Teacher's Apparatus.--English theology has no juster cause for pride
than the books it has produced on the Life of Paul. Perhaps there is
no other subject in which it has so outdistanced all rivals. Conybeare
and Howson's _Life and Epistles of St. Paul_ will probably always keep
the foremost place; in many respects it is nearly perfect; and a
teacher who has mastered it will be sufficiently equipped for his work
and require no other help. The works of Lewin and Farrar are written
on the same lines; the former is rich in maps of countries and plans of
towns; and the strong point of the latter is the analysis of Paul's
writings--the exposition of the mind of Paul. Sir William Ramsay has
made the whole subject peculiarly his own by the enthusiasm and labors
of a lifetime. The German books are not nearly so valuable.
Hausrath's _The Apostle Paul_ is a brilliant performance, but it is as
weak in handling the deeper things as it is strong in coloring up the
external and picturesque features of the subject. Baur's work is an
amazingly clever _tour de force_, but it is not so much a
well-proportioned picture of the apostle as a prolonged paradox thrown
down as a challenge to the learned. The latest large German work,
Clemen's _Paulus_, proceeds on the principle that the miracle is
untrue, and the effect may be sufficiently seen in the account it gives
of the first visit to Philippi. In Weinal's _Paulus_, pp. 312, 313,
there appears a forbidding picture of the effects produced by the
teaching of the subject in the author's country; in our country, on the
contrary, it has long been among the most attractive subjects for both
teachers and students. Adolphe Monod's _Saint Paul_, a series of five
discourses, is an inquiry into the secret of the apostle's life,
written with deep sympathy and glowing eloquence; and Renan's work,
with the same title, gives, with unrivaled brilliance, a picture of the
world in which the apostle lived, if not of the apostle himself. There
are books on the subject which do honor to American scholarship from
the pens of Cone, Gilbert, Bacon and A. T. Robertson, the last
mentioned with a valuable bibliography. But the best help is to be
found in the original sources themselves--the cameolike pictures of
Luke and the self-revelations of Paul's Epistles. The latter
especially, read in the fresh translation of Conybeare, will show the
apostle to any one who has eyes to see. Johnstone's wall-map of Paul's
journey is indispensable in the class-room.
CHAPTER I
Paragraph 2. Subject of class essay--Paul and the other Apostles:
Points of Connection and Contrast.
5. Subject of class essay--Relation of Christianity to Learning and
Intellectual Gifts: its Use of them and its Independence of them.
9. _Quote passages of Scripture in which Paul's destination to be the
missionary of the Gentiles is expressed._
CHAPTER II
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