sions.

After having sounded depths, which may be the fear of cherubims, and soared to heights, where they stand, with faces veiled, and with heads whence the crowns have been cast away, he turns round, without any loss of dignity or feeling of degradation, to give careful counsels to the humblest of saints; to "salute Tryphena and Tryphosa;" to remember a poor female slave; to inquire about the cloak and parchments he had left at Troas; and to immortalize in ignominy Alexander a coppersmith, henceforth the coppersmith for evermore. The golden head of the great man often ends in feet of miry clay, at once clumsy and foul; but Paul's subtle power is equally diffused down his whole nature -majestic on all great, he is mindful of all little things. The second marvel is the small compass in which his Epistles lie. The longest of them are short. There is not a day but letters, longer than those to the Romans or the Hebrews, are passing from country to country, and city to city. His letter to Philemon is a mere card. And yet, round these little notes, piles of commentaries have darkened; from them, as from a point of separation, entire sects have diverged; over them, alas! blood has been spilled; and in them, lie mysteries, the very edge of which has hardly yet transpired. Of what series of letters out of Scripture, but these, can the half of this be said? And the power thus lodged in nem, what can we call it, if we call it not divine? No charlatan, no fanatie, no pedant, no mere genius, could, by such brief touches, have so roused the "majestic world."

For mark, these letters, while making no pretensions to literary merit, while recording no new miracles, do announce themselves as from the Lord, and do testify to the supernatural character of Jesus Christ, did therefore commit their credit, and that of their author, to the entire claims of Christianity, and expose themselves to severe tests, and to the keenest scrutiny. And it is because they came forth from this triumphantly, and made the prejudiced confess their truth, and feel their power, that they now live and shine, as though written in stars upon the page of the heavens.

Our third wonder is their variety of subject, and tone, and merit. The idea of Paul, indeed, throughout all his writings, is the same. It is that of the largeness of Christianity, as compared with the law of Moses, and its unity and holiness, when contrasted with heathenism. It may be ex

pressed in one of the sentences uttered by him from Mars Hill:- God (the one spirit) has made of one blood all nations that dwell upon the face of the earth, and now commandeth all men every where to repent." His difficulties, in enforcing this great compound idea, arise from his doctrine of a special divine love, and from the prejudices of Judaizing believers; and to meet those difficulties, all the energies of his intellect are bent. He seeks to bring the tabernacle, on the one hand, with its worshippers, but without its temporary rites, and the heathen worshippers, on the other, without their idols, under the reconciling rainbow of the covenant. But, while ever pursuing this master-thought, he seeks it through a great variety of paths. And hence monotony, always a literary sin of magnitude, attaches not at all to his Epistles. Not one is a duplicate of another. His principal object in the Romans is to level Jew and Gentile in one dust, that he may first surprise them into one salvation, and then, by the strong force of gratitude, "conclude," or shut them all up into one holy obedience. In the Hebrews, it is to show the unity in diversity, and the diversity in unity, of the two systems of Judaism and Christianity, which he does by a comparison, so subtle, yet so clear and candid, that even prejudice, ere the close, is prepared to exult with him in his trimphant preference of the hill Sion, to the faded fires and deadened thunders of the "Mount that might be touched." In his First Epistle to the Corinthians, he plunges into the thick of Christian duty, into questions of casuistry, into minute practical details, gathering them all along with him as he rushes on to the grand climax of the Resurrection, with its prospective and retrospective bearings upon personal holiness, till his call to Corinthian backsliders seems to thunder through the last trump. And so with his other letters. In some of them, his chief purpose is to proclaim the glory of Christ. In others, it is to announce his Second Advent. In others, it is to magnify his own office, and to stir up the declining liberality of his correspondents. In others, it is to teach, warn, exhort, and encourage some of his leading children in the faith. And in one, the shortest and sweetest of all, written in a prison, but redolent of the virgin air of liberty, he condescends to baptize what had been a bond of harsh necessity and fear between two men, Philemon and Onesimus, into a bond of Christian brotherhood and love."

The style, too, and tone are different. Paul's "token," to be sure, "is in every Epistle." His presence proclaims itself by divers infallible marks: a kindly and earnest introduction, fervor of spirit, a close train of argument, winding on to end in a tail of fire, a digressive movement, short bursts of eloquence, sudden swells of devotion, audible yearnings of affection, strong and melting advices, minute remembrances, and a rich and effectual blessing at the close. But to some of his Epistles, the description and denunciation of sin give a dark oppressive grandeur. Witness the 1st chapter of the Romans, which reminds us of God looking down upon the children of men, "to see if any did understand or know God," and beckoning on the deluge, as he says, "They are altogether become filthy; there is none that doeth good, no, not one." Others sparkle with the light of immortality, and might have been penned by the finger of Paul's "Resurrection-body." Others glow with a deep, mild, autumnal lustre, as if reflected from the face of him he had seen as one born out of due time; they are full of Christ's love. Some, like the book of Hebrews, rise into rich rhetoric, from intricate and laborious argument, and contain little that is personally characteristic. Others are simple as beatings of his heart. On one or two, the glory of the Second Advent lies so brightly, that the gulf of death is buried in the radiance; in others, his own approaching departure, with its circumstances of suffering and of triumph, fills the field of view; and he says, "I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand."

