What may be called the inner or spiritual life of St. Paul may most of all be said to have been all Christ. His own theory of this innermost life is that it is a kind of living over again of the life of Christ: we die with Him to sin; we are buried with Him in baptism; as He rose, so we rise again to newness of life; He ascended to sit on the throne of the Father, and we are seated with Him in heavenly places. He is the very soil in which this life grows, and the atmosphere which it breathes; a Christian is "a man in Christ," and all the functions of his interior and even of his exterior life are performed in this element: he speaks in Christ, he marries in Christ, he dies in Christ, and in the resurrection he will rise in Christ.
This is what would be called the mysticism of St. Paul; and doctrines resembling this have sometimes been associated in religion with fantastic speculation and unpractical dreaming. In St. Paul, however, mysticism had no such results. If there was any part of his life on which the influence of Christ was more conspicuous than another, it was the practical part. To him any pretended connection or intercourse with Christ in secret had no meaning unless its outcome was visible in a Christlike life—"If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of His."
To his own person he applied this principle in the most rigorous manner. Christ, he is fond of saying, lives in him; he almost speaks as if in his flesh the Son of God had experienced a second incarnation; but he relentlessly draws the practical conclusion. When Christ lived in His own earthly tabernacle, what did He live for? It was for the salvation of men; He went about continually doing good; He lived to seek and save the lost. If so, then, living in St. Paul, He must have the same purpose—to make use of his powers of mind and body for the salvation of the world. In this way Christ was really still carrying on the work which had been interrupted by His death. St. Paul dares to say that he is filling up that which was lacking of Christ's sufferings for the sake of His body, the Church. He says that the heart of Christ is yearning after men in his heart; that the mind of Christ is scheming for the kingdom of God in his brain; he even compares the marks of persecution on his body to the wounds of Christ.
There is nowhere else on record—at least there was not till St. Paul had taught it to the Christian world—such a merging of one life in another. And it is all the more remarkable when it is considered how big and strong a nature St. Paul's was. If any other man might have coveted an original and independent life, surely he was entitled to be something in the world; but he had utterly sunk himself into the echo and the organ of Another.[50]
Gentlemen, I have taken up nearly the whole of the lecture with this minute analysis of St. Paul's Christianity for two reasons.
I have done so, first, because I wish to create in your minds a genial estimate of the man himself whom I am setting up in this course of lectures as the model for preachers. It is not uncommon to speak as if the earliest apostles had been formed by their association with Jesus, and, strong only in their affection for Him, had gone forth to tell the world the simple story of His life and death; but St. Paul, being a man of a colder nature and of strong intellectual proclivities, drew Christianity away from the person of Jesus and transmuted it into a hard intellectual system. I think I have proved that this is a totally mistaken impression, which does gross injustice to the great Apostle. None of the apostles, not even St. John, was more filled with the glow of personal attachment to Christ. He had a larger nature than any of them, but it was penetrated with this passion through and through. Being of the intellectual type, he could not help thinking out Christianity: but Christ entered into every thought he had about it.
The other reason why I have attempted to analyze so fully to-day the Christian experience of St. Paul is because I believe that the great motive of the ministry lies here—the very pulse of the machine.[51]
There are many motives which may go to constitute a powerful ministry and enable us to rejoice in our vocation. I have dealt with some of them already in this course of lectures. There is, for example, the one with which I dealt in my last lecture, that the ministry gives satisfying and exhilarating employment to all the powers of the mind. There is, again, that which I mentioned in an earlier lecture, that ours is a patriotic service: we are doing the very best for our country when we are permeating its life with the spirit of true religion. An aspect of the ministry which attracts many minds at present is that it is a service to humanity; the heart and conscience of the age are stirred by the misery of the poor, and this is the most obvious and effective mode of rescue. These are inspiring motives; and others might be mentioned. But far more important than them all is a strong personal attachment to the Saviour. This is the motive of the ministry which goes deepest and wears longest.
It may have many roots. It may be rooted in impressive convictions about the person of the Saviour and enthusiastic admiration of His character. It may spring from a profound sense of the lost condition from which He has rescued ourselves and of the destiny to which He has raised us. It may be due most of all to the impression made on our mind and heart by the sacrifice at the cost of which Jesus procured salvation for us. And here the depth or shallowness of our theology will be sure to tell. If our views are superficial either of the difference which salvation has made to ourselves or of what Christ did to constitute Himself the Saviour, the likelihood is that we shall love little. It is the man who knows that he has been forgiven much and saved at a great cost, who loves much. And the amount of love is the measure of sacrifice.
In all ages this has been the secret of devoted lives. It has made the great preachers—St. Augustine and St. Bernard, Luther and Wesley, Samuel Rutherford and McCheyne. It has made those too who have not been great in the eyes of men, but by their self-denying lives have made the kingdom of God to come. In one of his sonnets Matthew Arnold tells of meeting with a minister, "ill and o'erworked," on a broiling August day in the East End of London, and asking him how he fared in that scene of sin and sorrow. "Bravely," was the answer, "for I of late have been much cheered with thought of Christ." It is said to have been an actual incident.[52] At all events, it is the explanation of thousands of heroic lives passed in similar desperate situations. At present the adherents of a humanitarian philanthropism are loud in proclaiming the woes of the world, as if they had been the first to discover them, and propounding schemes for their amelioration; but their methods have all been anticipated by the humble followers of Jesus; and nine-tenths of the genuine philanthropic work of the world are being done by men and women who make no noise, but who cannot help working for the ends of Jesus, because His love is burning in their very bones, and because the life of Christ in them cannot help manifesting itself after its kind. Down the Christian centuries there has come floating a kind of hymn: the words are said to be by St. Patrick: the sentiment may well be called the music to which the true Church militant has always marched:—