Studies of Christianity; Or, Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers Part 16

Of the Apostle's mode of thought when fresh from his conversion no memorial exists; his earliest extant writing being of a date fourteen or fifteen years later, and the report in the Book of Acts not being altogether reliable--as Mr. Jowett has shown[61]--for historical accuracy. But we learn from his own remarkable statement to the Galatians, that he kept aloof from the churches in Judaea, and was unknown to them by face; that it was three years before he entered Jerusalem, or saw an Apostle; that he then made acquaintance with Peter, and met James, but without its affecting his independent course, which ran through eleven years more ere it brought him to Jerusalem again; that his errand, on this second visit, was to take security against being thwarted by Jewish jealousies sanctioned at head-quarters; that from James, Cephas, and John--the "seeming pillars" of the Church--he learnt nothing that he cared to hear; that they, on the other hand, could not gainsay the independent rights of so fruitful an apostles.h.i.+p, and agreed with him not to cross his path, if he would leave them theirs. The emphasis with which, in this animated pa.s.sage, St. Paul dwells on the separate sources of his own faith, and disowns any obligation to the prior Apostles, renders it certain that the biography, the discourses, the human personality of Jesus, were indifferent to him; and that with only the cross and the resurrection (contained as data in the vision of conversion) he could construct his scheme. The unmistakable sarcasm of the expressions, ??

d?????te?,--d?????te? e??a? t?--?? d?????te? st???? e??a?,--betrays a state of mind, in regard to the twelve, out of all sympathy with the grounds of their authority. And the necessity, in order to agreement, of marking out for each, not a separate geographical beat, but a distinct religious and ethnologic ground, shows that, with external mutual toleration, there is yet wanting the inner unity of an identic faith. Only in the absence of a common Gospel would each party have to take its own, and spare the other. Indeed, the difference was so fundamental as to involve everything that St. Paul then, and Christians now, would deem characteristic of their religion.

The question was this,--"How might a born Gentile become a Christian?"--"By becoming a Jew first, and then accepting Jesus as appointed to be the Jews' Messiah," was the answer at Jerusalem. "By believing in Jesus straightway," was the reply of Paul. With irresistible force he contended that, according to his opponents'

view, the Gospel opened no door at all, and was simply nugatory. For it had _always_ been possible for a Gentile to become a Jew; and if, without this step, faith in Christ was unavailing, the real efficacy must lie in what the Jew brought to Christ, not in what he received from him; so that it was hard to say what good there could be in pa.s.sing on from Moses at all, or what essential difference between the unconverted and the converted Hebrew. And, in truth, they were _not_ strongly contrasted in Jerusalem; and in habit, thought, and feeling, the twelve were probably much nearer to Gamaliel than to Paul. The altercation between Peter and Paul at Antioch is full of instruction on this point; proving, as it does, that the intensest form of ritual exclusiveness--the refusal to partake at table with the uncirc.u.mcised--was retained in the parent church, and enforced with jealous vigilance. In the Syrian capital the Gentile disciples were numerous, the Pauline comprehensiveness prevailed, and the intercourses of life were unhindered by ceremonial scruples. Peter, thrown amongst them on a visit, yields to the local impression, and, as long as he can do so un.o.bserved, falls in with their free ways; feeling all the while, no doubt, like the Quaker from home tempted into a ball-dress or regimentals. Soon, however, the strict brethren at Jerusalem send to look after him or the Antiochians, and instantly his liberality is gone; he is the prim Jew again, and the Gentile dishes are all unclean. And who then are these new witnesses, that he should fear their report? They are deputies from James, "the brother of the Lord," who, on account of this affinity,[62] was the recognized head of the Judaean Christians; and of whose ascetic abstinences, and constant devotions _on the temple pavement_, till "his knees were become like the knees of a camel," Hegesippus preserved the tradition.[63] It was clear, therefore, that Peter's a.s.sociation with the Gentile Christians was exceptional,--a violation of his professed rule, and of the allowed usage of the Apostolic Church. To own brotherhood with the uncirc.u.mcised believer, was a forfeiture of character, probably an outrage on his own conscience, to the Christian Apostle! This was the result, among his first disciples, of nearly twenty years' belief of Christ in heaven. There could be no real sympathy between such an evangile and Paul's. It let him make converts, but would not acknowledge them when made. It could not resist the fact of his success, but treated his "children in the faith" as in a doubtful case, left to Heaven's "uncovenanted mercies,"

and needing to be put in a securer state, as soon as his back was turned, and teachers could be sent to complete the task. Hence the opposition that tracked the steps, and so much marred the work of the Apostle, wherever he went; and in repelling which he wrote his chief Epistles, and matured the form of his great theology. Mr. Jowett, whilst allowing that this opposition was systematic and persistent, and in some degree connived at by the twelve, is yet anxious to lay it mainly to the charge of their followers, and defines the relation of the two sections thus: "Separation, not opposition; antagonism of the followers rather than of the leaders; personal antipathy of the Judaizers to St. Paul, rather than of St. Paul to the twelve." (I.

326.) These are fine distinctions, and for this very reason likely, we fear, in the rough movement of human pa.s.sions, to be more ideal than real. True, the feeling of a leader is ever apt to run into exaggeration among the followers; nor probably was Apostolic control over the ma.s.s of believers so complete as to exclude this danger. But the Epistle to the Galatians is written by one leader, and speaks of the others; and the impression it conveys is surely one of very decided antagonism, and that, too, not accidental, but depending on permanent differences of principle, which discussion did not smooth away, and which penetrated into the very organism of daily life. In the altercation with Peter, what was the point of Paul's rebuke? Did he simply censure his moral weakness and inconsistency? Not so, or he would have exhorted him to take whichever course he approved, and stick to it. Did he find fault with his _exceptional_ act, of eating with the Gentile Christians? Not so, for he did the same himself. The thing he blamed was nothing less than the rule and usage by which Peter _habitually lived_, and which, it is declared, virtually made Christ of none effect. Here was a collision of irreconcilable principles, and every subsequent occasion of personal contact, under like conditions, would be as liable to produce it as the first. Nor have we, in fact, any reason to suppose a closer approximation at a later part of the Apostolic age. That Paul looked with any particular respect on the other Apostles, is surely not proved, as Mr. Jowett imagines, by his appeal (1 Cor. xv. 5) to their testimony respecting the _fact_ of their Lord's resurrection, or by his claiming (1 Cor.

