So the extent of St. Paul’s deification of Christ may be thus generally described. He believed that Christ was in a peculiar sense the son of God—that is, something more than ordinary man. Intermediate between God and man, he was at once God’s agent and man’s representative. But St. Paul clearly makes him inferior to God as well as superior to man, and allows him no power except what is delegated to him by God.[79] Thus as yet there was no sign of the doctrine of the Incarnation, though a path for it was being prepared. For the doctrine of the Incarnation, it must be remembered, is not a mere deification of Christ. It is important, not because it deifies man, but because it humanizes God. St. Paul undoubtedly, so far as he deified—it would be better to say divinised—Christ, helped the Pagan tendencies of later Christianity, but there was nothing actually Pagan in his belief. The death of St. Paul marked the beginning of the end of Jewish Christianity. As the Jewish leaders died off, the vast Pagan majority seized upon power and impressed their ideas on the doctrines of the Church. Between the undiluted Jewish Christianity of its origin and the Pagan Christianity of the second century, Paulinism served as a link which enabled them finally to remain in nominal connection. In the spurious epistles attributed to St. Paul we can trace the steps of advancing Paganism, and observe the struggle for reconciliation which his followers inherited from him. Paulinism was ultimately lost in the Paganism with which its Jewish opponents had identified it. But it bridged the interval between the Jewish and Pagan periods of Christianity, and so saved the Church from a rupture it could not have survived. CHAPTER V. PAGAN CHRISTIANITY.