by the suppression of independent thought when adverse to alleged revelation, could possibly win the favour of the Deity!

When, in this age of intellectual freedom, we use the right of private judgment in rejecting the Immaculate Conception or the Infallibility of the Pope, we do not dread that even if these doctrines be true, we imperil our salvation by accepting the negative conclusions of reason. Can we, therefore, concur with Paul in assuming that the justification of his contemporaries was contingent on their belief in an unattested vision and a constructive resurrection, which assumed to them the form of illusory dreams? And if they even succeeded in silencing the voice of reason in the hope of salvation, had they not finally parted with all intellectual guarantees against the extremes of religious fanaticism?

Pauline faith, although passing beyond the simplicity of Galilee, paused so immeasurably short of the doctrines, dogmas, and mysteries of futurity that, if the great Apostle could have foreseen the medieval conditions of justification, not by faith, but by credulity, he would doubtless have used more caution in eulogising a Christian virtue so susceptible of transformation into a pernicious superstition; and the Christianity of futurity might thus have partially escaped the cumulative demands of ecclesiastical authority on the religious credulity of mankind.

The Reformation, in restoring the empire of reason within the realms of theology, practically destroyed the doctrine of Justification by Faith; for if its chiefs might legitimately exercise the right of private judgment by

rejecting the Eucharistic miracle, we also, in the fuller light of our generation, may disavow the Christian mysteries which they left untouched, and seek our justification, not by the faith which fosters credulity, but by the scepticism which worships truth.

Paul seems to have been absolutely ignorant of the true and simple story of Jesus whom he was determined to know, not as the unassuming Son of Man, but as the pretentious phantom of his own imagination,1 in which is hidden the mystery of God 2-as if the candid and straightforward Preacher of the Mount could possibly have had anything to conceal from the children of the Kingdom! The Pauline is not, therefore, the Galilean Messiah, but the ideal creation of metaphysical fanaticism, investing the truly human character of the Son of Man with a spiritual mysticism utterly foreign to his personal pretensions.

The Protean theosophy of Paul necessarily encouraged independent flights of speculative thought among aspiring converts, as confident as their master of their own divine inspiration; and, in due time, we therefore find the great founder of Gentile churches denouncing heresies and endeavouring to stifle freedom of discussion through the terrors of excommunication -a fatal precedent which lent the sanction of a great name to the sacerdotal intolerance of later generations!

3

Apart from the ascetic and metaphysical mysticism of Paul, we see in him a great moralist who, in studying the social obligations of mankind, gathers from the collective wisdom of Jew and Gentile the principles and practice forming the sum of contemporary progress in

1 2 Cor. v. 16.

2 Col. ii. 2, 3.

3 Rom. xvi. 17, 18.

the ethics of civilisation. Relying less than Jesus on the comprehensive rule of mutual beneficence, Paul more specifically inculcates the social duties of truth, honesty, justice, kindness, forbearance, forgiveness; and the personal virtues of industry, moderation, purity, endurance, and fortitude. Love he depicts, with enthusiastic eloquence, as greater than the gift of prophecy, the working of miracles, or the knowledge of mysteries-love known to us as charity, through the Authorised Version, but more correctly defined as the modern virtue of humanity, which, in its highest form, irrespective of creed or clime, grants to the calamities of every race the voice of sympathy and the boon of help.

But Pauline ethics virtually rest on a foundation of sand. Experience tells us that the family circle is the school of virtue. Paul, however, considered that both men and women are hampered in the career of saints by domestic ties, and would have all the faithful ascetic celebates as himself. This Pauline fanaticism, in due time, filled caves with anchorites, and cells with monks and nuns flying from the spiritual danger of being men and women, and transferring the business of life to the profane multitude guilty of adherence to the old-old fashions of Humanity, but willing to contribute to the support of unproductive piety, in exchange for the prayers of saints and the benedictions of hermits.

Modern Christians, conscious of the contrast between Pauline and Mosaic ethics, attribute the apparently abrupt transition to a new revelation: but in the long interval between the last of the prophets and the first of the apostles, the contact of Judaism with Persian,

Grecian, and Roman civilisation had modified ancient Hebrew barbarism; and the disciples of a Hillel or a Gamaliel were instructed in the borrowed wisdom of the Gentiles, under the patriotic illusion that they were listening to the traditional teaching of Moses.

Roman philosophy had passed, in the age of Paul, from speculation to practice; and his illustrious contemporary, Seneca, discoursed of religion and morality in terms which piety accepts from the lips of Paul as divine revelation. Seneca was not only hostile to Paganism, but depicted the Deity as the friend and father of mankind, inspiring them with good resolutions, never far off from the objects of his beneficent care, and worthy of the love and devotion of his children. In morals he taught the obligations of charity, kindness, and benevolence, through the comprehensive principle of the brotherhood of man. He maintained the rights of slaves, condemned the ravages of war, and denounced the wickedness of gladiatorial shows. He inculcated ascetic indifference to wealth, voluntary poverty, and unbroken fortitude in the presence of calamity, persecution, and death. It is true that Seneca did not practise what he preached; but his faults are chronicled by hostile critics, whilst the character of Paul is written by himself or his admiring friends. If he, as Seneca, had been exposed to the temptations of an imperial court, and had his biography written in the malignant spirit of a Dio Cassius, we should then, doubtless, recognise the merely human elements of his moral greatness.

The teaching of Paul was, therefore, the product of the ages; and its coincidence with the philosophy of Seneca tells us nothing more than that each had given

expression to the highest forms of contemporary thought, evolved from antecedent systems of philo: sophy, interpreted through the practical sense of duty preached by Cicero before the birth of Paul. These conclusions being, however, irreconcilable with the theory of Pauline inspiration, primitive Christians met the difficulty with a forged correspondence between Paul and Seneca, through which the teaching of the latter was placed to the credit of Christianity. But there is no proof that Seneca had ever heard of Paul, or borrowed from his gospel. Christians he necessarily confounded with Jews, for whom he ever expressed the same contempt with which his brother, Junius Gallio, as proconsul of Achaia, refused to listen to the accusers of Paul.1 The pious fiction of an evangelised Seneca having, therefore, perished in the light of modern criticism, we retain the conviction that Pauline ethics were naturally attainable by uninspired humanity.

Uncertainty as to the authorship of the Pauline epistles involves no doubt of the existence of a great Apostle, who accomplished a missionary work among the Gentiles, impossible to the simplicity of Galilee. There can be no question that an illustrious Jew, the disciple of Hebrew sages, exchanged the cherished convictions of his ancestral creed for his own ideal version of the Gospel of Jesus, joined the community of saints awaiting the second advent of the Messiah, founded a Pauline school of zealous disciples, and devoted all the resources of an inexhaustible enthusiasm to the propagation of the Faith among those Gentile communities which proved the germs of future Christian churches. But in the

1 Acts xviii. 12-16.