HIS WRITINGS AND HIS CHARACTER
115. Principal Literary Period.-It
has been mentioned that the third missionary journey
closed with a flying visit to the churches of Greece.
This visit lasted several months; but in the Acts
it is passed over in two or three verses. Probably
it was little marked with those exciting incidents
which naturally tempt the biographer into detail.
Yet we know from other sources that it was nearly the
most important part of Paul’s life; for during
this half-year he wrote the greatest of all his Epistles,
that to the Romans, and two others only less important-that
to the Galatians and the Second to the Corinthians.
116. We have thus alighted on
the portion of his life most signalized by literary
work. Overpowering as is the impression of the
remarkableness of this man produced by following him,
as we have been doing, as he hurries from province
to province, from continent to continent, over land
and sea, in pursuit of the object to which he was
devoted, this impression is immensely deepened when
we remember that he was at the same time the greatest
thinker of his age, if not of any age, and, in the
midst of his outward labors, was producing writings
which have ever since been among the mightiest intellectual
forces of the world, and are still growing in their
influence.
In this respect he rises sheer above
all other evangelists and missionaries. Some
of them may have approached him in certain respects-Xavier
or Livingstone in the world-conquering instinct, St.
Bernard or Whitefield in earnestness and activity.
But few of these men added a single new idea to the
world’s stock of beliefs, whereas Paul, while
at least equaling them in their own special line, gave
to mankind a new world of thought. If his Epistles
could perish, the loss to literature would be the
greatest possible with only one exception-that
of the Gospels which record the life, the sayings and
the death of our Lord. They have quickened the
mind of the Church as no other writings have done,
and scattered in the soil of the world hundreds of
seeds the fruits of which are now the general possession
of mankind. Out of them have been brought the
watchwords of progress in every reformation which
the Church has experienced. When Luther awoke
Europe from the slumber of centuries, it was a word
of Paul which he uttered with his mighty voice:
and when, one hundred years ago, our own country was
revived from almost universal spiritual death, she
was called by the voices of men who had rediscovered
the truth for themselves in the pages of Paul.
117. Form of his Writings.-Yet
in penning his Epistles Paul may himself have had
little idea of the part they were to play in the future.
They were drawn out of him simply by the exigencies
of his work. In the truest sense of the word
they were letters, written to meet particular occasions,
not formal writings, carefully designed and executed
with a view to fame or to futurity. Letters of
the right kind are, before everything else, products
of the heart; and it was the eager heart of Paul,
yearning for the weal of his spiritual children or
alarmed by the dangers to which they were exposed,
that produced all his writings. They were part
of his day’s work. Just as he flew over
sea and land to revisit his converts, or sent Timothy
or Titus to carry them his counsels and bring news
of how they fared, so, when these means were not available,
he would send a letter with the same design.
118. His Style.-This
may seem to detract from the value of these writings.
We may be inclined to wish that, instead of having
the course of his thinking determined by the exigencies
of so many special occasions and his attention distracted
by so many minute particulars, he had been able to
concentrate the force of his mind on one perfect book
and expound his views on the high subjects which occupied
his thoughts in a systematic form. It cannot
be maintained that Paul’s Epistles are models
of style. They were written far too hurriedly
for this; and the last thing he thought of was to
polish his periods. Often, indeed, his ideas,
by the mere virtue of their fineness and beauty, run
into forms of exquisite language, or there is in them
such a sustained throb of emotion that they shape
themselves spontaneously into sentences of noble eloquence.
But oftener his language is rugged and formless;
no doubt it was the first which came to hand for expressing
what he had to say. He begins sentences and omits
to finish them; he goes off into digressions and forgets
to pick up the line of thought he has dropped; he
throws out his ideas in lumps instead of fusing them
into mutual coherence.
Nowhere perhaps will there be found
so exact a parallel to the style of Paul as in the
Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. In the
Protector’s brain there lay the best and truest
thoughts about England and her complicated affairs
which existed at the time in that island; but, when
he tried to express them in speech or letter, there
issued from his mind the most extraordinary mixture
of exclamations, questions, arguments soon losing
themselves in the sands of words, unwieldy parentheses,
and morsels of beautiful pathos or subduing eloquence.
Yet, as you read these amazing utterances, you come
by degrees to feel that you are getting to see the
very heart and soul of the Puritan Era, and that you
would rather be beside this man than any other representative
of the period. You see the events and ideas of
the time in the very process of birth.
