The life and work of St. Paul

40 THE LIFE AHD WORK OF ST. PAUL.
broad phylactery. Saul as a Pharisee believed in eternity, he believed in the
resurrection, he believed in angel and spirit, in voices and appearances, in
dreaming dreams and seeing visions. But in all this struggle to achieve his
own righteousness this struggle so minutely tormenting, so revoltingly burdensome
there seemed to be no hope, no help, no enlightenment, no satisfaction,
no nobility nothing but a possibly mitigated and. yet inevitable curse. God
seemed silent to him, and heaven closed. No vision dawned on his slumbering
senses, no voice sounded in his eager ear. The sense of sin oppressed him ; the
darkness of mystery hung over him; he was ever falling and falling, and no
hand was held out to help him ;
he strove with all his soul to be obedient, and
he was obedient and yet the Messiah did not come.
The experience of Saul of Tarsus was the heartrending experience of all
who have looked for peace elsewhere than in the love of God. All that Luther
and the record of
suffered at Erfurdt Saul must have suffered in Jerusalem ;
the early religious agonies and awakenment of the one is the best commentary
on the experience of the other. That the life of Saul was free from flagrant
transgressions we see from his own bold appeals to his continuous rectitude.
He was not a convert from godlessness or profligacy, like John Bunyan or
John Newton. He claims integrity when he is speaking of his life in the
aspect which it presented to his fellow-men, but he is vehement in self-accusation
when he thinks of that life in the aspect which it presented to his God.
Ho found that no external legality could give him a clean heart, or put a right
spirit within him. He found that servile -obedience inspired no inward peace.
He must have yearned for some righteousness, could he but know of it, which
would be better than the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees. The
Jewish doctors had imagined and had directed that if a man did not feel inclined
to do this or that, he should force himself to do it by a direct vow.
" Yows,"
says Rabbi AMbha, 1 are the enclosures of holiness." But Saul the Pharisee,
long before he became Paul the Apostle, must have proved to the very depth
the hollowness of this direction. Vows might be the enclosures of formal
practice ; they were not, and could not be, the schooling of the disobedient
soul ; they could not give calm to that place in the human being where meet the
two seas of good and evil
2
impulse to the heart, which is the battle-field on
which passionate desire clashes into collision with positive command.
Even when twenty years of weariness, and wandering, and struggle, and
Buffering, were over, we still catch in the Epistles of St. Paul the mournful
echoes of those days of stress and storm echoes as of the thunder when its
fury is over, and it is only sobbing far away among the distant hills. We
hear those echoes most of all in the ^Epistle to the Romans. We hear them
when he talks of " the curse of the law." We hear them when, in accents of
deep self-pity, he tells us of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit ;
between the law of sin in his members, and that law of God which, though
holy and just and good and ordained to life, he found to be unto death. In
Pirke AbMth, iiL 10.
* The Tetter tSbh and the Yetier ha-rd of the Talmud.