hearts. The old civilisation, with all the brilliant qualities which make many moderns regret its destruction, rested on too narrow a base. The woman and the slave were left out, the woman especially by the Greeks, and the slave by the Romans. Acute social inequalities always create pride, brutality, and widespread sexual immorality. And when the structure which maintained these inequalities is itself tottering, the oppressed classes begin to feel that they are unnecessary, and to hope for emancipation. When St Paul drew his lurid pictures of Pagan society steeped in unnatural abominations, without hope for the future, 'hateful and hating one another,' and then pointed to the little flock of Christians-among whom no one was allowed to be idle and no one to starve, and where family life was pure and mutual confidence full, frank and seldom abused-the woman and the slave, of whom Aristotle had spoken so contemptuously, flocked into his congregations, and began to organise themselves for that victory which Nietzsche thought so deplorable.

It is not necessary in this article to traverse again the familiar field of St Paul's missionary journeys. The first epoch, which embraces about fourteen years, had its scene in Syria and Cilicia, with a short tour in Cyprus and other parts of Asia Minor. The second period, which ends with the imprisonment in A.D. 58 or 59, is far more important. St Paul crosses into Europe; he works in Macedonia and Greece. Churches are founded in two of the great towns of the ancient world, Corinth and Ephesus. According to his letters, we must assume that he only once returned to Jerusalem from the great tour in the West, undertaken after the controversy with Peter; and that the object of this visit was to deliver the money which he had promised to collect for the poor 'saints' at Jerusalem. He intended after this to go to Rome, and thence to Spain-a scheme worthy of the restless genius of an Alexander. He saw Rome indeed, but as a prisoner. The rest of his life is lost in obscurity. The writer of the Acts does not say that the two years' imprisonment ended in his execution; and if it was so, it is difficult to see why such a fact should be suppressed. If the charge against him was at last dismissed, because the accusers did not think it worth while to come to Rome to prosecute it, St Luke's silence is more explicable.

In any case, we may regard it as almost certain that St Paul ended his life under a Roman axe during the reign of Nero.

'There is hardly any fact' (says Harnack) 'which deserves to be turned over and pondered so much as this, that the religion of Jesus has never been able to root itself in Jewish or even upon Semitic soil.' This extraordinary result is the judgment of history upon the life and work of St Paul. Jewish Christianity rapidly withered and died. According to Justin, who must have known the facts, Jesus was rejected by the whole Jewish nation with a few exceptions.' In Galilee especially, few, if any, Christian Churches existed. There are other examples, of which Buddhism is the most notable, of a religion gaining its widest acceptance outside the borders of the country which gave it birth. But history offers no parallel to the complete vindication of St Paul's policy in carrying Christianity over into the Graeco-Roman world, where alone, as the event proved, it could live. This is a complete answer to those who maintain that Jesus made no break with Judaism. Such a statement is only tenable if it is made in the sense of Harnack's words, that what Gentile Christianity did was to carry out a process which had in fact commenced long before in Judaism itself, viz. the process by which the Jewish religion was inwardly emancipated and turned into a religion for the world.' But the true account would be that Judaism, like other great ideas, had to die to live.' It died in its old form, in giving birth to the religion of civilised humanity, as the Greek nation perished in giving birth to Hellenism, and the Roman in creating the Mediterranean empire of the Cæsars and the Catholic Church of the Popes. The Jewish people were unable to make so great a sacrifice of their national hopes. With the matchless tenacity which characterises their race they clung to their tribal God and their temporal and local millennium. The disasters of A.D. 70 and of the revolt under Hadrian destroyed a great part of the race, and at last uprooted it from the soil of Palestine. But conservatism, as usual, has had its partial justification. Judaism has refused to acknowledge the religion of the civilised world as her legitimate child; but the nation has refused also to surrender its life. There are no more

Greeks and Romans; but the Jews we have always with us.

St Paul saw that the Gospel was a far greater and more revolutionary scheme than the Galilean apostles had dreamed of. In principle he committed himself from the first to the complete emancipation of Christianity from Judaism. But it was inevitable that he did not at first realise all that he had undertaken. And fortunately for us, the most rapid evolution in his thought took place during the ten years to which his extant letters belong. It is exceedingly interesting to trace his gradual progress away from Apocalyptic Messianism to a position very near that of the Fourth Gospel. The evangelist whom we call St John is the best commentator on Paulinism. This is one of the most important discoveries of recent New Testament criticism.

