signification were unequal to bear the superabundant plenitude of ideas. Each word has been obliged, so to speak, to take a double or triple charge of meaning. In a preposition or in the juxtaposition of two terms Paul has lodged a whole world of ideas. This is what renders the exegesis of his Epistles so difficult and their translation absolutely impossible.1

If it be asked what is to be thought on the whole of St. Paul's Tarsian education, it is to be said that it made him a citizen of the world; if he is a Jew of the Diaspora he is also a Hellene-not a classic Hellene, but flavoured in temperament and sympathy with that broader Hellenism which marks the efforts of Greece towards a sort of Eastern imperialism which characterized the history of Greece during the first century of the Christian era. He remains a Hebrew all the time, but if you interpret him purely as a Hebrew and nothing more, as Harnack seems to do, you leave, as it were, half his mind unexplored. Providence seems to have had a hand in delivering St. Paul from the Hellenism of the classical period, and making him heir to a less delicate instrument; his Greek is hardier, more practical, and more commonplace than that of the classics, and therefore more influential and more suitable for the destiny of a Weltapostel, preaching the Gospel to every creature.' I think the Hellenistic training of St. Paul is very apparent in the Epistles to the Corinthians. He is all things to all men at Corinth, because he is a Greek to the Greeks. He has got into the Corinthian thought; he knows all about the people; he is conversant with the base trend of their worship, he knows their trade, their metiers, their games. Hence he writes Corinthian to them, and every word is a picture to them. Will anyone deny that this Weltanchauung does not owe much of its efficacy to his early training as a Tarsian Hellene? If it be said that the Eastern cities of St. Paul's day were Roman, it must

1 This is the view of an independent critic, for which, however, he cannot claim originality. St. Paul's style was characterized in somewhat similar terms of eulogy centuries ago by St. John Chrysostom, St. Jerome and St. Augustine. St. Philip Neri has almost the same thought as that expressed so eloquently by M. Sabatier, as to the world of meaning attaching to single words in St. Paul's Epistles.

be remembered that the rôle of Rome's imperial policy was conquest and organization-Rome did not de-Hellenize, so to speak, the cities of the East. She was content with a well-organized population, and let people live their own. way and think their own way, and pay their taxes.

The testimony [as to St. Paul's Hellenic tone in his Epistles, says Sir W. Ramsay] which struck me most of all was the opinion expressed by two of the most learned Jews of modern time with whom I happened to be talking more than ten years ago in the house of one of them. The conversation chanced to turn on Paul, and on the letters attributed to him. They were both perfectly certain that none of the Pauline letters could be genuine because there is much in them which no Jew could write. They were scholars whose opinion on any matter connected with Judaism in the early Christian centuries stands very high in the estimation of the whole world. They knew old Jewish feeling from the inside with an intimacy which no Western scholar can ever attain to. They appreciated the non-Jewish element intermingled in the writings of Paul. They rightly recognised that no pure Jew could write like that; but instead of inferring that Paul was a not mere Jew in education and mind, they inferred that Paul being (as is commonly assumed and maintained by modern scholars) a pure and narrow Jew could not have written these letters.

This Hellenic tone is discernible throughout St. Paul's discourses and Epistles in his fondness for dialectics; nowhere, as all exegetes, Catholic as well as Rationalist, admit, is the Apostle more at home than in a long drawnout argument, where the ideas lie on the top of one another like beds in a geological formation, the main thought running through all the while, now appearing, now seemingly lost to reappear again, as a denser vein of precious ore is found on deeper digging.

From Tarsus the parents of Saul brought the future Apostle to the Holy City to complete his education. While the Man-God was advancing in age, wisdom and grace in Nazareth, he who was first to persecute the Nazarene, and afterwards to wish himself an anathema for the name of Jesus, was seated at the feet of Gamaliel.' Destined for the profession of scribe young Saul was introduced to

Jewish culture in all its branches; for the scribe was by turns advocate, magistrate, and juris-consult. Two great schools then existed at Jerusalem, that of Hillel, embodying a narrow, and that of Schammai a broad and liberal interpretation of the law. The differences between these schools were, however, practically confined to minute points. Gamaliel, the teacher of St. Paul, was then head of the Hillel school. He was a type of the ideal Pharisee. The 'Mishnah' says of him: Since his death respect for the law no longer exists; the purity of the law is dead with him.' The instruction given in such a school while exclusively religious, was not exclusively Biblical; no doubt the Sacred Scriptures were the chief objects of study, and thence morality, positive law, and sacred history were learned. Besides this, however, there was a body of Jewish traditional doctrine to be acquired. The school was good as far as it went; it fulfilled the end of its existence; the teaching was thorough of its kind, for our Saviour, the implacable enemy of Phariseeism, admonishes His disciples to follow the lessons of the Pharisees, but not to be guided by their examples.

