The life and work of St. Paul

484 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATTL.
And if it be asserted, by way of modern objection to this theology, and to
St. Paul's methods of argument and exegesis, that they suggest multitudes of
difficulties ; that they pour new wine into old wine-skins, which burst under
its fermentation ; that they involve a mysticising idealisation of 1,500 years of
history and of the plain literal intention of large portions of the Old and
New Testament Scriptures ; that Moses would have been as horrified to be
told by St. Paul that the object of his Law was only to multiply transgression,
and intensify the felt heinousness of sin, as he is said to have been when
in vision he saw Rabbi Akhibha imputing to him a thousand rules which he
had never sanctioned ; that the Law was obviously given with the intention
that it should be obeyed, not with the intention that it should be broken ; that
St. Paul himself has spoken in this very Epistle of "doers of the Law being
justified," and of "works of the Law," and of "working good," and of a
recompense for it, 1 and of "reaping what we have sown;" 2 that he has in
every one of his Epistles urged the necessity of moral duties, not as an
inevitable result of that union with Christ which is the Christian's life, but as
things after which Christians should strive, and for the fulfilment of which
they should train themselves with severe effort; 3 and that in his Pastoral
Epistles these moral considerations, as in the Epistles of St. Peter and
4
St. James, seem to have come into the foreground, while the high theological
verities seem to have melted farther into the distance if these objections be
urged, as they often have been urged, the answers to them are likewise manifold.
We have not the smallest temptation to ignore the difficulties, though
it would be easy by separate examination to show that to state them thus is to
shift their true perspective. As regards St. Paul's style of argument, those
who see in it a falsification of Scripture, a treacherous dealing with the Word
of God, which St. Paul expressly repudiates, 6 should consider whether they
too may not be intellectually darkened by suspicious narrowness and ignorant
prepossessions. 6
St. Paul regarded the Scripture as the irrefragable Word of
God, and yet, even when he seems to be attaching to mere words and sounds
a " talismanic value," he never allows the letter of Scripture to becloud the
illumination (4>&>Tr/^s) of spiritual enlightenment. 7 Even when he seemed to
have the whole Pentateuch against him, he never suffered the outward expression
to enthral the emancipated idea. He knew well that one word of God
cannot contradict another, and his allegorising and spiritualising methods
(which, in one form or other, are absolutely essential, since the Law speaks in
the tongue of the sons of men, and human language is at the best but an
asymptote to thought) are not made the vehicle of mechanical inference or
individual caprice, but are used in support of formative truths, of fruitful
ideas, of spiritual convictions, of direct revelations, which are as the Eternal
Bom. ii. 6-13 ; iv. 4.
' Gal. vi. 7 ; 2 Thess. iii. 13 ; 1 Cor. xv. 58.
1 Cor. ix. 2527 ; Phil. iii. 14.
4 Mic. vi. 12; 1 Tim. iv. 7, 8; ii. 3; Tit. iii. 8; ii. 14; 2 Pet. i. 10, 11} James U.
17,24.
6 2 Cor. ii. 17, ov icamjAc'voires ; 2 Cor. Iv. 2. unSe SoAovires.
2 Cor. iv. I 7.
* 3Cor.iv. 4,