he enters the sphere of religion. Religion is that which binds and holds us to the practice of righteousness. We have accompanied Paul, and found him always treading solid ground, till he is brought to straits where a binding and holding power of this kind is necessary. Here is the critical point for the scientific worth of his doctrine. "Now at last," cries Puritanism, "the great apostle is about to become even as one of us; there is no issue for him now, but the issue we have always declared he finds. He has recourse to our theurgy of election, justification, substitution, and imputed righteousness." We will proceed to show that Paul has recourse to nothing of the kind.

II.

We have seen how Puritanism seems to come by its religion in the first instance theologically and from authority; Paul by his, on the other hand, psychologically and from experience. Even the points, therefore, in which they both meet, they have not reached in the same order or by the same road. The miserable sense of sin from unrighteousness, the joyful witness of a good conscience from righteousness, these are points in which Puritanism and St. Paul meet. They are facts of human nature and can be verified by science. But whereas Puritanism, so far as science is concerned, ends with these facts, and rests the whole weight of its antecedent theurgy upon the witness to it they offer, Paul begins with these facts, and has not yet, so far as we have followed him, called upon them to prove anything but themselves. The scientific difference, as we have

already remarked, which this establishes between Paul and Puritanism is immense, and is all in Paul's favour. Sin and righteousness, together with their eternal accompaniments of fear and hope, misery and happiness, can prove themselves; but they can by no means prove, also, Puritanism's history of original sin, election and justification.

Puritanism is fond of maintaining, indeed, that Paul's doctrines derive their sanction, not from any agreement with science and experience, but from his miraculous conversion, and that this conversion it was which in his own judgment gave to them their authority. But whatever sanction the miracle of his conversion may in his own eyes have lent to the doctrines afterwards propounded by Paul, it is clear that, for science, his conversion adds to his doctrines no force at all which they do not already possess in themselves. Paul's conversion is for science an event of precisely the same nature as the conversions of which the history of Methodism relates so many; events described, for the most part, just as the event of Paul's conversion is described, with perfect good faith, and which we may perfectly admit to have happened just in the manner related, without on that account attributing to those. who underwent them any source of certitude for a

scheme of doctrine which this doctrine does not on other and better grounds possess.

Surely this proposition has only to be clearly stated in order to be self-evident. The conversion of Paul is in itself an incident of precisely the same order as the conversion of Sampson Staniforth, a Methodist soldier in the campaign of Fontenoy. Staniforth himself relates his conversion as follows, in words which bear plainly marked on them the very stamp of good faith :—

"From twelve at night till two it was my turn to stand sentinel at a dangerous post. I had a fellowsentinel, but I desired him to go away, which he willingly did. As soon as I was alone, I knelt down and determined not to rise but to continue crying and wrestling with God till he had mercy on me. How long I was in that agony I cannot tell; but as I looked up to heaven I saw the clouds open exceeding bright, and I saw Jesus hanging on the cross. At the same moment these words were applied to my heart: 'Thy sins are forgiven thee.' All guilt was gone, and my soul was filled with unutterable peace: the fear of death and hell was vanished away. I was filled with wonder and astonishment. I closed my eyes, but the impression was still the same; and for about ten weeks, while I was awake, let me be where I would, the same appearance

was still before my eyes, and the same impression upon my heart, Thy sins are forgiven thee."

Not the narrative, in the Acts, of Paul's journey to Damascus, could more convince us, as we have said, of its own honesty. But this honesty makes nothing, as every one will admit, for the scientific truth of any scheme of doctrine propounded by Sampson Staniforth, which must prove itself and its own scientific value before science can admit it. Precisely the same is it with Paul's doctrine; and we repeat, therefore, that he and his doctrine have herein a great advantage over Puritanism, in that, so far as we have yet followed them, they, unlike Puritanism, rely on facts of experience and assert nothing which science cannot verify.

We have now to see whether Paul, in passing from the undoubted facts of experience, with which he begins, to his religion properly so called, abandons in any essential points of his teaching the advantage with which he started, and ends, as Puritanism commences, with a batch of arbitrary and unscientific assumptions.

We left Paul in collision with a fact of human nature, but in itself a sterile fact, a fact on which it is possible to dwell too long, although Puritanism, thinking this impossible, has remained intensely absorbed in the contemplation of it, and indeed has never properly got