of God; but by inheritance, example, and habit it has become second nature, and it is as impossible for him to cast it off as if it were his original constitution. The seat of its power is "the flesh," by which Paul does not mean merely the body as material, but body and soul, sense and reason, as they are, corrupted by sin. It renders nugatory all the aspirations after truth and goodness that man finds in his mind (nous), and is in permanent antagonism to God and his righteous will, to the gospel and the Spirit; the thoughts and aims of "the flesh" are opposed to God, for they are not and cannot be subject to the law of God. So long as a man is "in the flesh" he cannot please God.

Herein lies the necessity of the death of Christ.1 Since all have sinned, Christ by his death made atonement for the sins of mankind, and thus rendered it possible for God to "justify" (i. e., to save) the sinner who by faith in Christ avails himself of this salvation. In the mysteries the death of the hero is a meaningless calamity; it is his resurrection only that has religious value. To Paul the death of Christ is an expiation provided by God himself, who sent his Son to redeem the sinful race of men.

Paul is zealous to prove not only that the salvation in Christ avails for every man, but that there is no other way of salvation, and especially that Judaism is none. The Jews believe, he says, that they will be saved by the works of the Law, that is, by conformity to the will of God as revealed in Scripture and tradition; they rely on their own righteousness. But to be found righteous on his own merit a man must have kept the whole Law perfectly, a thing no one ever has done or can do. The Law was given, according to Paul, not that men by obedience might attain to righteousness, but to bring them to a consciousness of their sinfulness, and, by the impossibility of fulfilling its 1 To the immediate disciples of Jesus his death had no profounder necessity than that the Scriptures must be fulfilled.

2

The Jewish doctrine of salvation was, in fact, very different (see above, pp. 70 f.). Paul implicitly denies that God does, or can, freely forgive the penitent sinner.

demands, to impress upon them the necessity of another righteousness than their own. It was a tutor under whose stern discipline the Jews were put to prepare them for Christ.

The perpetuity of the Law was an axiom in Judaism and to the Jewish believers in Jesus. For Paul the Law was a pedagogic institute, a temporary dispensation. When Christ came and the new dispensation of grace was inaugurated, the Law, belonging to an order of things that had passed away, expired by its own implicit limitation without need of formal abrogation. Consequently, for Christians to be circumcised and put themselves under the obligation of the two-fold Law was nothing short of apostasy.

Paul thus emancipated Christianity from the Law not only in practice but in principle, without impugning the character of the Law, which is "holy and just and good," and without abandoning the ground of revealed religion in the Old Testament. A more radical type of Gentile Christianity, which made its appearance within Paul's lifetime, did both; it rejected the Law as in itself evil, imposed by a deity inferior to the Christian God or hostile to him-ideas which in the next century gained great currency in Gnostic sects.1

Paul's opponents accused him, by abolishing the Law, of destroying the very foundations of morality, and some of his converts evidently thought that the logic of no law was lawlessness. He does not meet these inferences, as has often been done in more recent times, by distinguishing between ritual and ceremonial and the moral law. The Law was for him, as for the Jews, an indissoluble unity; as a whole it was given, as a whole it was annulled. But his Christian has no need for an external regulative of conduct in Scripture and tradition, because he has the principle and motive of right living in himself, or, rather, in the spirit of Christ that lives in him. His old sinful nature is dead; it was crucified with Christ-how can he any more live in sin? Such was the theory; experience was a different story, as Paul's letters to the Corinthians testify.

Religious worship supposes a præsens numen, and Christians who worshipped the Lord Jesus necessarily believed that their Lord was present in their gatherings for worship. That he should be thus at once in heaven and on earth did not make them any difficulty; the religions of the time all made the same assumption without ascribing to the gods omnipresence. So, also, among the Jews the Shekina, the invisible presence of God, was wherever ten men (the quorum of the synagogue) were gathered for prayer.