If Tarsus gave St. Paul a knowledge of the Scriptures in Septuagint Greek, Jerusalem afforded a wider grasp of the same literature in Hebrew. If Tarsus tended to widen his sympathies, the atmosphere of Jerusalem, and especially his Jewish training here, narrowed him down to the odious mental servitude which Phariseeism involved. The school of Hillel developed self-love, presumption, and pride, a man being thereby tempted to believe that he was the creator of his own justice; it also fostered hypocrisy in that the ideal was high while the means of attaining to it were utterly inadequate. Hence, to an ardent spirit like that of St. Paul, Phariseeism was just the creed to make of him a fanatic, compensating by a brutal intolerance the miseries of his soul. If he held the clothes of St. Stephen's executioners, it was because he was too young to be judge or witness; but his ideas were as bloody, bold, and resolute' as those of the executioners. And this attitude was not born of wickedness, but resulted from the strong convictions of a deeply religious character.

His Greek education

as son of the Diaspora, his Jewish training as disciple of Gamaliel, combined with genuine thoroughness of his strong manly nature to make of him a capable agent for the spread of Judaism among the heathen. He was burning with zeal for the Law and for the honour of his God; not from selfinterest, like most of the Pharisees, but from a profound conviction of the truth and godliness of the Law did he attack Christianity.1

'And I made progress,' he says, mindful of his persecuting days, 'in the Jews' religion above many of my equals, being more exceedingly zealous for the tradition of my Fathers.'

What he was, he was completely. His was, in the full sense of the term, a religious nature, which allowed itself to be led singly and exclusively by the truth once made known to it. And for this truth he strove with the full strength of his personality without any consideration for himself or others. As long as Jesus seemed to him the enemy of the law, so long was he willing, with all the means that lay at his disposal, to labour for the annihilation of this presumed foe. But when on his conversion he arrived at the knowledge of his false zeal, and a new aim was offered to him in the Gospel, he wished to know no longer anything else save Christ crucified, he felt it a necessity of his being, his most sacred duty to live for the Gospel, and consume himself in its service. In a word he was the hero of his convictions. By the groundwork of his character (seiner Charackteranlage nach) he was a born apostle, for whom Providence had merely to substitute the absolute truth of the Gospel for his Pharisaical truth ideal, and thereby to make it (the Gospel) the goal of his energy.

The colossal extent of the Apostle's labours is the outcome, in part, of the strength of his character. 'He laboured more than all the other Apostles together.' 'A wicked fellow,' said Dr. Johnson one day, is the most pious when he takes to it. He'll beat you all at piety.' Wicked, St. Paul can scarcely be said to have ever been, fanatical and intolerably cruel he certainly was. The

1 Koller, Über den Geist, die Lehre u. das Leben des Apos. Paulus. Darmstadt, 1835.

2 Gal. i. 14.

words he himself uses of this period of his life, though they embody sentiments of repentance, are indicative of an organized system of tyranny towards the Christians, in which he seems to out-Herod Herod, so to say. But when Christ takes possession of this great heart and mind we find the genius of St. Paul so immersed in the work of his Master, that, more than the other Apostles, he develops the universal idea of the Gospel; that Christ came not for the healing of one nation or people, but that His mission is for all nations, Greek and Roman and barbarian as well as Jew, and for bond-man as well as the free.

While the rage of a fanatic tortured Saul, the little Church at Jerusalem was absorbed in prayer and the doctrine of the Apostles, and the Gospel seemed still bound to the ancient worship and the legal regime. From the storm of persecution many members of the Christian community had sought refuge in the surrounding cities. The old city of Samaria received some, others made their way to distant Damascus, to be as far away as possible from the growing terror. To this city, the metropolis of Syria, probably because of its importance as a centre for the growth of Christian influence, Saul, as yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, directed his steps, armed with a commission from the high priest, probably Caiphas, to seek out in the synagogues of Damascus the secret disciples of Jesus, and to bring them all, without distinction of age or sex, before the Sanhedrin at Jerusalem. The immediate occasion of this fanatical outburst was the report spread by the enemies of St. Stephen, to the effect that this latter had foretold the ruin of the Temple, and the change of customs and traditions looked upon by the Jews as their sacred patrimony coming down from Moses. The first flame of this fire of indignation was the sacrifice of St. Stephen, the second the journey of St. Paul to Damascus.

1 λυμαίνετο, Acts viii. 3 ; εδίωκον . . . ἐπορθοῦν, Acts ix. 21, and Gal. i. 13-23.

a Acts ii. 42.

Père Rose, Etudes sur S. Paul.

Acts ix. I.