Perhaps, indeed, a certain formlessness
is a natural accompaniment of the very highest originality.
The perfect expression and orderly arrangement of
ideas is a later process; but, when great thoughts
are for the first time coming forth, there is a kind
of primordial roughness about them, as if the earth
out of which they are arising were still clinging
to them: the polishing of the gold comes late
and has to be preceded by the heaving of the ore out
of the bowels of nature. Paul in his writings
is hurling forth the original ore of truth.
We owe to him hundreds of ideas which were never uttered
before.
After the original man has got his
idea out, the most commonplace scribe may be able
to express it for others better than he, though he
could never have originated it. So throughout
the writings of Paul there are materials which others
may combine into systems of theology and ethics, and
it is the duty of the Church to do so. But his
Epistles permit us to see revelation in the very process
of birth. As we read them closely, we seem to
be witnessing the creation of a world of truth, as
the angels wondered to see the firmament evolving itself
out of chaos and the multitudinous earth spreading
itself forth in the light. Minute as are the
details he has often to deal with, the whole of his
vast view of the truth is recalled in his treatment
of every one of them, as the whole sky is mirrored
in a single drop of dew. What could be a more
impressive proof of the fecundity of his mind than
the fact that, amid the innumerable distractions of
a second visit to his Greek converts, he should have
written in half a year three such books as Romans,
Galatians and Second Corinthians?
119. His Inspiration.-It
was God by His Spirit who communicated this revelation
of truth to Paul. Its own greatness and divineness
supply the best proof that it could have had no other
origin. But none the less did it break in upon
Paul with the joy and pain of original thought; it
came to him through his experience; it drenched and
dyed every fiber of his mind and heart; and the expression
which it found in his writings was in accordance with
his peculiar genius and circumstances.
120. The Man Revealed in his
Letters.-It would be easy to suggest compensations
in the form of Paul’s writings for the literary
qualities they lack. But one of these so outweighs
all others that it is sufficient by itself to justify
in this case the ways of God. In no other literary
form could we, to the same extent, in the writings
have got the man. Letters are the most personal
form of literature. A man may write a treatise
or a history or even a poem and hide his personality
behind it; but letters are valueless unless the writer
shows himself. Paul is constantly visible in
his letters. You can feel his heart throbbing
in every chapter he ever wrote. He has painted
his own portrait-not only that of the outward
man, but of his innermost feelings-as no
one else could have painted it. It is not from
Luke, admirable as is the picture drawn in the Acts
of the Apostles, that we learn what the true Paul
was, but from Paul himself. The truths he reveals
are all seen embodied in the man. As there are
some preachers who are greater than their sermons,
and the principal gain of their hearers, in listening
to them, is obtained in the inspiring glimpses they
obtain of a great and sanctified personality, so the
best thing in the writings of Paul is Paul himself,
or rather the grace of God in him.
121. His character presented
a wonderful combination of the natural and the spiritual.
From nature he had received a strongly marked individuality;
but the change which Christianity produces was no less
obvious in him. In no saved man’s character
is it possible to separate nicely what is due to nature
from what is due to grace; for nature and grace blend
sweetly in the redeemed life. In Paul the union
of the two was singularly complete; yet it was always
clear that there were two elements in him of diverse
origin; and this is, indeed, the key to a successful
estimate of his character.
122. Physique.-To
begin with what was most simply natural-his
physique was an important condition of his career.
As want of ear may make a musical career impossible
or a failure of eyesight stop the progress of a painter,
so the missionary life is impossible without a certain
degree of physical stamina. To any one reading
by itself the catalogue of Paul’s sufferings
and observing the elasticity with which he rallied
from the severest of them and resumed his labors, it
would naturally occur that he must have been a person
of Herculean mold. On the contrary, he appears
to have been little of stature, and his bodily presence
was weak. This weakness seems to have been sometimes
aggravated by disfiguring disease; and he felt keenly
the disappointment which he knew his bodily presence
would excite among strangers; for every preacher who
loves his work would like to preach the gospel with
all the graces which conciliate the favor of hearers
to an orator. God, however, used his very weakness,
beyond his hopes, to draw out the tenderness of his
converts; and so, when he was weak, then he was strong,
and he was able to glory even in his infirmities.
There is a theory, which has obtained
extensive currency, that the disease he suffered from
was violent ophthalmia, causing disagreeable redness
of the eyelids. But its grounds are very slender.
