RELIGIOUS WORLD

Taranaki Daily News, 20 September 1919, Page 12

RELIGIOUS WORLD

LORD BRYCE ON ST. PAUL. A VIVID PICTURE OF A GREAT MAN Few persons in history have exerted more influence upon the world by their ■ writings than St. Paul has done. These writings are very short; they would all tro into a daily newspaper of four pagesAnd how scanty are all the data that we have of his life! Besides his own writir.jfl!, fliere are some sixteen or seventeen chapters in the Acts of the Apostles < recounting his missionary journeys, and "( porting or, rather, briefly summarising some few of his speeches. And there are also in his Letters several allusions to his life which throw a vivid light upon many of the most important passages in if. Hardly ,vi<- autlienic personal traditions regiu-'.i>>7 him have been preserved by the writers of the two following generations, and we do not know what value to attach to the representations ef his face in the ancient mosaics at Rome. All these things serve rather to stimulate than to satisfy our curiosity. St. Paul is, and always has been to the historian, and probably will always continue to be, one of the most interesting figures in the whole long story of the Christian Church. He is one about whom we shall always wish to know far more than the Acts of the Apostles contain, though it is very unlikely tha't any new source of information will ever bo discovered, even in Egyptian papyri AN ADVENTUROUS LIFE. What an adventurous life was that o{ St. Paul! It included his perils iu and his escape from Damascus, where he was j let down in a basket from a hole in the city wall —they still show the place which tradition has assigned to the escape—his subsequent retirement to Arabia, his many missionary journeys to and fro, his imprisonments and seourgIngs, stoning, constant threats to his ! life, trials in courts of so-called justice, shipwrecks, every kind of peril that was J fitted to brace up a strong man, though half of them would have overcome anyone but the strongest. Nothing daunted him. He was accustomed to calumny, misrepresentation and danger, and lie faced everything with equal resolution. He must have had, as the Dean of St. Faul's in an extremely interesting article ii; a recent number of the "Quarterly Review," says, a wonderfully si xong natural constitution. He was evidently a man of intense nervous energy, which carried him through everything and enabled him to retain his courage and self-possession in the most tryng circumstances. It was the intensity of his feeling and his devotion to the cause which had taken possession of him, that gave him the strength needed for his work. What an amazing enterprise it was for a solitary Jew without any iuflyence and with no help except that which gathered round him from the disciples he inspired, to form the design of converting the whole Roman Empire. He saw that Empire as a world lying in wickedness, which was waiting for the message he had to deliver; and to that message he gave his life. Compare his position with that of the missionaries of more recent times. There were then no religious orders such as the later days of Christianity produced, no missionary societies, no kind of help to be expected from any quarter no organisation of any sort behind him. All had to be done by himself; and in the places which he visited he could seldom expect a friendly reception, and in fact usually, after a few days, encountered ferocious persecution on the part of the .lewish colonic?:, who regarded him as a dangerous renegade. A COMPLEX CHARACTER. How many different characteristics s'em to meet in St. Paul! He was a mystic. But he was also a man of energy and action, taking in a situation at a glance, ordering his methods so as to meet the situation, becoming, as he Mid himself, "all things to all men," retaining his integrity and singleness of purpose, but yet knowing how to address in different ways different kinds of minds and conditions. Men of such force tre apt to be stern and hard, but he was full of tenderness and won friends wherever he went, partly by this tenderness and l)j the capacity for all'ection which 1-e showed, and partly also, no doubt, by that perfect unselfishness and devotion to an ideal which soon impressed those who came to know him. Though he ctuld fiare tip on occasion (as in Acts I'xiii. 3), this gentleness and consideration, this wish to help individuals and set right things that have gone wrong, shines out touchingly in the little letter to Philemon, which I mention (thinking that little regard need to be had to those few modern critics who have im.i.lined its genuineness) because it is one of the most touching traits in a great character, to be able to stop in the middle of large enterprises to care for individuals. And with all his mysticism, how much practical judgment lie could show in dealing with concrete cases! lie was able to perceive what was the path of least resistance and the wisest thing to do having, regard to existing conditions. This appears in his handling of some of the controversies that had begun to distract the Church. Take for instance, his remarks upon the treatment of the question of partaking of food that had been ordered to idols (Ist Corinthians x. 25-32), and see how he dials with it in the spirit of a practical administrator, a spirit of clear, sound common sense. PAUL'S MARK ON HISTORY. Few men's thoughts have passed so much as his into the thought of all who have lived since. Few men have ever made so great ail impression by so small on amount of prose writings. A poet may be great forever by two or taree pjems, like the author of the Book of Job and some of the Greek lyric poetsBut how few have done this in prose! St. Paul and his career opened a new period in history. He marks the beginning of a time when the interest of mankind was shifting away from fhose political questions which had occupied their thought in earlier days, at least in politically developed countries like the Greek and Italian cities, to a new sphere of action and feeling—to inward religion and to ecclesiastical organisation. From his time onwards we feel that the real currents of life in the ancient world are rather religious than political. It is one of the tests of a man's greatness to think of what mankind would have been if he had not lived. How different might the course of Chiistian thought and of ecclesiastical history have been if St. Paul had never been born or if he had never seen the vision on his way from .Jerusalem to Damascus!—" Laymen's Manual."