ix. 5) to stand on a like footing of privilege with them.[64] To produce the spectators of an event as its proper witnesses, is no expression of feeling towards them at all; and to say, "Are the other Apostles to have the right of taking their wives with them at the cost of the Church, and may not I take or decline my mere personal maintenance as I think proper?" inst.i.tutes a comparison in which it is difficult to discover any strong sentiment of "respect." Nor do the doctrinal agreements, of which, as well as of the personal relations of fellows.h.i.+p, our author makes the most, amount to any substantial concurrence, when we penetrate to the essence from the form. On both sides, says Mr. Jowett, the disciples were baptized into the _same name_. (I. 340.) Yes; but how different the _object named_ as present to their thought; in the one case, the human life in its detail, with the resurrection as its crown; in the other, the cross of Christ that stands between them, and his life in heaven that pa.s.ses beyond them!

Both sections, it is again said, find their _ground_ in the Old Testament. (I. 341.) True: but the one on Moses, the tables, and the holy place; the other, on Adam's nature, and the patriarchs' freedom, and the prophets' insight; the one, moreover, using the ground to intrench the Law for ever; the other, to drive the ploughshare over its ruins, and make it a fruitful field. Once more, it is said that on both sides there was a looking for "the day of the Lord," an expectation of Christ's return to end the world within that generation. (I. 341.) a.s.suredly, but with such differences in the vision, that, in the apocalyptic picture of the one, Paul is not among the Apostles, or his followers among the white-robed and crowned (Rev.

xxi. 14, and ii. 2, 14, 20); while in that of the other, the advent will but perfect and perpetuate a union with Christ, already present to their consciousness, and open to all who live with him in the Spirit. In short, twenty years after the death of Christ, the two elements that were harmonized in him, but are ever apt to part in our imperfect minds, the ethical and the mystical, the historical and spiritual, ascetic concentration and outspreading trust, fell into determinate ant.i.thesis, realizing their conflict in the immediate question of Jew and Gentile, and finding their respective representatives in the twelve and St. Paul.

Whether, besides and beyond this general development of the Christian system, there was also a special development of doctrine into higher degrees of spirituality within the mind of St. Paul himself, is a question of less interest and more difficulty. Both Mr. Stanley and Mr.

Jowett find traces of such a change in the modified sentiment of his later writings, and even make the Apostle himself depose to his own enlargement of view. We must confess that this speculation, though excluded by no antecedent improbability, appears to us less well supported than anything in these volumes. It is ingeniously presented and argued by Mr. Jowett in his introduction to the Thessalonian Epistles; and by means of it he explains the marked absence from these letters of St. Paul's usual topics and manner, and gets rid of the objection urged on this ground to their authenticity. Applied at the other end of the Apostle's career, the hypothesis accounts for the prominence, in the Epistles to the Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians, of certain conceptions, doubtfully traceable elsewhere, of the place of Christ in the hierarchy of the universe, and of his union with his disciples as his "body." The pastorals may be left out of consideration, as their mixed phenomena cannot be much used in the service of this theory. The broad facts are undoubted,--that the four great central Epistles (Galatians, Corinthians, Romans) must be taken as our foci of authority for the characteristics of St. Paul; that, in the earlier Thessalonians, these characteristics are overshadowed by the more Judaic doctrine of the "day of the Lord," and in the later Ephesians, &c., by the more Gnostic conception of a spiritual hierarchy and pleroma. But these facts are quite overworked when set to prove our author's thesis. In order to establish a process of personal development, they ought to exhibit certain natural links of psychological and moral succession, and not mere abrupt and unrelated contrasts of subject. To look for such organic indications in the spa.r.s.e productions of the Apostle's pen, is to ask too much from a few incidental letters, bearing to his whole life the proportion of a dozen pages of random excerpts to a cyclopaedia. If only the matters treated be different, the whole group of writings may very well express, in its several parts and aspects, one simultaneous state of mind. If the types of thought be such as could scarcely co-exist, the cause may be sought as reasonably in a plurality of authors as in a succession of beliefs in the same author; and only a most delicate combination of symptoms can rescue the problem from this indeterminate state of double solution. Nor ought we to forget, in weighing the probabilities, that the whole set of Epistles comprising the phenomena of difference were written within nine years; and that, ere the first of them was produced, St. Paul had been a convert fifteen years, and had reached the age of fifty. The earlier and longer of these periods is a more natural seat of mental change than the later and shorter; especially of a change not apparent so much in particular judgments and opinions, as in the whole complexion of spiritual feeling and idea.

But, we are a.s.sured, the Apostle directly testifies to his own progress in doctrine; and intimates (2 Cor. v. 16) that there was a time when he had "known Christ according to the flesh,"--had preached him "in a more Jewish and less spiritual manner,"--though "henceforth he would know him so no more." Mr. Stanley, explaining this much-disputed phrase, says:--

"Probably, he must be here alluding to those who laid stress on their having seen Christ in Palestine, or on their connection with him or with 'the brothers of the Lord' by actual descent; and if so, they were probably of the party '_of Christ_.' But the words lead us to infer that something of this kind had once been his own state of mind, not only in the time before his conversion (which he would have condemned more strongly), but since. If so, it is (like Phil. iii.

13-15) a remarkable confession of former weakness and error, and of conscious progress in religious knowledge."--Vol. II. p. 106.

Did St. Paul then ever "lay stress on having seen Christ in Palestine"?

or on actual blood-connection with him? or on "something of this kind"?

