The life and work of St. Paul

SAUL'S RECEPTION AT JERUSALEM. 131
but they had
panied his alleged conversion they may indeed have heard of ;
occurred three years before. The news of his recent preaching and recent peril
in Damascus was not likely to have reached them but even if it ; had, it would
have seemed so strange that they might be pardoned for looking with doubt on
the persecutor turned brother for even fearing that the asserted conversion
might only be a ruse to enable Saul to learn their secrets, and so entrap them
to their final ruin. And thus at first his intercourse with the brethren in the
Church of Jerusalem was almost confined to his reception in the house of
Peter. "Other of the Apostles saw I none," he writes to the Galatians,
" save James the Lord's brother." But though he saw James, Paul seems to
have had but little communion with him. All that we know of the first Bishop
of Jerusalem shows us the immense dissimilarity, the almost antipathetic
peculiarities which separated the characters of the two men. Even with the
Lord Himself, if we may follow the plain language of the Gospels, 1 the eldest
of His brethren seems, during His life on earth, to have had but little commu-
nion. He accepted indeed His Messianic claims, but ho accepted them in the
Judaic sense, and was displeased at that in His life which was most unmis-
takably Divine. If ho be rightly represented by tradition as a Legalist, a
Nazarite, almost an Essene, spending his whole life in prayer in the Templo,
it was his obedience to Mosaism scarcely modified in any external particular
by his conversion to Christianity which had gained for him even from the
Jews the surname of " the Just*" If, as seems almost demonstrable, he bo
the author of the Epistle which bears his name, we see how slight was the ex-
tent to which his spiritual life had been penetrated by those special aspects
of the one great truth which were to Paul the very breath and life of Chris-
tianity. In that Epistle we find a stern and noble morality which raises it
infinitely above the reproach of being " a mere Epistle of straw ;" 2 but we
nevertheless do not find one direct word about the Incarnation, or the Cruci-
fixion, or the Atonement, or Justification by Faith, or Sanctification by the
Spirit, or the Resurrection of the Dead. The notion that it was written to
counteract either the teaching of St. Paul, or the dangerous consequences
which might sometimes bo deduced from that teaching, is indeed most
and all that wo can say of that supposition is, that it
extremely questionable ;
is not quite so monstrous a chimera as that which has been invented by the
German theologians, who soe St. Paul and his followers indignantly though
covertly denounced in the Balaam and Jezebel of the Churches of Pergarnos
and Thyatira, 3 and the Nieolaitans of the Church of Ephesus, 4 and the
" synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie," of the
Church of Philadelphia. 6 And yet no one can road the Epistle of James side
by side with any Epistle of St. Paul's without perceiving how wide were the
differences between the two Apostles. St. James was a man eminently inflex-
Matt. xiL 46; Mark iii. 31 ; Luke vilL 19; John vii. 6.
a "Ein reclit strohern Epistel, dcnn rie doch kein evangeliBch Art an ilia hat"
(Luther, Praef. N. T. t 1522) ; but he afterwards modified his opinion.
Bev. ii, 20. * Rev. il. 6. Kev. UL 9.