The life and work of St. Paul

12 THE LIFE AND WORK OV ST. PAUL.
outer world is neither due to his antiquity nor to his Semitic birth, but solely
to his individual character. The poetry of the Old Testament is full of the
tenderness and life of the pastures of Palestine. In the discourses and con-
versations of our Lord we find frequent allusions to the loveliness of the
flowers, the joyous carelessness of birds, the shifting winds, the red glow
of morning and evening clouds. St. Paul's inobservance of these things for
the total absence of the remotest allusion to them by way of even passing
illustration amounts to a proof that they did not deeply stir his heart was
doubtless due to the expulsive power and paramount importance of other
thoughts. It may, however, have boon due also to that early training which
made him more familiar with crowded assemblies and thronged bazaars than
with the sights and sounds of Nature. 1
It is at any rate remarkable that the
only elaborate illustration which he draws from Nature turns not on a natural
phenomenon but on an artificial process, and that even this process if not
absolutely unknown to the ancients was the exact opposite of the one most
commonly adopted. 2
But if St. Paul derived no traceable influence from the scenery with which
Tarsus is surrounded, if no voices from the neighbouring mountains or the
neighbouring sea mingled with the many and varied tones of his impassioned
utterance, other results of this providential training may be easily observed,
both in his language and in his life.
The very position of Tarsus made it a centre of commercial enterprise and
political power. Situated on a navigable stream, by which it communicated
with the easternmost bay of the Mediterranean, and lying on a fruitful plain
under that pass over the Taurus which was known as " the Cilician gates,"
while by the Amanid and Syrian gates it communicated with Syria, it was so
necessary as a central emporium that even the error of its having embraced
the side of Antony in the civil war hardly disturbed its fame and prosperity. 8
1 "For I was bred
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely save the sky and stars."
Coleridge.
8 I allude to the famous illustration of the wild olive graft (Rom. xi. 16 25). St. Paul's
argument requires that a wild slip should have heen budded upon a fruitful tree viz.,
the aypie'Atuos of heathendom on the eAaia of Judaism. But it is scarcely needful to
remark that this is never done, but the reverse namely, the grafting of a fruitful scion
on a wild stock. The olive shoot would be grafted on the oleaster, not the oleaster on
the olive (Aug. in Ps. LxxiL). It is true that St. Paul here cares solely for the general
analogy, and would have been entirely indifferent to its non-accordance with the ordinary
method of iynevrpi