THE PSYCHOLOGY OP ST. PAUL. 



07 



know that He to Whom he owed his all and for Whom he was 

 ready bo yield his all, was i he Jesus of the human name and the 

 human voice : the very Man of whom Cephas and John bore 

 earthly and personal witness; and to Whom he, no less than they, 

 would hear his human witness too. Thus by using the name 

 Jesus so perpetually and so confidently, he established the 

 solidarity of apostolic Christianity, and the historical character 

 of Christianity itself. 



No rationalising, whether sentimentally pious or clamorously 

 hostile, can get away from these findings ; and Christians are 

 entitled to hold fast to the doctrine of St. Paul as a witness no 

 less than as an apostle. 



The Pantheist fares no better than his brother the nation- 

 alist. The language of the apostle presents an insuperable bar 

 to him. Nowhere has the apostle stated more clearly the gulf 

 fixed between man and God by sin than in this epistle. No- 

 where has he stated with equal power and tenderness the 

 fulness and pathos of the reconciliation by which God has 

 bridged that gulf. The circumstances under which he was 

 writing made that doctrine very dear to his own soul. He was 

 acutely conscious of the divisions between men, even between 

 good men ; between races and sects ; within the Christian 

 community itself. He was charged by an absurd and fanatical 

 clique with being beside himself ; with being " an irreconcil- 

 able." He replied in the finest passage of all his writings by 

 exhibiting the glory of God as the Eeconciler. God became 

 a World-reconciler in Christ, not attributing to men their 

 trespasses ; and committing to chosen men the word and 

 function of reconciliation. The reconciliation was effected by 

 an august Person in an august transaction : " He made Him to 

 be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in 

 Him." 



The task of the Pantheist is to convince the human con- 

 science that everything is good : that there is no evil and 

 therefore no sin. That task he has tried to execute without 

 success for many ages. One of the chief obstacles in his way 

 is the language of St. Paul and the experience that lies within 

 that language. I have no doubt that the human conscience 

 is on the whole too sincerely faithful to truth, ever to adopt 

 the vagaries of Pantheism. It will at last come round to 

 the solid and awful realities so faithfully portrayed by the 

 apostle. 



The way out of the tangle of sin is by the door of reconcilia- 

 tion with God ; and St. Paul, more than any other man, has 



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