To personal relations with Jesus in his ministry or family he had no pretensions; and the spirit with which he had _always_ treated everything "of this kind," is so apparent from his narrative to the Galatians as to contradict Mr. Stanley's inference. Mr. Jowett gives the phrase a different turn. Finding (Gal. v. 11) the Apostle charged with at one time "preaching circ.u.mcision," he accepts this as synonymous with "knowing Christ according to the flesh" (i. 12). This, however, would imply that he was originally no "Apostle to the Gentiles," but insisted on _mediate_ conversion into the Gospel through the law. Feeling the irreconcilable variance of such an hypothesis with the autobiographical notices in the Epistles, Mr. Jowett lowers his phraseology, and attributes to St. Paul's early teaching only such sentiments as "_might be thought_" to make him "a preacher of the circ.u.mcision." And so we lose ourselves again in "something of the kind." Yet at last, in the following pa.s.sage, we find the critic's finger distinctly laid on the doctrine which he proposes to id entify with the Apostle's "knowing Christ according to the flesh."

"That such a change" (in the Apostle's teaching) "is capable of being traced, has been already intimated. Both Epistles to the Thessalonians, with the exception of a few practical precepts, are the expansion and repet.i.tion of a single thought,--'the coming of Christ.' It was the absorbing thought of the Apostle and his converts, quickened in both by the persecutions which they had suffered. Not that with this expectation of Christ's kingdom there mingled any vision of a temporal rule over the kingdoms of the earth. That was far from the Apostle. But there was that in it which fell short of the more perfect truth. It was not, 'The kingdom of G.o.d is within you'; but, 'Lo here, and lo there.' It was defined by time, and was to take place within the Apostle's own life.

The images in which it clothed itself were traditional among the Jews; they were outward and visible, liable to the misconstruction of the enemies of the faith, and to the misapprehension of the first converts,--imperfectly, as the Apostle saw afterwards, conveying the inward and spiritual meaning. The kingdom which they described was not eternal and heavenly, but very near and present, ready to burst forth everywhere, and by its very nearness in point of time seeming to touch our actual human state. Afterwards the kingdom of G.o.d appeared to remove itself within, to withdraw into the unseen world. The earthen vessel must be broken first, the unbeliever unclothed that he might be clothed upon, that mortality may be swallowed up of life. He was no longer 'waiting for the Son from heaven'; but 'desirous to depart and be with Christ' (Phil. i. 23). Such is the change, not so much in the Apostle's belief as in his mode of conception; a change natural to the human mind itself, and above all to the Jewish mind; a change which, after it had taken place, left the vestiges of the prior state in the Montanism of the second century, which may not improperly be regarded as the spirit of the first century overliving itself. Old things had pa.s.sed away, and, behold, all things became new. And yet the former things--the material vision of Christ's kingdom--have ever been p.r.o.ne to return; not only in the first and second century, but in every age of enthusiasm, men have been apt to walk by sight and not by faith. In the hour of trouble and perplexity, when darkness spreads itself over the earth, and Antichrist is already come, they have lifted up their eyes to the heavens, looking for the sign of the Son of man."--Vol. I. p. 10.

If to announce the coming of Christ is to "know him according to the flesh," St. Paul a.s.suredly did not keep his resolve "henceforth to know him no more." For the expectation reappears, without any perceptible change, in his later Epistles; as in Rom. xiii. 11, 12: "Do this the rather, knowing the time,--that now is the time to awake out of sleep: for our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed: the night is far spent; the day is at hand";--and in Phil. iv. 5: "The Lord is at hand."[65] Moreover, it is utterly impossible that _this_ element of his teaching could be adduced in proof of his "preaching circ.u.mcision." It had nothing to do with the question of Jew and Gentile; with the most opposite solutions of which it is equally compatible.

In truth, our author has here combined two pa.s.sages, which throw no light on one another, and has extracted from each what neither is able to yield. The words (in Gal. v. 11) "if I _still_ preach circ.u.mcision,"

do not really imply that the Apostle once _did_ so preach; though in an accurate writer this sense might be insisted on. He is not thinking of _his own_ former notions, but of _other people's_, continuing unaltered after they ought to have changed. There _were_ persons who, in spite of the dispensation of the Spirit, _still_ preached circ.u.mcision after its significance was gone. This did not Paul; but he was charged with doing so: and he says, "Well, if so, I am a Judaizer like you, and I cannot be _also_ chargeable with teaching that the cross of Christ supersedes the Law." The true sense is, therefore, given by the rendering, "If I preach circ.u.mcision _still_,"--that is, as _still necessary_; and no tale is told of the Apostle's earlier teaching.

The other pa.s.sage (2 Cor. v. 16) _does_ undoubtedly refer to a former state of the writer's own mind, when he "recognized Christ according to the flesh." But he alludes, we apprehend, to the period when he was a "Hebrew of the Hebrews"; and had no conception as yet of a suffering, dying, and heavenly Christ;--when he was full of the thoughts still occupying the twelve, who did not take in the significance of the cross, but carried past it their old Messianic notions. "There may have been a time," he means to say, "when I thought only of a national, Israelitish, historical Messiah, bound by the law of his fathers, and binding to it.

