The life and work of St. Paul

634 THB LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
that is flowing steadily beneath it, the unconscious recurrence of haunting
expressions, the straggle and strain to find a worthy utterance for thoughts
and feelings which burst through the feeble bands of language, the dominance
of the syllogism of emotion over the syllogism of grammar the many other
minute characteristics which stamp so ineffaceable an impress on the Apostle's
undisputed works. This may, I think, bo pronounced with some confidence
to be a psychological impossibility. The intensity of the writer's feelings is
betrayed in every sentence by the manner in which great truths interlace each
other, and are yet subordinated to one main and grand perception. Mannerisms
of style may be reproduced ; but let any one attempt to simulate the language
of genuine passion, and every reader will tell him how ludicrously he
fails. Theorists respecting the spuriousness of some of the Pauline Epistles
have, I think, entirely underrated the immense difficulty of palming upon the
world an even tolerably successful imitation of a style the mosi living, the
most nervously sensitive, which the world has ever known. The spirit in
which a forger would have sat down to write is not the spirit which could
have pom-ed forth so grand a eucharistic hymn as the Epistle to the Ephesians.
1
Fervour, intensity, sublimity, the unifying or, if I may use the
expression, esemplastic power of the imagination over the many subordinate
truths which strive for utterance ; the eagerness which hurries the Apostle to
his main end in spite of deeply important thoughts which intrude themselves
into long parentheses and almost interminable paragraphs all these must,
from the very nature of literary composition, have been far beyond the roach
of one who could deliberately sit down with a lie in his rigut hand to write a
false superscription, and boast with trembling humility of the unparalleled
spiritual privileges entrusted to him as the Apostle of the Gentiles.
A strong bias of prejudice against the doctrines of the Epistle may
perhaps, in some minds, have overborne the sense of literary possibilities.
But is there in reality anything surprising in the developed Christology of
St. Paul's later years P That his views respecting the supreme divinity of
Christ never wavered will hardly, I think, be denied by any candid contro-
versialist. They are as clearly, though more implicitly, present in the First
Epistle to the Thessalonians as in the Second Epistle to Timothy. No human
being can reasonably doubt the authenticity of the Epistle to the Romans ;
yet the Pauline evangel logically argued out in that Epistle is identical with
that which is so triumphantly preached in this. They are not, as Reuss has
observed, two systems, but two methods of exposition. In the Romans,
Paul's point of view is psychologic, and his theology is built on moral facts
the universality of sin, and the insufficiency of man, and hence salvation by
the grace of God, and union of the believer with the dead and risen Christ.
But in the Ephesians the point of view is theologic the idea of God's eternal
plans realised in the course of ages, and the unity in Christ of redeemed
humanity with the "
family of heaven. The two great dogmatic teachers of
1 J. LI. Davies, Eph., p. 19,