and the life of Jesus, will own allegiance to the law and spirit of the gospel on subjects, on which its testimony has been suppressed for ages; and thus will belong to the ranks of reform and progress. But he, who does not thus repose on the authority of Christ, will be too prone to rest satisfied with the religion of the Church as it is, instead of striving to raise it more nearly to the standard of the gospel.

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But most of all the preacher needs a spiritual faith, faith of experience, of insight, of personal knowledge, — that faith which gives substance to things hoped for, and felt reality to things not seen. Jesus, when on earth, spake of himself as in the bosom of the Father. He dwelt not in the world of sight; but in that which is unseen and eternal. There, with him, must his faithful preacher dwell. He must be even now a citizen of heaven, must "have passed from death unto life." He must hear the voice of God in nature and in Providence. He must trace the spiritual in the outward, the unseen in the seen. The truths appertaining to the inward life must be to him subjects of consciousness, portions of his own personal history. God's law of retribution he must know from his own self-chastening and humiliation for sin, and from the peace of "God that justifieth" shed abroad in his heart through the faithful discharge of duty. The efficacy of prayer he must know from having felt it. The regenerating spirit of God he must recognise from its power over his own heart. Jesus he must know not simply as the greatest personage in human history; but a "Christ formed within" must reflect the features of the evangelic record. The kingdom of heaven he must see as established in his own heart, as built up in the beauty of holiness in his own life. He must be able to say, as to all things that admit of being so verified, "I speak that I do know, and testify that I have seen." Through him who has this faith the word will be quick and powerful. His doctrine will drop as the rain, his speech will distil as the dew, making the waste places of the human heart to blossom and bear fruit, bringing up, "instead of the thorn, the fir tree, and instead of the briar, the myrtle."

In what we have now said, we have been actuated by no censorious spirit. We have spoken of tendencies, against which we ourselves have struggled, of wants which we ourselves have felt. We have unburdened ourselves of various doubts and questionings, as to the signs of the times, which

have rested heavily upon us. Indeed there are many things in the present aspect of the Church, which would utterly dishearten us, did we not believe that God loves his own cause better than we can love it. But knowing this, we rest assured, that the gospel cannot fail, or the Church die. His promise stands recorded for all generations, "I will be a wall of fire round about her, and will be a glory in the midst of her."

A. P. P.

ST. PAUL'S EPISTLES.

ARCHBISHOP Whately has said very wisely, that "there appears to be a remarkable analogy between the treatment to which Paul was himself exposed during his personal ministry on earth, and that which his works have met with since. Paul may be said to stand, in his works, as he did in person while on earth, in the front of the battle; to bear the chief brunt of assailants from the enemies' side, and to be treacherously stabbed by false friends on his own; degraded and vilified by one class of heretics, perverted and misinterpreted by another, and too often most unduly neglected by those, who are regarded as orthodox. And still do his works stand, and will ever stand, as a mighty bulwark of the true Christian faith."

Our community of Liberal Christians are not liable to the charge of perverting the meaning of the Pauline Epistles by any Pharisaic superstitions or Antinomian heresies. Our danger is, that we may neglect their study or undervalue their importance. Several causes have led us into this danger.

In the first place, the high value which we attach to morality, or good works, has sometimes given us a distaste for writings which seem to attach such paramount importance to faith; an objection which rests upon the assumption, that the faith advocated by the apostle is anything opposed to those firm principles and earnest affections, that are the only motives to truly good works.

A similar objection to Paul's Epistles has sprung from the general use of his phraseology in the Calvinistic creeds. Paul's language has been so constantly associated with Calvin

istic notions of Atonement, Original Sin, and Regeneration, that for fear of calling up wrong ideas in the minds of their hearers, our preachers have too generally neglected to use Paul's language in illustrating their discourses, and to lead their people through those states of mind and those views of truth, which Paul has stated with such power over the great mass of the Christian world.

From these reasons, as well as from the intrinsic difficulties of the case, both preachers and people have been fond of calling attention away from the Epistles to the Gospels, and of sheltering their ignorance or indifference under the remark of the Apostle Peter, that in the epistles of our beloved brother Paul are "some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable do wrest unto their own destruction." But, without saying anything of Peter's little sympathy with Paul, before we shelter ourselves under this text we must remember, that the wrong use of the epistles is attributed to the unlearned and unstable, a class of persons which we ought not to be in; and moreover, that Peter does not confine such danger of abuse merely to the epistles, but extends it to the whole of the Scriptures; "which they that are unlearned and unstable do wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, to their own destruction."

Perhaps the most cogent objection to a constant and careful study of the Epistles lies in their supposed opposition, or, at least, great inferiority, to the Gospels. This objection leads us directly to the first point of our discussion, the relation of the Epistles of Paul to the other parts of the New Testament.

