irresistible and delightful a manner the tedium or depression of common-place human life. And not only does it change the atmosphere of our spirits, making air, light, and movement where before was stagnation and gloom, but it also sensibly and powerfully increases our faculties of action. It is matter of the commonest remark how a timid man who is in love will show courage, or an indolent man will show diligence. Nay, a timid man who would be only the more paralysed in a moment of danger by being told that it is his bounden duty as a man to show firmness, and that he must be ruined and disgraced for ever if he does not, will show firmness quite easily from being in love. An indolent man who shrinks back from vigorous effort only the more because he is told and knows that it is a man's business to show energy, and that it is shameful in him if he does not, will show energy quite easily from being in love. This, I say, we learn from the analogy of the most everyday experience ;-that a powerful attachment will give a man spirits and confidence which he could by no means call up or command of himself; and that in this mood he can do wonders which would not be possible to him without it.

We have seen how Paul felt himself to be for the sake of righteousness apprehended, to use his own expression,

by Christ. "I seek," he says, "to apprehend that for which also I am apprehended by Christ." This for which he is thus apprehended is,-still to use his own words, the righteousness of God; not an incomplete and maimed righteousness, not a partial and unsatisfying establishment of the law of the spirit, dominant to-day, deposed to-morrow, effective at one or two points, failing in a hundred; no, but an entire conformity at all points with the divine moral order, the will of God, and, in consequence, a sense of harmony with this order, of acceptance with God.

In some points Paul had always served this order with a clear conscience. He did not steal, he did not commit adultery. But he was at the same time, he says himself, "a blasphemer and a persecutor and an insulter," and the contemplation of Christ made him see this, impressed it forcibly upon his mind. Here was his greatness, and the worth of his way of appropriating Christ. We have seen how Calvinism, too,-Calvinism which has built itself upon St. Paul,-is a blasphemer, when it speaks of good works done by those who do not hold the Calvinist doctrine. There would need no great sensitiveness of conscience, one would think, to show

*Wherein is, perhaps, a more exact translation than for which; but the sense is the same.

that Calvinism has often been, also, a persecutor and an insulter. Calvinism, as well as Paul, professes to study Christ. But the difference between Paul's study of Christ and Calvinism's is this: that Paul by studying Christ got to know himself clearly, and to transform his narrow conception of righteousness; while Calvinism studies both Christ and Paul after him to no such good purpose.

These, however, are but the veriest rudiments of the history of Paul's gain from Christ, as the particular impression mentioned is but the veriest fragment of the total impression produced by the contemplation of Christ upon him. The sum and substance of that total impression may best be conveyed by two words,-without sin.

We must here revert to what we have already said of the importance, for sound criticism of a man's ideas, of the order in which his ideas come. For us, who approach Christianity through a scholastic theology, it is Christ's divinity which establishes his being without sin. For Paul, who approached Christianity through his personal experience, it was Christ's being without sin which established his divinity. The large and complete conception of righteousness to which he himself had slowly and late, and only by Christ's

help, awakened, in Christ he seemed to see existing absolutely and naturally. The devotion to this conception which made it meat and drink to carry it into effect, a devotion of which he himself was strongly and deeply conscious, he saw in Christ still stronger, by far, and deeper than in himself. But for attaining the righteousness of God, for reaching an absolute conformity with the moral order and with God's will, he saw no such impotence existing in Christ's case as in his own. For Christ, the uncertain conflict between the law in our members and the law of the spirit did not appear to exist. Those eternal vicissitudes of victory and defeat, which drove Paul to despair, in Christ were absent; smoothly and inevitably he followed the real and eternal order in preference to the momentary and apparent order. Obstacles outside him there were plenty, but obstacles within him there were none. He was led by the spirit of God; he was dead to sin, he lived to God; and in this life to God he persevered even to the cruel bodily death of the cross. As many as are led by the spirit of God, says Paul, are the sons of God. If this is so with even us, who live to God so feebly and who render such an imperfect obedience, how much more is he who lives to God entirely and who renders an unalterable obedience, the unique and only Son of God?

This is undoubtedly the main line of movement which Paul's ideas respecting Christ follow. He had been trained, however, in the scholastic theology of Judaism, just as we are trained in the scholastic theology of Christianity; would that we were as little embarrassed with our training as he was with his ! The Jewish theological doctrine respecting the eternal word or wisdom of God, which was with God from the beginning before the oldest of his works, and through which the world was created, this doctrine, which appears in the Book of Proverbs and again in the Book of Wisdom, Paul applied to Christ, and in the Epistle to the Colossians there is a remarkable passage+ with clear signs of his thus applying it. But then this metaphysical and theological basis to the historic being of Christ is something added by Paul from outside to his own essential ideas concerning Christ, something which fitted them and was naturally taken on to them; it is secondary, it is not an original part of his system, much less the ground of it. It fills a very different place in his system from the place which it fills in the system of John, who takes his starting-point from it. Paul's starting-point, it cannot be too often repeated, is the idea of righteousness; and his

*Prov. viii, 22-31; and Wisd. vii, 25-27.

+ Col. i, 15-17.