He seems, on the contrary, to have had a remarkable
power of fascinating and cowing an enemy with the
keenness of his glance, as in the story of Elymas
the sorcerer, which reminds us of the tradition about
Luther, that his eyes sometimes so glowed and sparkled
that bystanders could scarcely look on them.
There is no foundation whatever for
an idea of some recent biographers of Paul that his
bodily constitution was excessively fragile and chronically
afflicted with shattering nervous disease. No
one could have gone through his labors or suffered
the stoning, the scourgings and other tortures he
endured without having an exceptionally tough and
sound constitution. It is true that he was sometimes
worn out with illness and torn down with the acts
of violence to which he was exposed; but the rapidity
of his recovery on such occasions proves what a large
fund of bodily force he had to draw upon. And
who can doubt that, when his face was melted with
tender love in beseeching men to be reconciled to
God or lighted up with enthusiasm in the delivery of
his message, it must have possessed a noble beauty
far above mere regularity of feature?
123. Enterprise.-There
was a good deal that was natural in another element
of his character on which much depended-his
spirit of enterprise. There are many men who
like to grow where they are born; to have to change
into new circumstances and make acquaintance with new
people is intolerable to them. But there are
others who have a kind of vagabondism in the blood;
they are the persons intended by nature for emigrants
and pioneers; and, if they take to the work of the
ministry, they make the best missionaries.
In modern times no missionary has
had this consecrated spirit of adventure in the same
degree as that great Scotchman, David Livingstone.
When he first went to Africa, he found the missionaries
clustered in the south of the continent, just within
the fringe of heathenism; they had their houses and
gardens, their families, their small congregations
of natives; and they were content. But he moved
at once away beyond the rest into the heart of heathenism,
and dreams of more distant regions never ceased to
haunt him, till at length he began his extraordinary
tramps over thousands of miles where no missionary
had ever been before; and, when death overtook him,
he was still pressing forward.
Paul’s was a nature of the same
stamp, full of courage and adventure. The unknown
in the distance, instead of dismaying, drew him on.
He could not bear to build on other men’s foundations,
but was constantly hastening to virgin soil, leaving
churches behind for others to build up. He believed
that, if he lit the lamp of the gospel here and there
over vast areas, the light would spread in his absence
by its own virtue. He liked to count the leagues
he had left behind him, but his watchword was ever
Forward. In his dreams he saw men beckoning him
to new countries; he had always a long unfulfilled
program in his mind; and, as death approached, he
was still thinking of journeys into the remotest corners
of the known world.
124. Influence Over Men.-Another
element of his character near akin to the one just
mentioned was his influence over men. There are
those to whom it is painful to have to accost a stranger
even on pressing business; and most men are only quite
at home in their own set-among men of the
same class or profession as themselves. But the
life he had chosen brought Paul into contact with
men of every kind, and he had constantly to be introducing
to strangers the business with which he was charged.
He might be addressing a king or a consul the one
hour and a roomful of slaves or common soldiers the
next. One day he had to speak in the synagogue
of the Jews, another among a crowd of Athenian philosophers,
another to the inhabitants of some provincial town
far from the seats of culture. But he could
adapt himself to every man and every audience.
To the Jews he spoke as a rabbi out of the Old Testament
Scriptures; to the Greeks he quoted the words of their
own poets; and to the barbarians he talked of the
God who giveth rain from heaven and fruitful seasons,
filling our hearts with food and gladness.
When a weak or insincere man attempts
to be all things to all men, he ends by being nothing
to anybody. But, living on this principle, Paul
found entrance for the gospel everywhere, and at the
same time won for himself the esteem and love of those
to whom he stooped. If he was bitterly hated
by enemies, there was never a man more intensely loved
by his friends. They received him as an angel
of God, or even as Jesus Christ himself, and were
ready to pluck out their eyes and give them to him.
One church was jealous of another getting too much
of him. When he was not able to pay a visit
at the time he had promised, they were furious, as
if he had done them a wrong. When he was parting
from them, they wept sore and fell on his neck and
kissed him. Numbers of young men were continually
about him, ready to go on his errands. It was
the largeness of his manhood which was the secret of
this fascination; for to a big nature all resort,
feeling that in its neighborhood it is well with them.
