The life and work of St. Paul

THE EETIEEMENT OF ST. PATJL. 121
certainty on this point, though such lights as we have are slightly in favour of
the longer rather than of the shorter period.
Very much depends upon the question whether physical infirmity, and
prostration of health, were in part the cause of this retirement and inactivity.
And here again we are on uncertain ground, because this at once opens the
often discussed problem as to the nature of the affliction to which St. Paul so
pathetically alludes as his " stake in the flesh." I am led to touch upon that
question here, because I believe that this dreadful affliction, whatever it may
have been, had its origin at this very time. 1 The melancholy through which,
like a fire at midnight, his enthusiasm burns its way the deep despondency
which sounds like an undertone even amid the bursts of exultation which
triumph over it, seem to me to have been in no small measure due to this. It
gave to St. Paul that painful self-consciousness which is in itself a daily trial to
any man who, in spite of an innate love for retirement, is thrust against his
will into publicity and conflict. It seems to break the wings of his spirit, so
that sometimes he drops as it were quite suddenly to the earth, checked and
beaten down in the very midst of his loftiest and strongest flights.
No one can even cursorily read St. Paul's Epistles without observing
that he was aware of something in his aspect or his personality which
distressed him with an agony of humiliation something which seems to
force him, against every natural instinct of his disposition, into language
which sounds to himself like a boastfulness which was abhorrent to him,
but which he finds to be more necessary to himself than to other men. It
is as though he felt that his appearance was against him. Whenever he
has ceased to be carried away by the current of some powerful argument,
whenever his sorrow at the insidious encroachment of errors against which
he had flung the whole force of his character has spent itself in words of
immeasurable indignation whenever he drops the high language of apos-
tolical authority and inspired conviction we hear a sort of wailing, pleading,
appealing tone in his personal addresses to his converts, which would be
almost impossible in one whose pride of personal manhood had not been
abashed by some external defects, to which he might indeed appeal as
marks at once of the service and the protection of his Saviour, but which
made him less able to cope face to face with the insults of opponents or
the ingratitude of friends. His language leaves on us the impression of
one who was acutely sensitive, and whoso sensitiveness of temperament has
been aggravated by a meanness of presence which is indeed forgotten by
the friends who know him, but which raises in strangers a prejudice not
always overcome. Many, indeed, of the brethren in the little churches
which he founded, had so " grappled him to their souls with hooks of steel,"
th t he could speak in letter after letter of their abounding love and
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1 There is nothing to exclude this hi the Wofcj fioi of 2 Cor. xii. 7. The affliction
might not have arrived at its full intensity till that period, which was some years after
his conversion, about A.D. 43, when St. Paul was at Antioch or Jerusalem or
T&rsut.