is right.' A Hampden or a Washington would, accordingly, have been to Paul the enemy of providential design in legislation and government; and liberty was to him so vain a sound, that he accepted slavery as a divine institution, and recommended all men, whether freemen or slaves, to remain in the same social position in which they had become converts to Christianity. These views, so fatal to individual and national progress, are obviously the result of faith in the impending advent of the Messiah; but can modern statesmen and philanthropists accept the social and political theories of Paul as infallible wisdom?

Pauline denunciation of the flesh-the only medium through which we know even the noblest of our race— has been accepted for centuries as divine revelation, and yet it simply reproduces the teaching of Socrates, as it reaches us through his illustrious interpreter, Plato. In the 'Phædo,'' we read that the soul and body exist under conditions of mutual hostility; that the true philosopher endeavours to attain to spiritual purification by separating the soul as much as possible from so great an evil as the body; and that we shall attain to greater knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, in this life, by avoiding all unnecessary communion with the flesh, and keeping ourselves uncontaminated by its influence, until finally released by the Deity. When, therefore, Paul affirms that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God,' he speaks as a disciple, not of Jesus, but of Socrates, and engrafts on Christianity a philosophic superstition, as untrue to the constitution of man as to the school of Galilee. For, has not science taught us,

11 Cor. vii. 20-24.

2 Phædo ix.-xii.

in modern times, that moral and intellectual excellence has no existence apart from the condition of our cerebral tissues; and that the slightest injury to the organ of mental function may transform saints to satyrs, and genius to imbecility?

Paul, having thus become imbued with the ascetic mysticism which teaches that the soul, as a spiritual essence, is degraded by its companionship with the body, and should be held in subjection through the mortification of the flesh, rejoiced in bodily suffering, that he might fill up on his part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ.' With language such as this in their infallible Bibles, how can Protestants disavow the hair shirts and whipcord of their Roman Catholic brethren? And does not this great Apostle of asceticism stand confessed as the patron of future saints, who degraded humanity with naked, unwashed, and ulcerated bodies, exposed in pestilential marshes, or pilloried on ascending columns ?

The visions of Paul did not terminate with his conversion. He was subsequently caught up,' he knew not whether in the body or in the spirit, to the third heaven, and heard unspeakable words unlawful for human utterance.1 Enoch also was snatched up by a cloud,'' into the heavens, and records the wonders of his celestial journey; but Paul more modestly declines to depict the marvels of Paradise, and thus we are happily rescued from the obligation of accepting his spiritual hallucinations as divine revelation.

Paul firmly believed in evil spirits, and accepted Satan as the God of this world." He declared that the 3 2 Cor. iv. 4.

1 2 Cor. xii. 2-4.

2 Enoch xxxix. 3.

sacrifices of the Gentiles were offered to demons, and thus, in accepting Olympian phantoms as spiritual powers, practically admitted a plurality of gods.1

In the Epistle to the Romans, Paul declares that 'we have been discharged from the Law;'2 but according to that addressed to the Corinthians this emancipation is limited to men; for women are to be in subjection, as also saith the Law,' and are to form their religious convictions second-hand through their husbands, to whom they are to be as docile as the Church to Christ.* Women of the nineteenth century cannot, therefore, even approach the question of the equality of the sexes without first disavowing the inspiration and infallibility of an important Pauline epistle.

But let hope revive in female breasts. All this is changed when we turn to the Epistle to the Galatians, and learn the enfranchisement of all through faith, which sweeps away every distinction between Jews and Gentiles, bond and free, male and female, for all are one man in Christ Jesus. If Paul was really the author of all these flagrant contradictions, he obviously kept no copies of his correspondence; and Luke was so careless or incompetent a secretary, that he failed to assist the memory of his great master, who thus became the object of his own anathema through conflicting gospels."

The most famous of Pauline doctrines is Justification by Faith, involving the obvious fallacy that guilt or merit can attach to opinions which, whether true or false, have been attained through the exercise of our natural faculties as if the wilful perversion of human reason,

1 1 Cor. x. 20.
4 Eph. v. 22-24.

2 Rom. vii. 6.
5 Gal. iii. 28.

$ 1 Cor. xiv. 34, 35. 6 Gal. i. 8.

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 inperil 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, 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.