St. Paul (you will find) in all his epistles recognizes the analogy
between the human race and the individual; and all that he teaches about
mankind corresponds to the development I have tried to sketch above. You
will be told indeed that the attempt to trace such a parallelism as I
have traced above, is an attempt to “read modern thoughts into an
ancient author.” But do not be in haste to call St. Paul an “ancient
author,” not at least in any disparaging sense, as if we had outgrown
the antiquated limits of his thoughts. Being a man of realities St. Paul
dived deep down below the surface of language, cant, and formularies; he
reached the very source and centre of the human heart where
righteousness is made. He realized the making of righteousness as a
visible process. Others, who have not realized it, think his writings
misguided, antique, occasionally untrue. But do not you fail to
distinguish between St. Paul’s style and St. Paul’s thought. He wrote in
a hurry; he did not think in a hurry. The general scheme of his theology
needs no excuse, nor allowance, nor patronage. His illustrations of it,
arguments in defence of it, even his expressions of it, are, from our
point of view, often inadequate; but his spiritual truths are the
deepest truths of human nature, as it may be seen ascending through
illusion and frailty to divine knowledge and divine righteousness. St.
Paul has been wonderfully obscured by formularizing commentators. The
best commentary on him that I know is an ordinary home; but for a young
man, away from home, and in danger of forgetting his childhood, the next
best commentary is Shakespeare, and the next to that is Wordsworth, or,
from a different point of view, the _In Memoriam_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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