Had this been the true conception of him, then would it have been a matter of privilege and pride to be near his person, to stand in natural relations with him, and be mixed up with the incidents of his local career. But ever since I understood the cross, and saw that Messiah's life began in death, a far other truth has dawned upon me. When he gave up the ghost, all the accidents of his humanity--his lineage, his nationality, his earthly manifestation--were left behind and died away; and they must carry with them into extinction whatever feelings had collected round them,--family pride, Jewish exclusiveness, and the memories of personal companions.h.i.+p. From that moment, clear of earthly entanglements, Christ in the spirit draws to him a community of human spirits,--one with him in self-abnegation, dying to the earthly past; one with him in re-birth, living to heavenly union with G.o.d. Thus, if any one be in Christ, it amounts to a new creation; his old self has pa.s.sed away; behold, all things have become new." The Apostle, therefore, sets up the death of Christ, as cutting off, for all disciples, the prior time from the subsequent; as flinging the former, with all the human conceptions that cling to it, into eclipse and annihilation, and beginning a new and luminous existence in the latter; as breaking the very ident.i.ty of the believer, and delivering him from the thraldom of nature into the freedom of the Spirit. The cross had already done its work ere St. Paul became a disciple. He had never known his Lord but in the spirit; and the "Christ," whom he had "known according to the flesh," was the Jewish Messiah of his previous and unconverted conception. Mr. Stanley's objection, that the Apostle could hardly have spoken of his unconverted state without stronger condemnation, might perhaps hold, were the allusions to his fit of persecuting violence against the Church. But there was no occasion for self-reproach in describing the picture of a national Messiah, on which, in common with his countrymen, he had permitted his imagination to dwell.[66]

Neither, then, from his own direct a.s.sertion, nor from comparison of his several writings, _inter se_, do we learn anything of the alleged _development_ of the Apostle's doctrine. There is no element in it, that, from inability to co-exist with the rest, requires to be a.s.signed to a date of its own. The breach with Judaism, especially, we conceive to have been complete from the first, and unsusceptible of degrees; nay, to have been the initial principle of his conversion, the secretly prepared condition or tendency of mind that rendered him accessible to the Divine call, and open to sudden change in the direction of his character. When first released from the formulas of a Jewish Christology, and communing in spirit with a heavenly and universal Lord, his mind would doubtless be met by a mult.i.tude of new problems, and would work freely towards their resolution, with the quickening consciousness of new light streaming in, and a grander landscape of Providence opening before him. The very intensity of this inward action, however,--the thirst it sustains for its own completion,--forbids us to attribute to it a life-long duration; ere fifteen years were pa.s.sed, its force would be spent by having realized its work, and attained the equilibrium of a holy peace. Whatever subsequent changes occurred would be of a different nature, enforced by the turn of the world's affairs; a mere remoulding or reproportioning of inward faiths, in adaptation to the altered pressures of the hour. Of such modifications, such retreat towards the background of once favorite ideas, and advance of dim suggestions into strong light, there are doubtless examples in St. Paul. The expectation of Christ's speedy coming to close the world's affairs, and realize "the kingdom," could not but dominate at first, and pale every other interest and belief by the terror and glory of its light.

But there is a limit beyond which the strain of longing cannot be sustained; as it subsides, the present and actual recovers power, and pushes its problems forward, and gains once more the eye that had looked beyond them. And so, after a while, spring up questions of Christian order that will not bear to be put off;--how to live in a world that, however near its doom, entangles the disciple still in a web of difficult relations; how to touch the skirt of its idolatries, and not be tainted; how to behave to wife and child in this last generation of human affairs; how to seal up the pa.s.sions that _ought to die_ within the saints, but were not dead; how to prevent the gifts of the Spirit from overbalancing themselves, on the heights of a dizzied mind, into outrages on nature; how to preserve to the woman and the slave, in their exulting reaction from degraded life, the sense of modest reverence, and the appreciation of faithful service.

Day by day questions of this kind insisted on attention, and brought out a fresh type of sentiments proper for their determination, and offering to view a new side of the Christian thought and life. Nor, again, could many years elapse, before the Jew and Gentile difficulty changed its whole aspect, and expanded, from a petty scruple compromised at Jerusalem, into a world-wide theology, regulative of all future history. When it became evident that it was no question about a small sprinkling of ethnic converts,--mere hangers-on of Hebrew families and synagogues; when the delay of Messiah, and the energy of Paul, gave occasion for thousands to pour in; when it seemed imminent that Palestine should be outvoted and overpowered by the growth of the foreign Gospel, the alarm of the Judaic Christians became great. They tracked Paul's steps; their emissaries were everywhere; their arguments and doctrine became more constricted, and his more wide and free; and as the clouds visibly lowered over Israel, touching him as well as them with gloom, all the more did he see the suns.h.i.+ne flood the lands beyond; and his national trust a.s.sumed this form,--that, maybe, the outlying heavenly light may creep back as the dark hour pa.s.ses, and again set the shadows moving on the hills it has so long glorified. The Apostle died before the question settled itself by the mere force of the facts,--by the utter breaking up of the Jewish nation, and the inpouring Gentile numbers. Others waited to be driven into catholicity by events; it is his glory to have surrendered himself to the inspiration that implanted in him its principle from the first. He lived, however, to see a mighty growth, though not the final fruit; and the grand scale on which he conducts the controversy, in his Epistle to the Romans, by converging reasonings fetched from afar out of history, and aloft out of the perfections of G.o.d, and deep out of human nature, shows how his thought expands with the exigencies of experience, and advances to fill the whole greatness of his opportunities.

There can be no doubt that the earliest Apostolic Christianity consisted mainly in the faith of Christ's coming again, "to-day, or to-morrow, or the third day." This event, with its effect on the living, was _the one only point_, Mr. Stanley conceives, on which St. Paul, in his great chapter on the Resurrection, professed to have a distinct revelation:--

"On one point only he professes to have a distinct revelation, and that not with regard to the dead, but to the living. So firmly was the first generation of Christians possessed of the belief that they should live to see the second coming, that it is here a.s.sumed as a matter of course; and their fate, as near and immediate, is used to ill.u.s.trate the darker and more mysterious subject of the fate of those already dead. That vision of 'the last man,' which now seems so remote as to live only in poetic fiction, was to the Apostle an awful reality; but it is brought forward only to express the certainty that, even here, a change must take place, the greatest that imagination can conceive."--Vol. I. p. 398.

