How can the most conservative Republicans accept as teacher a man who counsels religious men, in _proportion as they are religious_, to surrender their full, unqualified, sincere allegiance to established authorities because they are established, however despotic, ferocious nay vile they may be; even to such despotisms as that of Nero;--maintaining that resistance to such is equivalent to resisting the ordinance of God?--giving this not as the counsel of prudence, but as the dictate of conscience, thus proclaiming exemption from criticism or assault, for inhuman tyrannies? Nothing short of this is inculcated by the sweeping declaration: "Let every soul be subject to the higher powers: for there is no power but of God; the established powers are ordained of God." No doubt the bidding was given in view of a turbulent or insurrectionary spirit among the Israelites in Rome, but it is given without explanation or limit. It ratifies the divine right of kings: sanctions the principle that might makes right. Paul was an enthusiast for ideas; not a theologian, not a social reformer, but one whose zeal was spent on doctrines. Prevailingly intellectual, his whole nature was fused by the electric touch of a new thought. Paul's acquaintance with the Talmud is evidenced by his writings. His use of allegory, his fanciful analogies, his mystical interpretations, his play on words, his passion for types and symbols, his ingenious speculations on history and eschatology, betray his familiarity with that curious literature. He found a mine of precious material in the mythical Adam Cædmon, the progenitor, the prototype, the "federal head" of the race, the man who was not a man but a microcosm, created by special act from sifted clay; a creature whose erected head touched the firmament, whose extended body reached across the earth; a being to whom all save Satan did obeisance; who, but for his transgression, would have enjoyed an immortality on earth; whose sin entailed on the human race all the evils, material and moral, that have cursed the world; the primordial man, who contained in himself the germs of all mankind; whose corruption tainted the nature of generations of descendants. The Talmud exhausts speculation on this prodigious personality. The doctrine of the christian church for fifteen hundred years was not so much colored as shaped by the rabbis who exercised their subtlety on this tempting theme. Philo, a contemporary of Paul, is in no respect behind the most imaginative in his conjectures on this sublime legend. That Paul, a student of the Talmud, fell in with them, should excite no surprise. That he added nothing is due probably to the fact that there was nothing to add.