to Christ became in time so intimate that it was like an interfusion of a greater personality with his; for him, "to live," he said, "was Christ" (Phil. i, 21). This consciousness of the deep meaning of his and the Christian life, however, did not come to Saul at once on his conversion. He must take time for adjustment to his new spiritual condition and ideal. This must be done in solitude and self-examination. Accordingly, he spent the first three years after his conversion in Arabia (Gal. i, 17, 18), doubtless in searching study and meditation. Then, going up to Jerusalem, he made a fortnight's visit to St. Peter and saw St. James the Lord's brother (Gal. i, 18-19). From these men he doubtless got such information about Jesus' earthly life as he would need for the factual basis of his own teaching. What he habitually preached, however, was rather the values than the external facts of Jesus' ministry (cf. 2 Cor. v, 16); which values he deduced from the Christ he had seen in vision, who had become the risen Lord and Brother of every man. In this peculiar experience of St. Paul (for such his name became after he began preaching, cf. Acts xiii, 9) we discern two elements of special fitness, superior to what we find in the older apostles, for the distinctive literary work that fell to him to do. First, his conversion was not a reversal of his life's ideas but an adjustment and concentration, in which he continued to cherish all the permanent values of Judaism and could see their consummation and fulfillment. Secondly, even by the fact that he had not been a personal companion of Jesus he could the better interpret the idealism of the Christ to men of every nation who themselves must receive him rather by faith than by sight. He himself, dealing with Gentiles of every stripe, was an able exponent of the same faith. II St. Paul the Orator. In thinking of St. Paul as the writer of the letters that bear his name, we are too apt to ignore the main literary activity to which he gave his life. After his conversion, as soon as he became fully aware of "that for which he was laid hold of by Christ Jesus" (Phil. iii, 12), he became a traveling preacher and teacher; making it his life's business to interest men in his Christian message, to plant and organize churches, and to exercise a founder's care over them until they were well enough manned and indoctrinated to maintain themselves. In this work he showed a masterly generalship by choosing important strategic points or centers of influence: residing for various periods of time, sometimes amounting to years, and later repeating his visits, in such cities as Antioch, Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, and Ephesus; not to omit Cæsarea and Rome, in both of which cities he, though a prisoner, had much freedom of intercourse with the world and earned the recognition accorded to a man of intellectual and spiritual power (cf. Acts xxiv, 25, 26; xxviii, 30, 31). In all this extraordinarily active life he made his way and achieved success by public speaking, that is, as a powerful and persuasive orator. St. Paul himself, it would seem, set no great store either by the impressiveness of his personal presence (cf. 2 Cor. x, 10) His Manner or by the eloquence of his public speech (cf. 1 Cor. of Speaking ii, I, 4). He was inclined rather to attribute the undeniably marvelous effects of his preaching to the intrinsic power of his theme. But there are good reasons for a less deprecatory estimate. To quote from the Reverend Maurice Jones: "If the power to produce striking effects, and a marvelous facility of adapting himself to every class of hearer and to every variety of conditions, be the marks of a true orator, we are bound to confess that the Apostle possessed them in no small degree. . . . The effect of his first recorded sermon at Antioch in Pisidia, which brought the whole city to listen to him on the following Sabbath (Acts xiii, .44); the burning eloquence which filled the conscience-stricken Felix with fear and awe (Acts xxiv, 25); the impassioned oratory which moved Festus to exclaim that he was mad (Acts xxvi, 24); the persuasiveness which fascinated and kept quiet a howling mob of Jews thirsting for his life (Acts xxii, 2), all these tell the same tale, and assure us that among the many and outstanding gifts possessed by the Apostle, that of speech was not the least. High Roman officials, Jewish kings, crowds of heathen, whether among the dilettanti of Athens or the peasants of Lystra, all acknowledge the power of that magic voice. . . . To the unlettered crowd at Lystra there was but one name which could do justice to the brilliancy of his eloquence, that of Mercury, the herald of the gods "1 (Acts xiv, 12). Notes of The reports of St. Paul's public addresses are all from the pen of St. Luke, the writer of the Acts, who was for several years the intimate friend and traveling companion of the apostle. Some of these speeches, it