The life and work of St. Paul

188 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
exclusiveness, the despairing pride of Stoicism with the warmth, the glow, the
radiant hope, the unbounded tenderness, the free natural emotion, the active
charities, the peaceful, infinite contentment of Christianity as it shines forth
with all its living and breathing sympathies in the Epistles of St. Paul.
And this difference between Stoicism and Christianity is reflected in the
lives of their disciples. While the last genuine representatives of Roman
statesmanship and Roman virtue were thinking it a grand thing to hold
aloof from the flatteries into which the other senators plunged with such
headlong baseness while they were being regarded as models of heroism for
such acts as rising and walking out of the senate when some more than
usually contemptible flattery was being proposed while they were thus
eating away their own hearts in the consciousness of an ineffectual protest,
and finding it difficult to keep even their own souls from " the contagion of
the world's slow stain "
two Jews of obscure name, of no position, without
rank, without wealth, without influence, without either literary, political, or
military genius, without any culture but such as a Roman noble would have
despised as useless and grotesque but mighty in the strength of a sacred
cause, and irresistible in the zeal of a conscious inspiration set forth
unnoticed on the first of those journeys which were destined to convert the
world. For He who made and loved the world, and knew the needs of the
world which He died to save, had sent them forth ; and if He had sent them
forth without any apparent means for the fulfilment of His great design, it
was because He willed to choose " the foolish things of the world to confound
the wise, and the weak things to confound the mighty, and things which are
not to bring to nought things which are, that no flesh should glory in His
presence." 1
Vast, then, as was the task before them, and hedged around by apparently
insuperable difficulties, the elders of the Church of Antioch were convinced
that Barnabas and Saul had indeed been summoned on a Divine mission, and
that they dared no longer delay the distinct manifestation of the will of the
Spirit. They held one more special prayer and fast, 2 laid on the heads of
their two great brethren the hands of consecration, and sent them on their
way. Already, in his vision, Paul had been predestined to be an Apostle of
3
the Gentiles ; henceforth, after this solemn ordination, he receives the title
of an Apostle in its more special significance.* For a time, as in his Epistles
to the Thessalonians, he modestly abstains from himself adopting it; but
when his name was vilified, when his teaching was thwarted, when his
authority was impugned, he not only adopted it, 5 but maintained his independent
position as a teacher, and his right to be regarded as in nowise inferior
to the very chiefest of the Twelve.
> 1 Cor. i. 27, 28.
8 Acts xiii. 3, njorrevo-airef . . rpov I9v3>v et ov$ rya> rj ojroore'AA*.
* Acts xiv. 4, 14 (cf. John xvii. 18 ; Heb. iii. 1).
8
Except in the few purely private lines which he wrote to Philemon, Mid in the letter
to his beloved Philippisna who needed no assertion of his claim,