The life and work of St. Paul

DTTaODTTCTOBT. 3
burst the gates of brass, and break the bars of iron
the Papacy
in sunder with which
had imprisoned for so many centuries
made free.
the souls which God
It has happened not unfrequently in the providence of God that the
destroyer of a creed orjsystem has been bred and trained in the inmost
bosom of the system which he was destined to shake or to destroy. Sakya
Mouni had been brought up in Brahminism; Luther had taken the vows
of an Augustinian; Pascal had been trained as a Jesuit; Spinoza was a
Jew; Wesley and Whitefield were clergymen of the Church of England.
It was not otherwise with St. Paul. The victorious enemy of heathen
philosophy and heathen worship had passed his boyhood amid the heathen
surroundings of a exclusiveness
philosophic city. The deadliest antagonist of Judaic
was by birth a Hebrew of the Hebrews. The dealer of the
*
death-wound to the spirit of Pharisaism was a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees ;
had been brought up from his youth at Jerusalem at the feet of
!
Gamaliel ;
had been taught according to the perfect manner of the law of
had lived
the fathers ;
" after the most straitest sect " of the Jewish service. 1 As his work
differed in many respects from that of the other Apostles, so his training was
wholly unlike theirs. Their earliest years had been spent in the villages of
Gennesareth and the fisher-huts on the shores of the Sea of Galileo; his
in the crowded ghetto of a Pagan capital. They, with few exceptions,
were men neither of commanding genius nor strongly marked characteristics;
ho was a man of intense individuality and marvellous intellectual power.
They were "unlearned and ignorant," untrained in the technicalities, in-
experienced in the methods, which passed among the Jews for theologic
learning; he had sat as a "disciple of the wise" 4 at the feet of the most
eminent of the Rabbis, and had been selected as the inquisitorial agent
of Priests and Sauhedrists because he surpassed his contemporaries in
burning zeal for the traditions of the schools.6
This is the man whose career will best enable ns to understand the
Dawn of Christianity upon the darkness alike of Jew and Gentile; the
man who loosed Christianity from the
the world of Paganism with joy and hope. The study of his life wil
leave upon our minds a fuller conception of the extreme nobleness of the
man, and of the truths which he lived and died to teach. And we must
consider that life, as far as possible, without traditional bias, and with the
determination to see it as it appeared to his contemporaries, as it appeared
to Paul
"
himself. For if he was a Paul," says St. Chrysostom, "he also
was a man," nay, more than this, his very infirmities enhanced his
greatness. He stands infinitely above the need of indiscriminate panegyric.
1 Acts rsiii. 6 (Phil. iii. 5). The true reading, vifc #api