glory of her
Lord and the meaning of his saving work.
Of course Jesus had himself had in his mind a comprehension both of

what he was and of what he was doing which was luminous as the sun.
But it was one of the most pathetic aspects of his earthly ministry that
he could not tell all his mind to his followers. They were not able to
bear it; they were too rude and limited to take it in. He had to carry his
deepest thoughts out of the world with him unuttered, trusting with a
sublime faith that the Holy Ghost would lead his Church to grasp them
in the course of its subsequent development. Even what he did utter
was very imperfectly understood.
There was one mind, it is true, in the original apostolic circle of the
finest quality and capable of soaring into the rarest altitudes of
speculation. The words of Christ sank into the mind of John and, after
lying there for half a century, grew up into the wonderful forms we
inherit in his Gospel and Epistles. But even the mind of John was not
equal to the exigency of the Church; it was too fine, mystical, unusual.
His thoughts to this day remain the property only of the few finest
minds. There was needed a thinker of broader and more massive make
to sketch the first outlines of Christian doctrine; and he was found in
Paul.
7. Paul was a born thinker. His mind was of majestic breadth and force.
It was restlessly busy, never able to leave any object with which it had
to deal until it had pursued it back to its remotest causes and forward
into all its consequences. It was not enough for him to know that Christ
was the Son of God: he had to unfold this statement into its elements
and understand precisely what it meant. It was not enough for him to
believe that Christ died for sin: he had to go farther and inquire why it
was necessary that He should do so and how His death took sin away.
But not only had he from nature this speculative gift: his talent was
trained by education. The other apostles were unlettered men; but he
enjoyed the fullest scholastic advantages of the period. In the rabbinical
school he learned how to arrange and state and defend his ideas. We
have the issue of all this in his Epistles, which contain the best
explanation of Christianity possessed by the world. The right way to
look at them is to regard them as the continuation of Christ's own
teaching. They contain the thoughts which Christ carried away from the

earth with