is not to be doubted, he himself heard. For others he must depend on report, or perhaps procure an account of them from the apostle himself. As reported to us they are all brief, and doubtless comprise in each case only the gist or main course of what was said; and much of the wealth of color, illustration, and impassioned appeal can be only meagerly reproduced. Enough is preserved, however, to show the wonderful tact with which the apostle adapted himself to every audience and occasion; the variety of appeal that he made to very different classes of people; yet withal the absolute singleness and sincerity of purpose which drove him in each case straight to his point, with oratorical skill yet quite without the tricks or sophistry of the rhetorician. His absorbing sense of the power of his theme (cf. I Cor. ix, 16) 1 Jones, "St. Paul the Orator," p. 1. is what gives power, unity, and eloquence to all his work. He himself describes this in 1 Cor. ix, 19-27, illustrating his singleness of aim by a figure taken from athletics: "I therefore so run as not uncertainly; so fight I, as not beating the air." NOTE. List of St. Paul's Speeches. Of St. Paul's reported speeches, six are longer and more noteworthy than the rest";1 and they present such a variety of treatment and occasion that we naturally conclude them to have been selected by St. Luke as broadly typical of the main aspects of his work. They are: 1. The speech at Antioch in Pisidia, Acts xiii, given before an audience of his own nation, in a synagogue. 2. The speech at Athens, Acts xvii, given before an audience of Greek philosophers. 3. The speech at Miletus, Acts xx, given as a farewell address to a Christian audience. 4. The speech at Jerusalem, Acts xxii, given to a Jewish hostile mob; an apologia pro vita sua. 5. The speech before Felix, Acts xxiv, given as a defense before a Roman tribunal. 6. The speech before King Agrippa, Acts xxvi, given on an occasion of great pomp before a Jewish king and a Roman procurator. To these main addresses may be added: brief notes of speeches to an unlettered crowd at Lystra (Acts xiv, 15–17); to the Sanhedrim in Jerusalem (Acts xxiii, 1-6); and to the Jews at Rome, soon after his arrival there as a prisoner (Acts xxviii, 17-28). Thus, not only in variety of audience and occasion as represented in St. Luke's reports, but "we have records of his addresses at the great centres of imperial and provincial life.... The selection of speeches, although exceedingly limited in quantity, is by the variety and comprehensiveness of its contents, of the greatest importance, and redounds, in no small degree, to the credit of the author of the Acts as a historian of high rank" (Jones, p. 5). In estimating St. Paul's speeches we must bear in mind that we do not have them immediately from him, but from St. Luke, who in reporting them may supposably have impressed something of his own style upon them. We have 1 For this list and remarks thereon, see Gardiner, in "Cambridge Biblical Essays," and Jones, " St. Paul the Orator." to bear in mind also the conventional method of ancient historians, whose custom was to compose speeches and put Bearing on them in the mouths of their characters. St. Luke's the Epistles close conversance with St. Paul's mind, however, would remove the necessity of much invention of speeches; besides, he was the actual hearer of some of them. Beyond this, however, there is a close analogy between the speeches and the epistle. Not only are the lines of thought as much alike as the variety of occasion would permit, but the epistles themselves, in the glow and impetuosity of their style, in the close grip, as it were, of a man with an audience, and in their intimate personal tone, are like public speech reduced to writing. In the direct and incisive way of marshaling his thoughts, too, St. Paul's mind was eminently oratorical. The chosen occasion of his epistles was always like that of a pastor conversing with his people. In such a literary medium it was, accordingly, familiar yet impassioned, that he gave his great Christian message to the ages. III Letters of the Active Missionary. If we would trace the development of St. Paul's thought through his epistles, we must take them not in the order in which they occur in the New Testament but in that which a careful study of their thought and occasion reveals as chronological. This order can be ascertained without much uncertainty, except in the relative order of one or two of the shorter ones. The development of thought which this study reveals may be traced in the large in two stages. These may be defined somehow thus: The gospel which St. Paul has in charge is indeed universal, not to be monopolized by any race or class (cf. Rom. i, 14, 16). But it has its roots in Jewish ways of thinking, inherited from an ancient history and literature, and in its branches in ways of thinking which Gentiles cannot understand without first being educated in |