That this belief, where held at all, should be paramount and absorbing, follows from its very nature. Accordingly, St. Paul, as Mr. Jowett remarks, makes even the essence of the Gospel to consist in it:--

"It appears remarkable, that St. Paul should make the essence of the Gospel consist, not in the belief in Christ, or in taking up the cross of Christ, but in the hope of his coming again. Such, however, was the faith of the Thessalonian Church; such is the tone and spirit of the Epistle. Neither in the Apostolic times, nor in our own, can we reduce all to the same type. One aspect of the Gospel is more outward, another more inward; one seems to connect with the life of Christ, another with his death; one with his birth into the world, another with his coming again. If we will not insist on determining the times and the seasons, or on knowing the manner how, all these different ways may lead us within the veil. The faith of modern times embraces many parts and truths; yet we allow men, according to their individual character, to dwell on this truth or that, as more peculiarly appropriate to their nature. The faith of the early Church was simpler and more progressive, pausing in the same way on a particular truth, which the circ.u.mstances of the world or the Church brought before them."--Vol. I. p. 46.

Only it is not on "a particular _truth_," but on a particular _error_, that the "pause" of faith was here made;--an error found or implied, as our author observes, "in almost every book of the New Testament; in the discourses of our Lord himself, as well as in the Acts of the Apostles; in the Epistles of St. Paul, no less than in the Book of the Revelation." Mr. Jowett does not evade the difficulty. In an admirable essay on this special subject, he frankly states the facts, traces their influence on the early Church, accepts them as among the limits which human conditions impose on Divine revelation, and shows from them, how, even in G.o.d's highest teachings, he leaves much truth to be drawn forth from time and experience.

"It is a subject," he says, "from which the interpreter of Scripture would gladly turn aside. For it seems as if he were compelled to say at the outset, 'that St. Paul was mistaken, and that in support of his mistake he could appeal to the words of Christ himself.' Nothing can be plainer than the meaning of those words, and yet they seem to be contradicted by the very fact, that, after eighteen centuries, the world is as it was. In the words which are attributed, in the Epistle of St. Peter, to the unbelievers of that day, we might truly say that, since the fathers have fallen asleep, all things remain the same from the beginning. Not only do 'all things remain the same,' but the very belief itself (in the sense in which it was held by the first Christians) has been ready to vanish away."--Vol. I. p. 96.

It is the infirmity of human nature--an infirmity irremovable by inspiration--to translate eternal truth into forms of time, to throw color into the invisible till it can be seen, and look into any given infinity till finite shapes appear within it, and it is felt as infinite no more. The soul tries, as it were, every apparent path, from spiritual apprehension to scientific knowledge, from deep insight to clear foresight, from perception of what G.o.d _is_ to vaticination of what he _does_; and abides alone with the Holy Presence, that will not tell His counsels, but is ever there himself. From the world of Divine reality into that of transient phenomena, there is no bridge found as yet; and only He, whose footsteps need no ground, can pa.s.s across. We know somewhat on both sides; but the chasm between vindicates its perpetuity against all invasion. _Vision_ for faith; _prevision_ for science:--this seems to be the inviolable allotment of gifts by the Father of lights.

And whoever overlooks this rule, and, inspired with discernment of what absolutely is, ventures to p.r.o.nounce what relatively will be, embodies his truth in a form whence it must again be disengaged. The deepest spiritual insight is ineffectual to teach _past_ history; it is equally so to teach _future_ history. The moment you lose sight of this fact, and expect the sons of G.o.d to _predict_ for you, you confound inspiration with divination, and will pay the double penalty of missing the truth they have, and being disappointed at that which they have not.

It is not always much otherwise with themselves; the light which they _are_, they do not _see_; and that which shapes itself before them, and becomes the _object_ of their minds, is but the shadow of human things, deepened and sharpened, perhaps also misplaced, by the preternatural intensity. By its very inwardness and closeness to the soul's centre, G.o.d's Spirit may express itself chiefly in the unconscious att.i.tudes and manifestations of the mind; especially as it is these that often leave the most ineffaceable impressions of character upon others, and may, therefore, be the vehicle of a more life-giving power than any purposed teaching or more conscious authority. The disappointment of an avowed prediction, or the error of an elaborated doctrine, no more affects the Divine inspiration at the heart of Christianity, than the miscalculations and failure of the Crusades disprove their Providential function in the historical education of mankind. Mr. Jowett takes up the question from another side, and shows how the faith in a future life, though not directly _given_, necessarily disengaged itself in the end from the expectation of the coming of Christ.

"We naturally ask, why a future life, as distinct from this, was not made a part of the first preaching of the Gospel?--why, in other words, the faith of the first Christians did not exactly coincide with our own? There are many ways in which the answer to this question may be expressed. The philosopher will say, that the difference in the mode of thought of that age and our own rendered it impossible, humanly speaking, that the veil of sense should be altogether removed.

The theologian will admit that Providence does not teach men that which they can teach themselves. While there are lessons which it immediately communicates, there is much which it leaves to be drawn forth by time and events. Experience may often enlarge faith; it may also correct it. No one can doubt that the faith and practice of the early Church, respecting the admission of the Gentiles, were greatly altered by the fact that the Gentiles themselves flocked in; 'the kingdom of heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by force.' In like manner, the faith respecting the coming of Christ was modified by the continuance of the world itself. Common sense suggests that those who were in the first ecstasy of conversion, and those who after the lapse of years saw the world unchanged and the fabric of the Church on earth rising around them, could not regard the day of the Lord with the same feeling. While to the one it seemed near and present, at any moment ready to burst forth, to the other it was a long way off, separated by time, and as it were by place, a world beyond the stars, yet, strangely enough, also having its dwelling in the heart of man, as it were the atmosphere in which he lived, the mental world by which he was surrounded. Not at once, but gradually, did the cloud clear up, and the one mode of faith take the place of the other. Apart from the prophets, though then beyond them, springing up in a new and living way in the soul of man, corrected by long experience, as the 'fathers one by one fell asleep,' as the hopes of the Jewish race declined, as ecstatic gifts ceased, as a regular hierarchy was established in the Church, the belief in the coming of Christ was transformed from being outward to becoming inward, from being national to becoming individual and universal,--from being Jewish to becoming Christian."--Vol. I. p. 99.