I. Their connexion with the Book of the Acts is sufficiently obvious. They give us a view of the inward thought and feelings of the personage, whose outward history constitutes the chief portion of that book; and they make us acquainted with the inward life of the churches whose origin is there described. Without dwelling upon the relation of Paul's Epistles to the subsequent parts of the New Testament, let us consider their bearing upon the Gospels.

I apprehend that an invidious inferiority is attached to the Epistles in reference to the Gospels from the fact, that the word "Gospels" carries with it the idea that the books so designated must contain the whole of gospel-truth. Yet strictly a part of gospel-truth is stated by the Evangelists merely in embryo, and looked to future events for its develop

ment and explanation. Instead of invidiously contrasting the Gospels with the Acts and Epistles, we ought to contemplate them as parts of a connected whole; and as the promise of the Comforter, made by our Lord and given in such touching language in the Gospel of John, was fulfilled in the foundation of the Apostolic Church, as recorded in the Acts and frequently implied in the Epistles, so the whole import of Christianity was shown in actual development after the time to which the gospel narratives refer. Christ himself expressly declares that the revelation made before his death was not complete, and left his disciples to be enlightened in due time as to the nature of his kingdom by the gift which he promised them. "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of Truth, is come, he shall guide you into all truth." Obviously the bearing of our Lord's death and resurrection were not understood, until these events actually took place, and after their Master's departure gave the apostles full opportunity to reflect calmly upon all the circumstances of his mission, and to receive those aids which he had promised them.

The Epistles of Paul contain a view of Christian doctrine from an apostle who, apart from any claims to infallibility, brought the highest spirituality of character and the rarest intellectual gifts to the work; and from his position so near to Christ and so conversant with the other apostles, he was able to survey fully all the facts of the Christian revelation, without being misled by those prejudices, which the gradual dawning of gospel light was so slow in removing from the minds of the other apostles. Were we to view Paul merely as an intelligent man suddenly converted to Christianity from Judaism, ardent to form clear ideas of the faith he had adopted, and to convert the Gentiles with the Jews, and to purify the Church, great interest must be attached to his writings. And when we add to his natural qualifications for his work the evidence of his miraculous conversion, and of his personal communion with the glorified Saviour, we must certainly accord to him, not indeed infallibility, but all needful light upon the leading truths of that religion, of which he was chosen by Heaven to be the most illustrious and successful preacher.

The Gospels indeed contain the great facts of Christianity, yet they do not give a full statement of the bearing of these facts upon human feeling and conduct, nor do they set forth

Christian doctrine as a compact whole, as for the guidance of those who are beginning to lead a religious life. It has been well said that "Christ did not come to make a revelation so much as to be the subject of a revelation. He accomplished what he left his Apostles to testify and explain." This view will be allowed just, even by those who disagree with us in our estimate of the value of the Epistles, since they claim liberty for themselves to judge fully and freely of the bearing of the facts of the Gospels; whereas we would accord great authority to the judgment of Paul.

If it is said that Paul must be ranked below the twelve Apostles, who had been witnesses of the great events in our Lord's life, we reply that, as having been with Christ after the resurrection, he must be considered as a witness of that great event, and that not only did he do and suffer more than the twelve, but that the claim which he makes of having received the truth in an interview with Christ must save him from being unfavorably contrasted with any of his associates.

Paul's view of Christianity is certainly more broad and liberal than that taken by the other Apostles, excepting John. He was the first to set forth fully the equality of Christian privilege between Gentile and Jew, and to develop in a decided doctrinal system the spirituality which all our Lord's teachings exhibit, but which even the most spiritual of the Evangelists does not endeavor to set forth in its doctrinal applications.

Perhaps a parallel between Paul, and John the Evangelist, would be the simplest mode of illustrating the peculiarities of the Epistles. "In John," says Olshausen, "the intuitive faculty, or in the best sense of the word gnosis, may be regarded as the peculiar element; his whole turn of mind was reflective, contemplative, his soul receptive, all eyes, as it were, to behold the eternal ideas of truth; outward action was not his sphere; the flower of his life was prophecy. Paul presents an entirely different picture. Although not naturally deficient in the intuitive perception of divine things, he yet exhibits a mode of treating religion different from that of John, the dialectic or logical, in which acuteness of understanding, aiming at definite conceptions of ideas, predominates. By this dialectical faculty Paul became the founder of a sharply defined doctrinal phraseology, and the father of theology in the Christian church."

Olshausen further remarks that Paul's letters may be con3D s. VOL. XV. NO. I.

VOL. XXXIII.

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