The life and work of St. Paul

32 .... THE LIFE AND WORK Of ST. PAUL.
he states the solid argument on which he rests his conclusion, and only adduces
Scripture by way of sanction or support. And this is in exact accordance
with all that we know of his spiritual history of the genuineness of which
it affords an unsuspected confirmation. He had not arrived at any one of the
truths of his special gospel by the road of ratiocination. They came to him
with the flash of intuitive conviction at the miracle of his conversion, or in
the gradual process of subsequent psychological experience. We hear from
his own lips that he had not originally found these truths in Scripture,
or been led to them by inductive processes in the course of Scripture study.
He received them, as again and again he tells us, by revelation direct from
Christ. It was only when God had taught him the truth of them that he
became cognisant that they must be latent in the writings of the Old
Dispensation. When he was thus enlightened to see that they existed in
Scripture, he found that all Scripture was full of them. When he knew
that the treasure lay hid in the field, he bought the whole field, to become
its owner. When God had revealed to him the doctrine of justification by
faith, he saw as we may now see, but as none had seen before him that it
existed implicitly in the trustfulness of Abraham and the " life " and " faith ''
of Habakkuk. Given the right, nay, the necessity, to spiritualise the meaning
of the Scriptures and given the fact that this right was assumed and
practised by every teacher of the schools in which Paul had been trained and
to which his countrymen looked up, as it has been practised by every great
teacher since we then possess the key to all such passages as those to which
I have referred ; and we also see the cogency with which they would come
home to the minds of those for whom they were intended. In other words,
St. Paul, when speaking to Jews, was happily able to address them, as it were,
in their own dialect, and it is a dialect from which Gentiles also have deep
lessons to learn.
It is yet another instance of the same method when he points to the two
wives of Abraham as types of the Jewish and of the Christian covenant,
and in the struggles and jealousies of the two, ending in the ejection of Agar,
sees allegorically foreshadowed the triumph of the new covenant over the
old. In this allegory, by marvellous interchange, the physical descendants of
Sarah become, in a spiritual point of view, the descendants of Agar, and those
who were Agar's children become Sarah's true spiritual offspring. The
descended from Sarah and
inhabitants of the Jerusalem that now is, though
Abraham, are foreshadowed for rejection under the type of the offspring of
Ishmael ; and the true children of Abraham and Sarah are those alone who
are so spiritually, but of whom the vast majority were not of the chosen seed.
And the proof of this if proof be in any case the right word for what
perhaps St. Paul himself may only have regarded as allegoric confirmation-
is found in Isaiah liv. 1, where the prophet, addressing the New Jerusalem
which is to rise out of the ashes of her Babylonian ruin, calls to her as to
a barren woman, and bids her to rejoice as having many more children
than she that hath a husband. The Jews become metamorphosed into th?