With the Apostle Paul, however, the "coming of Christ" occupies the place of our "future life"; the _living_ ma.s.s of disciples, waiting till then for the "redemption of their bodies," fill the foreground and largest s.p.a.ce in the scene; the rising of the dead is the subsidiary fact, needful to the completeness of the gift of life in Christ. On this crisis, supposed to be so near, his eye was exclusively fixed whenever he spoke of the Christian's "salvation"; and could he have been told that no such crisis would come, that, for fifty generations, the present order of the world would vindicate its stability, we cannot imagine what shape his faith would have a.s.sumed; whether he would have made light of all these centuries, said that with the Eternal "a thousand years are but as one day," and still opposed to one another the a??? ??t?? and the a??? e????; or whether he would have found that the distinction was evanescent, and the kingdom of G.o.d was to be not sent hither, but to be created here; or how, in either case, he would have represented to himself the state of the innumerable dead. These are questions which did not arise for him; and it were vain to conjecture his solution. He is engaged with other problems;--all, indeed, having reference to that never doubted crisis, and arising out of its manifold relations, yet so treated by him as to detach them unawares from their origin, and give them a permanent place in the religious consciousness of men. _Who_ were to be the subjects of that salvation? How were they _qualified_? By what act of G.o.d's, and what temper of their own, to reach the blessing?

What present _a.s.surance_ had they of this approaching good? It is in dealing with these questions that St. Paul darts from his objective theology into the deepest recesses of human experience, and fetches into expression spiritual truths that transcend their incidental occasion, and will remain valid while there is a soul in man.

In the Apostle's habit of thought there is a certain antique _realism_ which renders many of his doctrines and reasonings almost unpresentable before a modern imagination. With our sharp notions of personality, of the entire insulation of each mind as an individual ent.i.ty, of the ant.i.thesis of inner self to the outer everything, we are quite out of St. Paul's lat.i.tude, and shall be perpetually taking for figures and personification what had a literal earnestness for him. The universe is with him full of Agents that for us are only Attributes,--the theatre of certain _real_ principles (_i. e._ principles having existence independent of us), that carry out their tendencies and history among themselves, and upon and through individual men, as organs or media of their activity. Thus, _Sin_ is neither the mere voluntary unfaithfulness of the transgressor, nor the person of the tempter; but _both_ of these; and that not apart from one another or alternately, but blended together under the conception of a universal element of evil, having its objective focus in Satan and its subjective manifestation in man. In like manner its opposite, _Righteousness_ (Justification), is not exclusively human rect.i.tude, or the Divine justice, or _quasi_-goodness subst.i.tuted for genuine; but less ethical than the first, less forensic than the last, and more ontological than either; that element, we may say, in the essence of G.o.d which sets man at one with Him, and is the common ground of their harmonious relation. Around these two contrasted principles, others, equally conceived as real elements, and misunderstood as mere attributes or phenomena, group themselves on either side. With the former is _Death_,--the pair being _gemini_, not simply joined by decree of G.o.d in time, but inseparable _in rerum natura_, co-ordinates by physical necessity; and _Flesh_, the material or medium that furnishes the endowments of sense, and instinct, and the natural will, and affords to Sin its seat and hold upon us; and _Law_, the discriminating light that parts the mixture of good and evil, and, on entering into us, brings the slumbering evil into the conscious state, and so makes it sin relatively to us, and simultaneously shows us the good without adding to the force for producing it. With the latter--Righteousness--are enjoined _Life_, the positive opposite of Death, and, like it, a function of the moral as well as the natural const.i.tution, the immortal energy inherent in sinless being; and _Spirit_, the absolute essence of G.o.d, present as the vivifying source of whatever transcends nature,--a faint susceptibility, felt only to be overmastered, in the sons of Adam,--a conquering power, coalescing with the personality itself, in Christ and his disciples,--and a spontaneous flow of higher life seizing on converted men as organs of its charismata; and _Faith_,--the opposite of Law,--the pa.s.sing out of ourselves to embrace unseen relations, to make conscious appropriation of the Spirit, and thus enter into union with Christ and G.o.d. Even this most subjective of all the great principles of the Apostle's theology, is more than a mere private and personal act. As common to all the disciples,--the simultaneous gaze that connects them as a whole with Christ,--its single threads pa.s.s out and become a converging web. As something other than the act (of obedience) which men were under bond to render, it is a new inst.i.tute of G.o.d, and, relatively to them, reads itself off as _Grace_. As opposed to Law, in which there is a delivery of the Divine will _into_ men, it involves a _drawing_ by Divine love of an affection _out of_ men. And under all these aspects it acquires something of that indeterminate character, subjective and objective at once, which the a.s.sociated elements possess in a much higher degree. The same mode of thought is traceable in another form. The Apostle exhibits the providential scheme of the human race by distributing them into two successive _gentes_,--the earthy or natural, the heavenly or spiritual; and lays down all the predicates of each direct from the personal history of their respective heads, Adam and Christ. Whatever is true of the founder is considered as known of the followers; the phenomena of his being spread themselves inclusively to theirs. He is regarded, not simply as a representative individual, while they are the represented individuals; but as a _type_ of being within which they are contained, and which in its history and vicissitudes carries them hither and thither. Condemnation and redemption take place by _Kinds_, and fall on particular persons in virtue of their partaking of these kinds. Settle the attributes of the species, as found in its archetype, and you know what to say of individuals. It is not difficult to understand this way of thinking so long as the Apostle applies it, as a naturalist might, to the _Adamic gens_; and argues, that, being made of earthy materials (??????), and having the focus of personality in sa??, with no adequate counterpoise of p?e?a, it is the seat of sin and death. But it is less easy to follow the Apostle's meaning when he similarly identifies Christians with Christ, and transfers, or rather extends, to them all the great characteristics of his existence. They are crucified to the world. They are "all _dead_"

with him; they are "buried with him" in baptism; they are "risen with him"; their "life is hid with him in G.o.d." And while this is true of _living_ disciples, he is no less "the first-fruits of them that sleep"; his resurrection is but the first pulsation of an act that next proceeds to theirs, and then completes the transformation of the living. All this is meant for more than rhetorical a.n.a.logy. With Christ, and in Christ, took place a re-const.i.tution of humanity. Of the new man, he was the ideal and archetype; inverting the proportions of sa?? and p?e?a, and having his essence and personality in the latter, so as to render sin an unrealized possibility and death a transitory accident. The spirit in him which evinced its life-giving power in raising him from the dead, is no more limited to his individuality, than flesh and blood were the attributes of Adam only.

