The life and work of St. Paul

THE RETIEEMEN5? Of ST. PAUL. 123
had rendered habitual. We foci at once that this would be natural to the
bowed and weak figure which Albrecht Diirer has represented ;
but that it
would be impossible to the imposing orator whora Raphael has placed on the
steps of the Areopagus. 1
And to this he constantly refers. There is hardly a letter in which he
does not allude to his mental trials, his physical sufferings, his persecutions,
his infirmities. He tells the Corinthians that his intercourse with them
had been characterised by physical weakness, fear, and much trembling. 2
He reminds the Galatians that he had preached among them in consequence
of an attack of severe sickness. 3 He speaks of the inexorable burden of
life, and its unceasing inoan. 4 The trouble, the perplexity, the persecution,
the prostrations which were invariable conditions of his life, seem to him
like a perpetual carrying about with him in his body of the mortification
& the putting to death of Christ a ; perpetual betrayal to death for Christ's
sake a perpetual exhibition of the energy of death in his outward life. 6 He
died daily, he was in deaths oft 7 he 8
; was being killed all the day long.
And this, too as well as the fact that he seems to write in Greek and
think in Syriac is the key to the peculiarities of St. Paul's language. The
feeling that he was inadequate for the mighty task which God had specially
entrusted to him ; the dread lest his personal insignificance should lead any
of his hearers at once to reject a doctrine announced by a weak, suffering,
distressed, overburdened man, who, though an ambassador of Christ, bore
in his own aspect so few of the credentials of an embassy ;
the knowledge
that the fiery spirit which " o'erinformed its tenement of clay " was held,
like the light of Gideon's pitchers, in a fragile and earthen vessel, 9 seems to
be so constantly and so oppressively present with him, as to make all words
too weak for the weight of meaning they have to bear. Hence his language,
in many passages, bears the traces of almost morbid excitability in its
passionate alternations of humility with assertions of the real greatness of
his labours, 10 and of scorn and indignation against fickle weaklings and
intriguing calumniators with an intense and yearning love. 11 Sometimes his
heart beats with such quick emotion, his thoughts rush with such confused
impetuosity, that hi anakoluthon after anakoluthon, and parenthesis after
parenthesis, the whole meaning becomes uncertain. 12 His feeling is so intense
that his very words catch a life of their own they become " living creatures
with hands and feet." 13 Sometimes ho is almost contemptuous in his assertion
of the rectitude which makes him indifferent to vulgar criticism, 14 and
keenly bitter in the sarcasm of his self-depreciation. 16 In one or two
* Hausrath, p. 61. * 1 Cor. ii. 8. Gal. iv. IS.
4 2 Cor. V. 4, oi ovrts iv Ttpovrff.
Id. 11, oi yap Tjueis oi {Jiwjre*, eif 6a.va.-rov irapai2dfieda.
7 2 Cor. xi. 23 ; 1 Cor. rv. 31. 8 Rom> ^iti. 36.
2 Cor. iv. 7.
10 1 Cor. rv. 10. Gal. and 2 Cor. passim.
Gal. iv. 12. w Gal. iv. 14; 1 Cor. iv. 13; Phil. iii. 8.
* 1 Cor. iv. 3. 1 Cor. iy, 10; x, 16; 2 Cor. xi. 1619; xii. U.