The necessity that Paul was under of commending his christology to the Jews, a self-imposed necessity in part, inasmuch as his own genius being Jewish, imposed it on him, embarrassed the movement of his mind to such a degree that he was never able to do perfect justice to his own theory. Much time was spent in explaining his conduct to orthodox Jews, or in answering questions raised by hebrew casuistry. The epistle to the Romans, the most labored of his compositions, is a long argument addressed to his countrymen in Rome, with the design of persuading them that Jehovah was quite justified in accepting Gentiles who conformed to his requirements, and in rejecting children of Abraham who did not. This is the burden of the letter. The argument is lighted up by splendid bursts of eloquence, and diversified by keen remarks on points of psychology. But, omitting two or three of the chapters and scattered passages in others, the remainder is intellectually arid and devoid of human interest. The same may be said of the letter to the Galatians. The epistles to the Thessalonians, and those to the Corinthians, are occupied chiefly with matters of local and incidental concern. It is probable that Paul's genius was disastrously circumscribed within hebrew limits after all; that he never completely emancipated himself even from the old time traditions of his people; that the Jewish half of the man was not the weaker half. A philosopher he was not; a theologian, in the great sense, he was not; a metaphysician he was not; a psychologist he was not. He was an apostle, a preacher. The problems he discussed were formal rather than vital, and the spirit in which he discussed them was the temper of the dogmatist rather than that of the seer. However this may be, it may be affirmed that his system contained no strictly original ideas; that his leading thoughts, and even the phases of his thought, were borrowed from the literature of his nation, or, at least, may be found there. It is a frequent remark that, but for St. Paul, Christianity might have had no life out of Judæa; which is tantamount to saying that it might have had no prolonged or extended life at all, but would have perished as an incidental phase of Judaism. The remark is essentially just; at the same time it must be remembered that the Christianity which Paul devised and planted was a system quite unlike that of his predecessors, though still another phase of Judaism, a divergent and cosmopolitan phase.