It spreads to the whole family of souls, springing up into his kindred; it flows into them as they look up to him in faith, and are reborn to him; it repeats in them the fruits it produced in him,--the sacrifice of self,--the dying away of pa.s.sion and pride,--the heavenly love that darts upon the wing whither the bleeding feet of conscience fail to climb,--together with many "a gift less excellent," of healing and of tongues. The consciousness of this new heart, set free with Divine affections, is immediate evidence of their union with Christ, of the Real Presence of his Spirit within them, of their substantive incorporation into his essence, and therefore of a restored harmony and even oneness with G.o.d. To what extent the Apostle conceived that this transformation of nature, by partners.h.i.+p in the properties of the heavenly Christ, might be carried in the living disciple, it is not possible to say. It amounted to "a new creation"; and among the "old things" that had already "pa.s.sed away," he probably included more than the moral habits and feelings of the unconverted state; and conceived that the same spirit by which these died out was purifying also the bodily organism of the believer, and leavening it with antiseptic preparation for its final invest.i.ture with immortality. That last "change," like the resurrection itself, is not regarded as an external miracle, suddenly forced on an uncongenial material by mere Almightiness; but as the last and crowning stage of an internal development, whose principle had long been active,--the emergence from all entanglement with "flesh and blood" of that spiritual element which in Jesus "could not be holden of death," and which, dwelling in his disciples, already deadened and damped the vitality of the sa??, and would at last quicken the s?a with imperishable life. Thus it is that "Christ" is not to St. Paul an historical individual, but a generic nature,--the archetype of a spiritual species, sharing his attributes and repeating his experience.

Cleared as a stage for these contending principles, the universe witnesses their co-existence and antagonism from the beginning to the end of time.

The great drama has two main acts, and the cross of Christ divides them.

The first is a descending period, acc.u.mulating the force of evil to a pitch of frightful triumph. The second is an ascending period, at whose goal the last enemy is gone.

In the opening scene of the first, extending from Adam to Moses, both Flesh and Spirit were there; not yet, however, in conflict; but the latter sleeping as a mere susceptibility, and the former having its own way in the instinctive life of man. The state was not one which, had the comparison been made, would have accorded with the Divine will. It was therefore really, though unconsciously, a reign of Sin, as was proved by the presence of Sin's inseparable sign,--the generations _died_.

The next scene was marked by the introduction of _Law_. The effects were, to bring into full consciousness the sin before unmarked, and so make it exceedingly sinful; to set man at variance with himself by giving him discernment, and quickening his longing and his fear, without any new spring of force; and actually to multiply transgressions by enumerating and suggesting them.

Hence, at the close of the period, an utter rotting away of human society, and a confirmed moral incapacity of the widest sweep. The spontaneous law of nature and the written law of Moses being equally set at naught by Gentile and by Jew, any promises G.o.d might have given fell through, from human breach of the conditions. This was the moment seized for inst.i.tuting a new creation; the promised Messiah of the Jews being the vehicle of its accomplishment, and the link of connection between the old and the new.

All the Messianic conditions were _fulfilled_,--the right tribe, the right family, the right personal marks and characteristics. But they were also _transcended_. Along with the human infirmities and liabilities was present, in this archetype of a new race, the Spirit in such full measure as to const.i.tute his proper self, or at least win that centre by complete victory over nature and temptation and surrender of all he had and was to a Divine Love. As he had baffled and held off Sin, Death had so far no business with him. Yet what was to be done? for there were conflicting claims upon him. Sinless in himself, he was of a sin-doomed type, the _likeness_ of sinful flesh (????a sa???? ?a?t?a?), and therefore liable to the incidents of such a race. This was at least his property by nature. At the same time, he was internally and essentially of the opposite type; the image of G.o.d (e???? t?? Te??), and so, foreign to the mortal fate, at once imperishable and life-giving. In the person of this double nature, the contest between the antagonists must come to an issue; and while _both_ gain their due, it is the last triumph of evil, the first opening of eternal good. Sin, recognizing in his suffering and mortal frame its own physical counterpart and shadow, strikes him with death, exerting for that end its own "strength" and instrument, "the Law."

But in thus carrying its course upon the guiltless, it overreached and spent itself; and the Law, lending itself to such an act, fell into self-contradiction, and disappeared in suicide. He died, therefore, in virtue of what was really foreign to him, as _representative_ of a Sin which was not his, but which yet involved him, as human, in sorrow and mortality. But no sooner had this happened, than his "Righteousness"

vindicated its power. He came out of death, which _could not keep_ one so holy; and now, escaped from nationality, and placed aloft as the ideal of the new humanity, his vivifying spirit penetrates the heart of men below, and, taking them on the side of faith and love instead of will, kindles a divine fire that burns up the dead elements of the "old man," and wraps the "heavenly places" and the earthly in a common blaze. By spiritual affiliation with him, his disciples enter the essence of all holy and immortal natures. And so it comes to pa.s.s, that, through the incidence of sorrow and death in the wrong place, an objective power of "righteousness" is set free, that reconciles mankind with G.o.d, and restores them to sanct.i.ty and life. The past and the future of humanity were concentrated, just at the turning point between them, in one person; the natural element, bearing the burden of the past, perished and fell away; the spiritual and divine principle, containing the germ of the future, a.s.serted its inextinguishable life; and from heaven evinced its self-multiplying power, making him only "the first-born of many brethren."

