have the courage, then, to say that such words may be writ, but are not holy, wherever they occur? Nor can Paul's instructions about the veiling of women and the silence of women in the churches be longer regarded as good ethics, at least for our day. The good sense of modern Christians has practically blotted those words out of our Bibles. Even men whose boast is that they "believe every word of the Bible, from the first verse of Genesis to the last of Revelation" openly approve of women addressing large assemblies on religious topics. They act precisely as if Paul had never written those words—which is, of course, the only sensible thing to do, though it accords ill with their professions of belief in Paul's inspiration and infallibility. For the reasoning by which he supports his commands, if it gave them any authority when he issued them, gives them permanent validity to those who accept the historicity of Genesis. For Paul distinctly bases his words on the principle that woman is man's natural inferior and subordinate, (') created after him and for him, and that her spiritual inferiority is manifest in the fact that she was first in the great transgression of Eden. (2) Milton caught Paul's spirit exactly when he wrote of Adam and Eve, He for God only, she for God in him. We repudiate both Milton and Paul. We no longer believe that woman is in any sense man's inferior, or that man is in any sense woman's "head." We do not believe that the family is a little despotism, of which man is ruler by divine right, and wife and children are his obedient subjects. The divine right of husbands has gone into the limbo whither the divine right of priests and the divine right of kings preceded it. There are no "divine rights" among men. Christianity is the religion of democracy, of equal rights for all. (1) 1 Cor. 11:1-16; 14:34-36; Tit. 2:5. (2) 1 Tim. 2:11-15. And it is to be further noted that even when Paul's ethics are apparently identical with those of Jesus, closer scrutiny discloses a fundamental difference. He exhorts the Romans not to seek revenge against those who have injured them; but the ground on which he bases his exhortation is that God will avenge them; since he quotes (not quite accurately) as his authority from the "Song of Moses" in Deuteronomy, Vengeance is mine, and recompense. (1) The ground on which Jesus urges men to forego vengeance is precisely the reverse of this-not because God will avenge, but because God forgives and we must forgive to be like God. Of Paul's exegesis of the Old Testament in general it must be said that its authority, and often its correctness, is quite repudiated by the scholarship of our day. It is based on the Septuagint, not on the original Hebrew, and is such as he learned from Hebrew rabbis, whose interpretations were often logically as well as grammatically unsound, and absurdly allegorical. A crucial case is the apostle's argument to the Galatians that the promise to Abraham, "to him and to his seed," meant Christ, because God said "seed" and not "seeds."(2) But the word in the Hebrew, though singular in form is a collective noun, like our word "sheep," and may mean one or a multitude. The context shows clearly that the promise related to all the descendants of Abraham, "and I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth." (3) Paul's exegesis is not even doubtful; it is quite impossible. On the other hand, his allegorizing of the story of Hagar and the two children of Abraham (*) is not impossible-it is merely absurd. (1) Deut. 32:35. CHAPTER VII THE MAKING OF PAUL THE APOSTLE I PAUL and Jesus were as unlike in spirit as in heredity and environment. No two human personalities could well be more dissimilar; hardly a single quality, bodily or mental, is common to the two. The notable thing in the personality of Jesus is the exquisite balance of his faculties and qualities. His spirit was at once strong and restful; he was masculine without brutality, gentle without weakness. Normally equable and tranquil, without a trace of irritability or impatience, he was yet capable of fiery indignation. Yet at the summit of his passion he never loses his poise, his sense of proportion. His speech is calm and measured for the most part, yet when occasion demands it can be vitriolic and burn into the conscience as no other human speech can. He was an idealist, but not a dreamer; an enthusiast but no fanatic. The bodily powers of Jesus were as remarkable as the spiritual. His vitality is wonderful; he surpassed in endurance his disciples, men inured to labor, of exceptional toughness of physique, and though often wearied he was never ill. This vitality, no less than his faith in God, kept him from discouragement. His clarity of vision is surpassed only by his steadfastness of hope. He began each day with fresh and exultant spirit. He was the great Optimist, an optimist without an illusion, who desired all men to share his present joy and coming triumph. He was the one man who wanted nothing for himself, everything for others. In every respect he seems the normal man, a human being raised to the nth power. In contrast we need not take too literally Paul's ironical self-depreciation, "his bodily presence is weak and his speech despicable";(1) but the fact that the people of Lystra, supposing them to be gods, called Barnabas Jupiter and Paul Mercury, (2) is sufficient warrant for the conclusion that Paul was by no means of imposing physique. And while few have surpassed him in keenness of intellect, he lacked the temperamental balance of Jesus. Where the one was conspicuous for poise and power, a placid and unruffled spirit, the other stands forth a fiery, tempestuous, impulsive, vehement, volcanic nature. Jesus was a Seer of God, not a philosophizer about God. From an early age he became conscious of a peculiar relation to his Father, and his spiritual experiences were an uninterrupted process of development, conditioned by this consciousness. There was no moral crisis, no "conversion" in his life. He studied the Scriptures, to be sure, but as a revelation of his Father's mind and heart, not as a guide to salvation. He did not need the Law whose food it was to do his Father's will. Paul had no such relation to God, whom he feared more than he loved, because he believed (and never ceased to believe) that God's wrath is kindled against the evildoer, and he knew himself to be an evil-doer. To him, therefore, the Law was an inflexible code, an infallible rule of conduct, a means of salvation if its requirements could be met. And so he became "of the strictest sect of the Pharisees," differing from those against whom Jesus hurled his fiercest invectives only in possessing greater sincerity than they. But he was sincerely wrong, as he came at last to see, and perhaps dimly suspected all along. (1) 2 Cor. 10:10. (2) Acts 14:12. It was entirely in harmony with such a spiritual experience and such a theory of life that Saul became a fierce persecutor of the Christians. The more doubt he had concerning the foundations of his legalism, the more urgently he may have sought the punishment of those who offered a way of salvation apart from the Law. He was probably not the first, and certainly not the last, to seek an anodyne for intellectual difficulties in some form of activity. There are to-day Christians not a few who will tell you that the one best cure for all doubts is to engage strenuously in "Christian work." That may stifle doubt, it will never solve it, as Saul found. It is not difficult to comprehend the hatred of Saul and his Pharisaic fellows for Jesus and his teachings. To the good, pious Jews of his day, Jesus gave apparently quite sufficient reason for them to suspect him of hostility to their religion. It is true that he sometimes said that he had come not to destroy the Law, but to fulfil it, that is, both to render full obedience to it and to expound it in fulness of meaning. Yet how could his contemporaries reconcile this declaration with his conduct at other times? Did he not violate their Sabbath rules and justify his conduct? Did he not criticise their feasts and sacrifices and set aside their taboos? Did he not show disregard for practical piety by eating with unwashed hands, and was he not the unashamed associate of those accounted irreligious and even immoral? If his example should be followed, if his teaching and conduct should be accepted as the norm, what would become of Judaism and its traditions? Jesus had outraged the orthodoxy, he had opposed and denounced the plutocracy, of his time. He was undermining both, threatening both with destruction. Under guise of completing the old, he was in reality establishing a new religion and a new social order. Pharisee and Sadducee saw this with equal clearness, and for a |