The life and work of St. Paul

392 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL.
11. And at this point begins a remarkable digression, which, though a digression,
iudirectly supported the position which some of his adversaries had impugned, and
though personal in its details, is, in Paul's invariable manner, made subservient to
eternal truths. They might object that by what he had said he was curtailing their
liberty, and mating tho conscience of the weak a fetter upon the intelligence of the
strong. Well, without putting their objection in so many words, he would show
themthat he practised what he taught. He, too, was free, and an Apostle, their
Apostle at any rate, and had every right to do aa the other Apostles did the
Desposyni, and Kephas himself in expecting Churches to support them and their
wives. 1 That right he even defends at some length, both by earthly analogies of
the soldier, husbandman, and shepherd, 2 and by a happy Rabbinic midrash on the
non-muzzling of the ox that treadeth out tho corn s and ; by tho ordinary rules of
4 and by the ordinance of the Jewish Temple, 5 and
gratitude for benefits received ;
the rule of Christ; 6 yet plain as the right was, and strenuously as he maintained it,
he had never availed himself of it, and, whatever his enemies might say, he never
would. He must preach the Gospel he could not ; help himself his one reward
;
would be the power to boast that lie had not claimed his rights to the fuU, but had
made the Gospel free, and so removed a possible source of hindrance. Free, then,
aa he was, he had made himself a slave (as in one small particular he was asking
them to do) for the sake of others a slave to ; all, that he might gain the more ;
putting himself in their place, meeting their sympathies, and even their prejudices,
half way ; becoming a Jew to the Jews, a legalist to legalists, without law to those
without law (never, however, his real
forgetting allegiance to the law of Christ)/
weak to the weak, all things to all men in order by alf means to save somo. And if
he thus denied himself, should not they also deny themselves ? 8 In their Isthmian,
games each strove to gain the crown, and what toil and temperance they endured to
win that fading wreath of ! pine Paul did the same. He ran .