Thus was the second act initiated, which also presented two successive scenes. During the first, the Christ was still in heaven; and his Spirit on earth, having the community of disciples for its organ or "body,"

stood in presence still of the opposing powers. In the world, it encroached upon the province of evil continually, and reclaimed a citadel here and there. In the Church, if it infused as yet no _perfect_ grace, it left its "earnest" everywhere;--ecstatic gifts and mystic insights; hearts set free from pride and scorn, and brought to the meekness and gentleness of Christ; the self-seeking will surrendered; the anxious conscience led to trust; the tangles of thought smoothed out by a wisdom not its own; and outward distinctions reduced to naught by faith, and hope, and charity. Nevertheless, Satan disturbed the ??s??

still; and even the children of the Spirit were but prisoners yet, and felt the tent of nature but a poor abode. They had yet to wait for their full adoption; when the tabernacle in which they groaned being dissolved, they should be invested with an unwasting frame.

This was reserved for the final scene, the coming and the reign of Christ. At this culminating crisis, the antagonism which in Adam was as yet unfelt from the ascendency of nature, was to die out and cease on the absolute triumph of the Spirit. Physically, death was to disappear; the departed being finally reinstated in life, and the living "clothed upon" with their new garment ere yet they were stripped of the old.

Morally, the remnant of inner strife and temptation, that even the faith of saints might leave unappeased, would pa.s.s away, aspiration be harmonized with achieving power, and in conscious presence of the objects of deepest affection and reverence the sighs of separation would cease. As soon as resistance was over, and there was nothing to subdue, the separate function of G.o.d's redeeming and sanctifying Spirit would find no work; "the kingdom would be resigned to the Father"; "the Son would be subject"; and "the Trinity would cease."

Whether the Apostle's vision of trust was really of universal success, and included even those who should still be found astray at last, is a question difficult of direct determination; but not very doubtful when tried by the general scope of his doctrine. Mr. Jowett's judgment, given in the following pa.s.sage, truly seizes, we think, the feeling of St. Paul. The author is commenting on the parallel drawn between Adam and Christ, especially on the words, "As by one man's transgression sin entered into the world, and death by sin," and has shown that they do _not_ teach any imputation of Adam's sin.

"It is hardly necessary to ask the further question, what meaning we can attach to the imputation of sin and guilt which are not our own, and of which we are unconscious. G.o.d can never see us other than we really are, or judge us without reference to all our circ.u.mstances and antecedents. If we can hardly suppose that he would allow a fiction of mercy to be interposed between ourselves and him, still less can we imagine that he would interpose a fiction of vengeance. If he requires holiness before he will save, much more, may we say in the Apostle's form of speech, will he require sin before he dooms us to perdition.

Nor can anything be in spirit more contrary to the living consciousness of sin of which the Apostle everywhere speaks, than the conception of sin as dead, unconscious evil, originating in the act of an individual man, in the world before the flood.

"On the whole, then, we are led to infer that in the Augustinian interpretation of this pa.s.sage, even if it agree with the letter of the text, too little regard has been paid to the extent to which St.

Paul uses figurative language, and to the manner of his age in interpretations of the Old Testament. The difficulty of supposing him to be allegorizing the narrative of Genesis is slight, in comparison with the difficulty of supposing him to countenance a doctrine at variance with our first notions of the moral nature of G.o.d.

"But when the figure is dropped, and allowance is made for the manner of the age, the question once more returns upon us,--'What is the Apostle's meaning?' He is arguing, we see, ?at a????p??, and taking his stand on the received opinions of his time. Do we imagine that his object is no other than to set the seal of his authority on these traditional beliefs? The whole a.n.a.logy, not merely of the writings of St. Paul, but of the entire New Testament, would lead us to suppose that his object was not to rea.s.sert them, but to teach, through them, a new and n.o.bler lesson. The Jewish Rabbis would have spoken of the first and second Adam; but which of them would have made the application of the figure to all mankind? A figure of speech it remains still, an allegory after the manner of that age and country, but yet with no uncertain or ambiguous interpretation. It means that 'G.o.d hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth'; that 'he hath concluded all under sin, that he may have mercy upon all'; that life answers to death, the times before to the times after the revelation of Jesus Christ. It means that we are one in a common sinful nature, which, even if it be not derived from the sin of Adam, exists as really as if it were. It means that we shall be made one in Christ by the grace of G.o.d, in a measure here, more fully and perfectly in another world. More than this it also means, and more than language can express, but not the weak and beggarly elements of Rabbinical tradition. We may not enc.u.mber St. Paul with the things which he 'destroyed.' What it means further is not to be attained by theological distinctions, but by putting off the old man and putting on the new man."--Vol. II. p. 166.

On surveying the picture of time and the history of humanity that lay beneath St. Paul's eye, the question naturally arises, What is its significance and value for us? Manifestly not those of an absolute guide through the labyrinthine depths of the Divine counsels. "We can scarcely imagine what would have been the feeling of St. Paul, could he have foreseen that later ages would look not to the faith of Abraham in the Law, but to the Epistle to the Romans, as the highest authority on the doctrine of justification by faith; or, that they would have regarded the allegory of Hagar and Sarah, in the Galatians, as a difficulty to be resolved by the inspiration of the Apostle."[67] We cannot say of him less than Mr. Jowett says of a greater than Paul, that in many places "his teaching is on a level with the modes of thought of his age." (I.

97.) The ultimate point towards which all the lines of his expectations converged, and all the history of the past appeared to gaze, we know to have had no existence where he placed it; and as the whole scheme was laid out to lead up to this, it might seem to disappear as the fabric of a dream. Yet it is not so; and the very fear implies that we look in the wrong place for the permanent amid the evanescent in the Gospel.