The life and work of St. Paul

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BOYHOOD III A HKATHBN CITY, 7
that occupies itself with minute detail. We do not in reality know more of A
great man because we happen to know the petty circumstances which made up
his daily existence, or because a mistaken admiration has handed down to
posterity the promiscuous commonplaces of his ordinary correspondence.
We know a man truly when we know him at his greatest and his best j
realise his significance for ourselves and for the world when we see him in the
noblest activity of his career, on the loftiest summit, and in the .fullest glory
of his life. There are lives which may be instructive from their very littleness,
aiid it may be well that the biographers of such lives should enter into detail.
But of the best and greatest it may be emphatically asserted that to know
more about them would only be to know less of them. It is quite possible
that if, in the case of one so sensitive and so impetuous as St. Paul, a minute
and servile record had preserved for us every hasty expression, every fugitive
note, every momentary fall below the loftiest standard, the small souls
which ever rejoice at seeing the noblest of their race degraded, even for
an instant, to the same dead level as themselves, might have found some
things over which to glory. That such must have been the result we may
infer from the energy and sincerity of self-condemnation with which the
Apostle recognises his own imperfections. But such miserable records, even
had they been entirely truthful, would only have obscured for us the true Paul
Paul as he stands in the light of history ; Paul as he is preserved for us in x
\ the records of Christianity ; Paul energetic as Peter, and contemplative as [
j John ; Paul the hero of unselfishness ; Paul the mighty champion of spiritual \
< freedom ; Paul a greater preacher than Chrysostom, a greater missionary than (
I
; Xavier, a greater reformer than Luther, a greater theologian than St. Thomas \
of Aquinum ; Paul the inspired Apostle of the Gentiles, the slave of the Lord )
Jesus Christ.
OBLAPTER H.
BOYHOOD 1 A HEATHKW CITY.
OVK a