The presence of Christ in the Christian community was manifest in the operations of the Spirit. As in the Old Testament the spirit of God is the author of experiences in which men seem to be possessed and controlled by something above themselves, and endued with supernatural wisdom or power, so in the Christian church the spirit comes upon men, producing enthusiasm or ecstasy; they prophesy, speak with tongues and interpret the unintelligible dialect of the spirit, heal diseases and expel demons, at its prompting and in its power. As in the Old Testament the operations of the spirit are attributed to God, who sends it, so in the church the work of the spirit of Christ is the work of Christ. But besides these occasional and spectacular manifestations of divine possession, the spirit of Christ indwelling in Christians is the permanent source and power of their peculiar religious life. The virtues and graces-"love, gladness, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, continence"-are the work of the spirit; they are in the empirical man as supernatural as the gift of tongues or miraculous powers. The spirit is for Paul a divine atmosphere in which the Christian lives, an element which, like the atmosphere, penetrates and pervades his whole being.

The Jewish ideal of a golden age on earth, which had its origin in the Messianic prophecies, and even in its most universalised form could not be dissociated from the national hope-it always left an invidious precedence, if not pre-eminence, to the Jews-was not the good which Gentiles

seeking the salvation of their souls asked of religion. Many Jews, also, living in an atmosphere of Greek thought, entertained the conception of the immortality of the soul which was current in popular religious philosophy and had no affinity to the orthodox Palestinian eschatology. The salvation which such Jews, like their Gentile neighbours, sought was a state of eternal blessedness with God and the souls of the good. A Jewish Hellenist like the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, or a Christian Hellenist like the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, conceives salvation in the same way; the resurrection of the body has no room in his thought.

Paul was a Pharisee; the resurrection of the body was the distinguishing dogma of his school. He had let go pretty nearly all else of his Jewish orthodoxy, but on this point he was tenacious. The resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of believers were in his mind correlative. In Judaism, as in Zoroastrianism, whence the doctrine came, the resurrection was the redintegration out of its dispersed elements of the identical body that was dissolved at death and the reunion of the soul with it, that the whole man, soul and body, might stand at the bar of God's great judgment and receive the just retribution of the deeds which they had together done in the mortal life. The scene of the blessed hereafter beyond resurrection and judgment was this earth, purified and glorified.

Paul's conception is entirely different. When the Lord comes in the clouds, his saints will be caught up to meet him in the air and go to be for ever with him in heaven. At the same time the dead in Christ will be raised and taken up to heaven. But heaven is no place for flesh and blood, and so those who are living at Christ's coming will be transformed, and the bodies which rise from the tomb will be as unlike those that were committed to it as the plant that springs from the earth is unlike the seed that was buried in it. "It is sown an animal body, it is raised a spiritual body" —that is, probably a body of fiery matter such as angels are made of; it will be like the glorious body of the Lord him

self. In another even more significant passage Paul lets go this slender thread of continuity. In a familiar (originally Orphic) metaphor, the body is a tent in which the soul has its transient habitation; when this tent is struck the soul is not left naked and homeless; a celestial body awaits it, an imperishable house of God's own building. Thus for Paul "resurrection" is not the restoration and revivication of the fleshly body, but the assumption to heaven of the soul invested with a new and heavenly body.1

Far the greater part of those to whom the gospel was preached, whether Jews or Gentiles, rejected it. The ground of this rejection Paul sometimes puts in the sinful will of man, or he ascribes it to a false conceit of wisdom, or to the influence of superhuman powers of evil-"the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelieving that the illumination of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not enlighten them." But when he expresses his deeper reflection on the problem he finds the solution in predestination. With his view of the inherent sinfulness of humanity and its consequent aversion to the truth, faith was not in the power of man, it must be the gift of God; and that God had not bestowed on all the will to believe was plain. "He has mercy on whom he wills, and whom he wills he hardens"-so the Scripture taught. Such reflections were confirmed by his own experience; like Augustine, his doctrine of election was rooted in his experience of divine grace. Paul's doctrine of predestination is not the determinist corollary of an idea of God which asserts for him a causality so absolute as to leave no place for finite free will; it is his solution of the problem, Why, when the gospel is so convincing, do not all men believe??

The philosophies as well as the religions of the time, in proportion as their idea of God was metaphysically or morally sublimated, made place for a multitude of powers intermediate between God and the world of nature and

1 It is perhaps not superfluous to remark that neither the soul nor the spiritual body is immaterial. Paul was not a Platonist.

2 So it was also with Mohammed. See below, pp. 396 f.