125. Unselfishness.-This
popularity was partly, however, due to another quality
which shone conspicuously in his character-the
spirit of unselfishness. This is the rarest
quality in human nature, and it is the most powerful
of all in its influence on others, where it exists
in purity and strength. Most men are so absorbed
in their own interests and so naturally expect others
to be the same that, if they see any one who appears
to have no interests of his own to serve but is willing
to do as much for the sake of others as the generality
do for themselves, they are at first incredulous,
suspecting that he is only hiding his designs beneath
the cloak of benevolence; but, if he stand the test
and his unselfishness prove to be genuine, there is
no limit to the homage they are prepared to pay him.
As Paul appeared in country after country and city
after city, he was at first a complete enigma to those
whom he approached. They formed all sorts of
conjectures as to his real design. Was it money
he was seeking, or power, or something darker and
less pure? His enemies never ceased to throw
out such insinuations. But those who got near
him and saw the man as he was, who knew that he refused
money and worked with his hands day and night to keep
himself above the suspicion of mercenary motives,
who heard him pleading with them one by one in their
homes and exhorting them with tears to a holy life,
who saw the sustained personal interest he took in
every one of them-these could not resist
the proofs of his disinterestedness or deny him their
affection.
There never was a man more unselfish;
he had literally no interest of his own to live for.
Without family ties, he poured all the affections
of his big nature, which might have been given to wife
and children, into the channels of his work.
He compares his tenderness toward his converts to
that of a nursing-mother to her children; he pleads
with them to remember that he is their father who
has begotten them in the gospel. They are his
glory and crown, his hope and joy and crown of rejoicing.
Eager as he was for new conquests, he never lost his
hold upon those he had won. He could assure
his churches that he prayed and gave thanks for them
night and day, and he remembered his converts by name
at the throne of grace. How could human nature
resist disinterestedness like this? If Paul
was a conqueror of the world, he conquered it by the
power of love.
126. His Mission.-The
two most distinctively Christian features of his character
have still to be mentioned. One of these was
the sense of having a divine mission to preach Christ,
which he was bound to fulfill. Most men merely
drift through life, and the work they do is determined
by a hundred indifferent circumstances; they might
as well be doing anything else, or they would prefer,
if they could afford it, to be doing nothing at all.
But, from the time when he became a Christian, Paul
knew that he had a definite work to do; and the call
he had received to it never ceased to ring like a
tocsin in his soul. “Woe is unto me if
I preach not the gospel;” this was the impulse
which drove him on. He felt that he had a world
of new truths to utter and that the salvation of mankind
depended on their utterance. He knew himself
called to make Christ known to as many of his fellow-creatures
as his utmost exertions could enable him to reach.
It was this which made him so impetuous in his movements,
so blind to danger, so contemptuous of suffering.
“None of these things move me, neither count
I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish
my course with joy, and the ministry which I have
received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel
of the grace of God.” He lived with the
account which he would have to give at the judgment-seat
of Christ ever in his eye, and his heart was revived
in every hour of discouragement by the vision of the
crown of life which, if he proved faithful, the Lord;
the righteous Judge, would place upon his head.
127. Devotion to Christ.-The
other peculiarly Christian quality which shaped his
career was personal devotion to Christ. This
was the supreme characteristic of the man, and from
first to last the mainspring of his activities.
From the moment of his first meeting with Christ
he had but one passion; his love to his Saviour burned
with more and more brightness to the end. He
delighted to call himself the slave of Christ, and
had no ambition except to be the propagator of His
ideas and the continuer of His influence.
He took up this idea of being Christ’s
representative with startling boldness. He says
the heart of Christ is beating in his bosom toward
his converts; he says the mind of Christ is thinking
in his brain; he says that he is continuing the work
of Christ and filling up that which was lacking in
His sufferings; he says the wounds of Christ are reproduced
in the scars upon his body; he says he is dying that
others may live, as Christ died for the life of the
world. But it was in reality the deepest humility
which lay beneath these bold expressions. He
had the sense that Christ had done everything for him;
He had entered into him, casting out the old Paul
and ending the old life, and had begotten a new man,
with new designs, feelings and activities. And
it was his deepest longing that this process should
go on and become complete-that his old
self should vanish quite away, and that the new self,
which Christ had created in His own image and still
sustained, should become so predominant that, when
the thoughts of his mind were Christ’s thoughts,
the words on his lips Christ’s words, the deeds
he did Christ’s deeds, and the character he
wore Christ’s character, he might be able to
say, “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in
me.”