The life and work of St. Paul

THE EPISTLE TO "THE EPHESIANS." 633
veyed so different an impression in a style so characteristic and so intensely
emotional. 1 Even if we could regard it as probable that any one could
have poured forth truths so exalted, and moral teaching so pure and profound,
in an Epistle by which he deliberately intended to deceive the
Church and the world, 2 it is not possible that one actuated by such a pur-
pose should successfully imitate the glow and rush of feeling which marks
the other writings of the Apostle, and expresses itself in the to-and-fro-
conflicting eddies of thought, in the one great flow of utterance and purpose.
The style of St. Paul may be compared to a great tide ever advancing
irresistibly towards the destined shore, but broken and rippled over
every wave of its broad expanse, and liable at any moment to mighty
refluences as it foams and swells about opposing sandbank or rocky cape. 9
With even more exactness we might compare it to a river whose pure
waters, at every interspace of calm, reflect as in a mirror the hues of
heaven, but which is liable to the rushing influx of mountain torrents, and
whose reflected images are only dimly discernible in ten thousand fragments
of quivering colour, when its surface is swept by rufning winds. If we
make the difficult concession that any other mind than tha,t of St. Paul
could have originated the majestic statement of Christian truth which is
enshrined in the doctrinal part of the Epistle, we may still safely assert,
on literary grounds alone, that no writer, desirous to gain a hearing for such
high revelations, could have so completely merged his own individuality in
that of another as to imitate the involutions of parentheses, the digressions
at a word, the superimposition of a minor current of feeling over another
1 The similarity of expressions (Davidson, Introd. L 384) often throws into more
marked relief the dissimilarity in fundamental ideas. It is another amazing sign of the
blindness which marred the keen insight of Baur in other directions, that he should say
the contents of the Epistles "are so essentially the same that they cannot well be distinguished"!
(Paul. ii. 6.) The metaphysical Christology, which is polemically dwelt
upon in the Colossians, is only assumed and alluded to in the Ephesians; and the
prominent conceptions of Predestination and Unity which mark the doctrinal part of the
Ephesians find little or no place in the Colossians. The recurrence of any word ^ns
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