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Such are the letters of Paul-letters which, like the works, large or small, of all the great, seem to descend from, instead of overtopping, the writer. And we try to complete the image of the man, by piecing together those broken fragments of his soul-broken, though all seeking and tending to unity. His life, after all, was the Poem; he himself is our Epistle." A wondrous life it was. Whether we view him, with low bent head and eager eye, at the feet of Gamaliel; or sitting near Stephen's stoning, disdaining to wet his hands, but wetting his soul in his blood; or, under a more entire possession of his fanaticism, haling men and women to prison; or, far before his comrades on the way to Damascus, panting like a hound when his scent of game is getting intolerable; or lifting up one last furious glance through his

darkening eyes to the bright form and face of Jesus; or led by the hand, the corpse of his former self, into the city, which had been waiting in panic for his coming; or "rolling his eyes in vain to find the day," as Ananias enters; or let down from the wall in a basket-the Christianity of the Western world suspended on the trembling rope; or bashful and timid, when introduced to Cephas and the other pillars of the Church, who, in their turn, shrink at first from the Tiger of Tarsus, tamed though he be; or rending his garments at Lystra, when they are preparing him divine honors; or, with firm yet sorrowful look, parting with Barnabas at Antioch; or in the prison, and after the earthquake, silent, unchained, still as marble, while the jailer leaps in trembling, to say, "What must I do to be saved?" or turning, with dignified resentment, from the impenitent Jews to the Gentiles; or preaching in the upper chamber, Eutychus alive, through sleep and death; or weeping at the ship's side at Miletus; or standing on the stairs at Jerusalem, and beckoning to an angry multitude; or repelling the charge of madness before Festus, more by his look and his folded arms, than by his words; or calm, as the figure at the ship's head, amid the terrors of the storm; or shaking off the viper from his hand as if with the

Silent magnanimity of Nature and her God;"

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or, in Rome, cherishing the chain like a garment; or, with shackled arm, writing those words of God, never to be bound;" or confronting Nero, as Daniel did his lions in the den, and subduing him under the mere stress of soul; or, at last, yielding his head to the axe, and passing away to receive the "Crown of Life" the Lord was to confer upon him; wherever, and in whatever circumstances, Paul appears, his nature, like a sun, displays itself entire, in its intensity, its earnestness, its clear honesty, its incessant activity, its struggle to include the world in its grasp but is shaded, as evening draws on, into milder hues, tenderer traits, and a holier effulgence. And though the light went down in darkness and blood, its relict radiance still shines upon us like the Parthenon, which seemed "carved out of an Athenian sunset." Who that witnessed the persecutor on his way to Damascus, could have predicted that a noon of such torrid flame could so tenderly and divinely die; and that the name of

Paul, when uttered now, should come to the Christian ear, as if carried on the breath of that "south wind which blew softly" while he and the Everlasting Gospel were sailing together past the Cretan shore to Rome?

CHAPTER XV.

PETER AND JAMES.

THE poetry of Peter lies more in his character than in his writings, although both display its unequivocal presence. His impetuosity, his forwardness, his outspoken utterance, his mistakes and blunders, his want of tact, his familiarity with his master, his warm-heartedness, his simplicity of character, render him the Oliver Goldsmith of the New Testament. It was owing to the childlike temperament of genius, blended with peculiar warmth of heart, that he on one occasion took Jesus aside, and began to rebuke him that he said, on another, "thou shalt never wash my feet," but added immediately, on being told what it imported, "Lord, not my feet only, but my hands and my head"—that he muttered on the Mount of the Transfiguration, the supremely absurd words, spoken as if through a dream, "Let us make here three tabernacles, one for thee, one for Moses, and one for Elias" that he drew his sword, and cut off the ear of Malchus-that he adventured on the water where Christ was walking that he was the spokesman of the twelve, always ready, whether with sense or with kindly nonsense-and that his affectionate nature was grieved when Christ asked at him the third time," Lovest thou me ?" With this temperament consort his faults; his boldness breaks down when danger appears, as has often happened with men of the poetical temperament; even in his denial of Christ, we see the fervor of the man-it is with oaths and curses, for his very sin has an emphasis with it. And in fine keeping, too, with this, are the tears produced by Christ's look (Christ knew that for Peter a look was enough)-fast, fiery, bitter, and renewed, it is said, whenever he heard the cock crow, till his dying day.

The change produced on Peter after the resurrection is