At the same time a suffering Messiah was a contradiction in terms, unspeakably repulsive to a Jew. We can see this much in the tremendous efforts of the Apologists to overcome Jewish aversion by producing Old Testament prophecies that Christ was to suffer. _Pathetos_ (subject to suffering) was a word that waked rage and contempt in every one, who held to contemporary views of God, or even had dabbled in Stoic or similar conceptions of human greatness. But it seems that the serenity and good conscience of Christian martyrs impressed their persecutor, who was not happy in his own conscience; and at last the thought came--along familiar lines--that Christ's sufferings might be for the benefit of others. And then he saw Jesus on the road to Damascus. What exactly happened is a matter of discussion, but Paul was satisfied--he was "a man in Christ." Much might be said in criticism of Paul's Christology--if it were not for Paul and his followers. They have done too much and been too much for it to be possible to dissect their great conception in cold blood. Paul's theories are truer than another man's experiences--they pulse with life, they have (in Luther's phrase) hands and feet to carry a man away. The man is so large and so strong, so simple and true, so various in his knowledge of the world, so tender in his feeling for men--"all things to all men"--such a master of language, so sympathetic and so open--he is irresistible. The quick movement of his thought, his sudden flashes of anger and of tenderness, his apostrophes, his ejaculations--one feels that pen and paper never got such a man written down before or since. Every sentence comes charged with the whole man--half a dozen Greek words, and not always the best Greek--and the Christian world for ever will sum up its deepest experience in "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world." Close examination reveals a good deal of Judaism surviving in Paul,--a curious way of playing with the text of Scripture, {156} odd reminiscences of old methods, and deeper infiltrations of a Jewish thought which is not that of Jesus. Yet it does not affect our feeling for him--he stands too close to us as a man, too much over us as the teacher of Augustine, Calvin and Luther--a man, whom it took more genius to explain than the church had for fifteen centuries, and yet the man to whom the church owes its universal reach and unity, its theology and the best of the language in which it has expressed its love for his master. [Sidenote: Explanation of Jesus]