To himself the office was an unceasing delight. The universalism of the gospel--a commonplace of our modern rhetoric--had burst upon his mind in its unspoilt freshness and undimmed splendour. He is sailing out into an undiscovered ocean, with a boundless horizon. A new heaven and earth are opened to him in the revelation that the Gentiles are partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus. He is entranced, as he writes, with the largeness of the Divine purpose, with the magnificent sweep and scope of the designs of grace. These verses give us the warm and genuine impression made upon the hearts of its first recipients by the disclosure of the universal destination of the gospel of Christ. St Paul’s work, in carrying out the dispensation of this mystery, was twofold. It was both external and internal. He was a “herald and apostle”; he was also “teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth” (1 Tim. ii. 7). He had in the former capacity to carry the good tidings from one end to the other of the Roman empire, to spread it abroad as far as his feet could travel and his voice reach, and thus “to fulfil the gospel of Christ.” But there was another, mental task, as necessary and still more difficult, which likewise fell to his lot. He had to _think out_ the gospel. It was his office to unfold and apply it to the wants of a new world, to solve by its aid the problems that confronted him as evangelist and pastor,--questions that contained the seed and beginning of the intellectual difficulties of the Church in future times. He had to free the gospel from the swaddling-bands of Judaism, to emancipate the spirit from the letter of a mechanical and legal interpretation. On the other hand, he had equally to guard the truth as it is in Jesus from the dissolving influences of Gentile scepticism and theosophy. Fighting his way through fierce and incessant opposition on both sides, the apostle Paul led the mind of the Church onwards and guides it still in the faith and knowledge of the Son of God. These noble epistles are the fruit and record of St Paul’s theological work. Through them he has left a deeper mark on the conscience of the world than any one man besides, except the Master of truth who was more than man.