My Brethren, I have now explained to a certain extent what I meant when I spoke of St. 10 Paul's characteristic gift, as being a special apprehension of human nature as a fact, and an intimate familiarity with it as an object of continual contemplation and affection. He made it his own to the very full, instead of annihilating 15 it; he sympathized with it, while he mortified it by penance, while he sanctified it by the grace given him. Though he had never been a heathen, though he was no longer a Jew, yet he was a heathen in capability, as I may say, and a Jew 20 in the history of the past. His vivid imagination enabled him to throw himself into the state of heathenism, with all those tendencies which lay dormant in his human nature carried out, and its infirmities developed into sin. His wakeful 25 memory enabled him to recall those past feelings and ideas of a Jew, which in the case of others a miraculous conversion might have obliterated; and thus, while he was a Saint inferior to none, he was emphatically still a man, and to 30 his own apprehension still a sinner. And this being so, do you not see, my brethren, how well fitted he was for the office of an Ecumenical Doctor, and an Apostle, not of the Jews only, but of the Gentiles? The Almighty sometimes works by miracle, but commonly He 5 prepares His instruments by methods of this world; and, as He draws souls to Him, "by the cords of Adam," so does He select them for His use according to their natural powers. St. John, who lay upon His breast, whose book was the sacred heart 10 of Jesus, and whose special philosophy was the "scientia sanctorum," _he_ was not chosen to be the Doctor of the Nations. St. Peter, taught in the mysteries of the Creed, the Arbiter of doctrine and the Ruler of the faithful, he too was passed 15 over in this work. To him specially was it given to preach to the world, who knew the world; he subdued the heart, who understood the heart. It was his sympathy that was his means of influence; it was his affectionateness which was his title and 20 instrument of empire. "I became to the Jews a Jew," he says, "that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the Law, as if I were under the Law, that I might gain them that were under the Law. To those that were without the Law, 25 as if I were without the Law, that I might gain them that were without the Law. To the weak I became weak, that I might gain the weak. I became all things to all men, that I might save all." 30