Nowhere in the Old Testament is mention made of spirit and flesh after the manner of Paul. They had no knowledge of Grecian philosophy. Of course the mental condition had undergone some changes from the time of Ezra to Christ. Numerous sects had paved the way, and the ideas of various nations had been exchanged. A wonderful metamorphosis had taken place in the God during the one thousand five hundred years that passed between Moses and Paul. The ideal of Moses was a barbarous, cruel God--a determined, imperative, imperious God, that had a purpose in view, a nation to form, a country to conquer. The prince of Egypt, the successful general of a victorious army, talks; every word is a peremptory command. The strong, powerful will of an energetic man stands behind Jehova. There is no philosophy, but all action. No ideality, but muscular force. No humbleness, meekness, or mildness, but the stern exercise of a power that never flinches in any undertaking; regardless of consequences; pitiless in battle; fearless in the struggle, once determined must reach success. There is no display of imagination, no spiritual reflection, no refinement, but there is only the coarse, vulgar, savage God of Chaldean-Egyptian modification. The God had undergone changes in the mental agitation of the times, and Paul had accepted the God as he conceived him, through teachings then prevalent. An orator for a reformation, the cause of Christ he had embraced, coupled with the learning of the Grecian literature, his imagination led him to portray his God in the abstract--a refined ethereal being--in truth, a gentleman of a God. Paul was the real founder of the past and modern church system, the giver of ideas, the furnisher of numerous themes that gave impulse to any number of shades of the various sects now in existence, the promulgator of modification, the pleader of a cause, the moralizer, the humble adviser and counselor of the lowly, ignorant, and poor. He was very earnest and sincere in the cause he had espoused, and, if anything, proud of it--"For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek" (Rom. i, 16). Next to Jew he was Greek. No wonder that his mind was tainted with Grecianism. His God was an alloy of Greek and Jew Gods. The Greek philosophy helped to refine and eliminate the barbarism and brutality out of the Mosaic God.