And now, leaving Puritanism and its errors, let us turn again for a moment, before we end, to the glorious apostle who has occupied us so long. He died, and men's familiar fancies of bargain and appeasement, from which, by a prodigy of religious insight, Paul had been able to disengage the death of Jesus, fastened on it and made it their own. Back rolled over the human soul the mist which the fires of Paul's spiritual genius had dispersed for a few short years. The mind of the whole world was imbrued in the idea of blood, and only through the false idea of sacrifice did men reach Paul's true one. Paul's idea of dying with Christ the _Imitation_ elevates more conspicuously than any Protestant treatise elevates it; but it elevates it environed and dominated by the idea of appeasement;--of the magnified and non-natural man in Heaven, wrath-filled and blood-exacting; of the human victim adding his piacular sufferings to those of the divine. Meanwhile another danger was preparing. Gifted men had brought to the study of St. Paul the habits of the Greek and Roman schools, and philosophised where Paul Orientalised. Augustine, a great genius, who can doubt it?--nay, a great religious genius, but unlike Paul in this, and inferior to him, that he confused the boundaries of metaphysics and religion, which Paul never did,--Augustine set the example of finding in Paul's eastern speech, just as it stood, the formal propositions of western dialectics. Last came the interpreter in whose slowly relaxing grasp we still lie,--the heavy-handed Protestant Philistine. Sincere, gross of perception, prosaic, he saw in Paul's mystical idea of man's investiture with the righteousness of God nothing but a strict legal transaction, and reserved all his imagination for Hell and the New Jerusalem and his foretaste of them. A so-called Pauline doctrine was in all men's mouths, but the ideas of the true Paul lay lost and buried.