In the earliest Epistles-those to the Thessalonianswe have the naïve picture of Messiah coming on the clouds, which, as we now know, was part of the Pharisaic tradition. In the central group the Christology is far more complex. Besides the Pharisaic Messiah, and the records of the historical Jesus of Nazareth, we have now to reckon with the Jewish-Alexandrian idea of the generic, archetypal man, which is unintelligible without reference to the Platonic philosophy. Philo is here a great help towards understanding one of the most difficult parts of the Apostle's teaching. We have also, fully developed, the mystical doctrine of the Spirit of Christ immanent in the soul of the believer, a conception which was the core of St Paul's personal religion, and more than anything else emancipated him from apocalyptic dreams of the future. We have also a fourth conception, quite distinct from the three which have been mentioned-that of Christ as a cosmic principle, the instrument in creation and the sustainer of all life in the universe. We must again have recourse to Philo and his doctrine of the Logos, to understand the genesis of this idea, and to the Fourth Gospel to find it stated in clear philosophical form. In this second period, these theories about the Person of Christ are held concurrently, without any attempt to reconcile or systematise them. The eschatology is being seriously modified by the conception of a 'spiritual body,' which is prepared for us so soon as our 'outward

man' decays in death. The resurrection of the flesh is explicitly denied (1 Cor. xv, 50); but a new and incorruptible clothing' will be given to the soul in the future state. Already the fundamental Pharisaic doctrine of the two ages-the present age and that which is to come -is in danger. St Paul can now, like a true Greek, contrast the things that are seen, which are temporal, with the things that are not seen, which are eternal. The doctrine of the Spirit as a present possession of Christians brings down heaven to earth and exalts earth to heaven; the 'Parousia' is now only the end of the existing worldorder, and has but little significance for the individual. These ideas have not displaced the earlier apocalyptic language; but it is easy to see that the one or the other must recede into the background, and that the Pharisaic tradition will be the one to fade.

The third group of Epistles-Philippians, Colossians, and Ephesians-are steeped in ideas which belong to Greek philosophy and the Greek mystery-religions. It would be impossible to translate them into any Eastern language. The Rabbinical disputes with the Jews about justification and election have disappeared; the danger ahead is now from theosophy and the barbarised Platonism which was afterwards matured in Gnosticism. The teaching is even more Christocentric than before; and the Catholic doctrine of the Church as the body of Christ is more prominent than individualistic mysticism. The cosmology is thoroughly Johannine, and only awaits the name of the Logos.

This receptiveness to new ideas is one of the most remarkable features in St Paul's mind. Few indeed are the religious prophets and preachers whose convictions are still malleable after they have begun to govern the minds of others. St Paul had already proved that he was a man who would follow the gleam,' even when it called him to a complete breach with his past. And the further development of his thought was made much easier by the fact that he was no systematic philosopher, but a great missionary who was willing to be all things to all men, while his own faith was unified by his strength of purpose, and by the steady glow of the light within.

It is difficult for us to realise the life of his little communities without importing into the picture

features which belong to a later time. The organisation, such as it was, was democratic. The congregation as a whole exercised a censorship over the morals of its members, and penalties were inflicted by vote of the majority' (2 Cor. ii, 6). The family formed a group for religious purposes, and remained the recognised unit till the 2nd century. In Ignatius and Hermas we find the campaign against family churches in full swing. The meetings were like those of modern revivalists, and sometimes became disorderly. But of the moral beauty which pervaded the whole life of the brotherhoods there can be no doubt. Many of the converts had formerly led disreputable lives; but these were the most likely to appreciate the gain of being no longer outlaws, but members of a true family. The heathen were amazed at the kind of people whom the Christians admitted and treated like brethren; but in the first century scandals do not seem to have been frequent. Women, who were probably always the majority, enjoyed a consideration unknown by them before. The extreme importance attached by the early Church to sexual purity made it possible for them to mix freely with Christian men; indeed, the strange and perilous practice of a brother' and a virgin sharing the same house seems to have already begun, if this is the meaning of the obscure passage in 1 Cor. vii, 36.

Chastity and indifference to death were the two qualities in Christians which made the greatest impression on their neighbours. Galen is especially interesting on the former topic. But we must add a third characteristic —the cheerfulness and happiness which marked the early Christian communities. Joy' as a moral quality is a Christian invention, as a study of the usage of xapà in Greek will show. Even in Augustine's time the temper of the Christians, 'serena et non dissolute hilaris,' was one of the things which attracted him to the Church. The secret of this happy social life was an intense realisation of corporate unity among the members of the confraternity, which they represented to themselves as a 'mystery'-a mystical union between the Head and members of a 'body.' It is in this conception, and not in ritual details, that we are justified in finding a real and deep influence of the mystery-cults upon Christianity. Vol. 220.-No. 488.

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