The life and work of St. Paul

406 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
were the base and miserable innuendoes against which even a Paul had
deliberately to defend himself ! Slander, like some vile adder, has rustled iu
the dry leaves of fallen and withered hearts since the world began. Even
the good are not always wholly free from it, and the early Christian Church,
so far from being the pure ideal bride of the Lord Jesus which we often
imagine her to be, was (as is proved by all the Epistles) in many respects as
little and in some respects even less pure than ours. The chrisom-robe of
baptism was not preserved immaculate either in that or in any other age.
The Church to which St. Paul was writing was, we must remember, a community
of men and women of whom the majority had been familiar from the
cradle with the meanness and the vice of the poorest ranks of heathenism in
the corruptest city of heathendom. Their ignorance and weakness, their past
training and their present poverty, made them naturally suspicious ; and
though we cannot doubt that they were morally the best of the class to which
they belonged, thoiigh there may have been among them many a voiceless
Epictetus a slave, but dear to tho immortals and though their very re-
ception of Christianity proved an aspiring heart, a tender conscience, an
enduring spirit, yet many of them had not got beyond the inveteracy of lifelong
habits, and it was easy for any pagan or Judaic sophister to lime their
"
wild hearts and feeble wings." But God's mercy overrules evil for good,
and we owe to the worthless malice of obscure Judaic calumniators the lessons
which we may learn from most of St. Paul's Epistles. 1 A trivial characteristic
will often show better than anything else the general drift of any work, and
as we have already pointed out the prominence in this Epistle of the thought
of " tribulation," so we may now notice that, though " boasting " was of all
things the most alien to St. Paul's genuine modesty, the most repugnant to
his sensitive humility, yet the boasts of his unscrupulous opponents so completely
drove him into the attitude of self-defence, that the word " boasting "
occurs no less than twenty-nine times in these few chapters, while it is only
found twenty-six times in 3
all the rest of St. Paul's writings.
The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, and those to the Galatians and
Romans, represent the three chief phases of his controversy with Judaism.
In the Epistle to the Galatians he overthrew for ever the repellent demand
that the Gentiles should be circumcised ; in the Epistle to the Romans he
established for ever the thesis that Jews and Gentiles were equally guilty, and
could be justified only by faith, and not by works. In both these Epistles he
establishes, from different points of view, the secondary and purely dis-
ciplinary functions of the law as a preparatory stage for the dispensation of
free grace. In both Epistles he shows conclusively that instead of the falso
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1 The authenticity of the letter has never been questioned. The tliree main divisions
are : i. viL Hortatory and retrospective, with an under-current of apology, viii. , ix.
Directions about the contribution, x. xiii. Defence of his Apostolic position. The
more minute analysis will be seen as we proceed. But it is the least systematic, as tue
i'irst is the most systematic of all his writings.
J
Especially in 2 Cor. x., ii., xii. This finds Its illustration In the proiiinence of
' '
inflation " in 1 Cor. passim ; but only elsewhere in Col. ii. 18.