That thorn in the flesh, whose presence he deplored, kept him from forgetting the body and its obligations; the moral disorders breaking out wherever he preached his gospel, warned him in time not to relax too far the restraint imposed [pg xiv] by the law without. As the revolt of the Anabaptists checked Luther, so did the excesses of the Gentile Christians arrest Paul. Both saw and obeyed the warning finger of Providence signalling a retreat.
Divinely inspired St. Paul was. But inspiration never obscures and obliterates human characteristics. It directs and utilizes them for its own purpose, leaving free margin beyond that purpose for the exercise of individual proclivities uncontrolled.
Paul's natural tendency is unmistakable; and we may see evidence of divine guidance in the fact of his having refused to give the rein to his natural propensities, and of being prepared to turn all his energies to the repairing of those dykes against the ocean which in a moment of impatience he had set his hand to tear down.
As Socrates was by nature prone to become the most vicious of men, so was Paul naturally disposed to become the most dangerous of heresiarchs. But the moral sense of Socrates mastered his passions and converted him into a philosopher; and the guiding spirit of God made of Paul the mystic an apostle of righteousness.
Christianity, as the religion of the Incarnation, has its external form and its internal spirit, and it is impossible to dissociate one from the other without peril. Mere formalism and naked spirituality are alike and equally pernicious. Formalism, the resolution of religion into ceremonial acts only, void of spirit, is like the octopus, lacing its thousand filaments about the soul and drawing it into the abyss; and mysticism, pure spirituality, like the magnet mountain in Sinbad's [pg xv] voyage, draws the nails out of the vessel—the rivets of moral law—and the Christian character goes to pieces.
The history of the Church is the history of her leaning first towards one side, then towards the other, of advance amid perpetual recoils from either peril.
2. The alarm caused in Jerusalem amidst the elder apostles and the Nazarene Church at the immorality which disfigured Pauline Christianity, was not the only cause of the mistrust wherewith they viewed him and his teaching. Other causes existed which I have not touched on in my text, lest I should distract attention from the main points of my argument, but they are deserving of notice here.
And the first of these was the intense prejudice which existed among the Jews of Palestine against Greek modes of thought, manners, culture, even against the Greek language.
The second was the jealousy with which the Palestinian Jews regarded the Alexandrine Jews, their mode of interpreting Scripture, and their system of theology.
St. Paul, an accomplished Greek scholar, brought up at Tarsus amidst Hellenistic Jews, adopted the theology and exegesis in vogue at Alexandria, and on both these accounts excited the suspicion and dislike of the national party at Jerusalem. The Nazarenes were imbued with the prejudices they had acquired in their childhood, in the midst of which they had grown up, and they could not but regard Paul with alarm when he turned without disguise to the Greeks, and introduced into the Church the theological system and scriptural interpretations of a Jewish community they had always regarded as of questionable orthodoxy.