all things under Him, that God may be all in all, is sometimes cited to justify minimising or disparaging views of Christ's place, but nothing could be more inept. The person here spoken of has already brought to nought 'every principality, and every authority and power.' He has put all His enemies under His feet. He has destroyed death. He has fulfilled all the purposes and promises of God. All that God has designed to do for men, He has now done through Him as Messianic King, and the ends of His Kingship being achieved Christ hands over the kingdom to His Father. But that does not touch the fact that these ends have been achieved through Him, and that they can be achieved through no other. What other could do what Christ is here represented as having done for men? What other could hold the place in the apostle's mind which He holds? What other could be called simpliciter 'the Son'? The handing over of the kingdom to the Father does not compromise the solitary greatness which is conveyed by this name; it leaves the Son in that incomparable place which is suggested by His own solemn words in Mark 13 32.

The religious attitude of Paul to Christ is made plainer still by the passages in which he involuntarily or deliberately contrasts Him with men. Thus in defending his apostleship to the Galatians he speaks of himself as an apostle who did not owe his calling to a human source nor get it through a human channel, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead (Gal. I 1). The last words show that when he mentions Jesus Christ it is the Risen Lord he has in view, and nothing could bring out more clearly than the broad contrast of this sentence how instinctively and decisively Paul sets the Risen Christ side by side with God the Father in contrast to all that is human. That is his place in the Christian religion. He is not in any sense one of those

who have been or are being saved; he is included in the divine causality by which salvation is accomplished. It would never have occurred to Paul to deny that Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified at Jerusalem was true man, but however he may have reconciled this with his faith -as a Christian, that faith indubitably put Jesus into the sphere of the divine. The apostolic calling which came to Paul through him was not a calling of man, but of God, and the same holds of all the experiences which the apostle owes to Christ. Another illustration of this may be given. 'What is Apollos? What is Paul?' the apostle asks, rebuking the party spirit at Corinth. 'Ministers through whom ye believed, and each as the Lord gave to him.' The Lord here, as always in Paul, is Christ, and is directly contrasted with His most distinguished servants. It is in the same spirit that the apostle exclaims, 'Was Paul crucified for you? or were you baptized in the name of Paul?' The idea which he here takes for granted is that the name of Jesus is an incomparable, incommensurable name. We can compare Paul and Apollos if we please; we can say that one planted and the other watered, though the apostle does not look on the making of such comparisons as a very profitable employment. But we must not compare Paul and Christ. They are not, like Paul and Apollos, members of one class by the ideal of which they can be judged. They are not teachers of religion, whether in rivalry or in partnership, who can equally be criticised through the idea of what religious teaching ought to be. This view is quite common in modern times even among men who profess to preach the Christian religion, but it is not the view of Paul. The very idea of it shocked him. His own relation to the Church, or that of Apollos, was in no way analogous to that of Christ. No doubt if he and Apollos had refused or renounced Christianity, the

Church would have missed them, but their places could have been supplied. The Church would have been there though they had been wanting, and the Lord who Himself gives the apostles and prophets and evangelists would have raised up others for His work. But without Christ there would be no Church, and no ministry at all; everything that we call Christian is absolutely dependent on Him. From this side, again, therefore, we see the unique place which Christ filled in the faith of Paul.

This exclusive and divine significance of Christ is even more conspicuous when we look at the two great religious controversies which engaged the apostle's mind in his earlier and later years, and brought his faith to articulate and conscious expression. The first is that which has left its most vivid record in the Epistle to the Galatians, and which is described from a greater distance and with less passion, perhaps less appreciation of all that was involved, in the fifteenth chapter of Acts. What was really at stake was the essence of Christianity. All who were Christians, Paul and his Pharisaic opponents alike, in some sense believed in Christ; the question was whether for perfect Christianity anything else was required. The Pharisaic Christians said Yes. The Gentile faith in Christ was very well as a beginning; but if these foreign believers were to be completely Christian and to inherit the blessings of the Messianic kingdom on the same footing with them, their faith in Christ must be supplemented by circumcision and the keeping of the Mosaic law. Paul said No. Christ is the whole of Christianity-Christ crucified and risen. He is the whole of it on the external side, regarded as the revelation and action of God for the salvation of sinful men; and faith in Christ—that abandonment of the soul to Him in which Paul as a Christian lived and moved and had his being-is the whole of it on the internal side. Anything that compromises this simple

and absolute truth, anything that proposes to supplement Christ on the one side or faith on the other, is treason to the gospel. It strikes at the root of Christianity, at the absolute sufficiency of grace in God and of faith in man to solve the problem of salvation; it denies the glory of Christ and destroys the hope of sinners. This is how Paul conceived it, and it is this, and not any personal intolerance of opposition, which prompts the solemn vehemence of Gal. 1: Though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema. The interest of the words for us is the force with which they bring out the absolute and unshared place which Christ filled in the religion of Paul. His faith in Christ was such that it admitted of no other object; Christ completely filled his religious horizon; his whole being, as a spiritual man with a life toward God, depended upon and was determined by Christ alone. And for this view, which he was perhaps the first to think out in clearness and simplicity, Paul was able to command the assent of the apostles who had been admitted to the intimacy of Jesus. James, Cephas, and John gave him and his fellow-worker Barnabas the right hand of fellowship.

It is essentially the same religious question which is raised in another form in the second great controversy of the apostle's life-that to which we are introduced in the Epistle to the Colossians. The law appears here also, but the real danger now is not that of supplementing Christ by ritual observances, but that of dispensing with Him, to a greater or less extent, in favour of angelic mediators. Paul's attitude in this new situation is precisely what it was in Galatians. Christ is all, is the burden of his argument. We do not need to look anywhere but to Him for that knowledge and presence of God on which salvation depends; in Him are all the

treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden away; in Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. Once more it may be repeated that we are not dealing with the truth or falsehood of these views, with the possibility or impossibility of justifying them, but only with the fact. This is how Paul unquestionably thought of Jesus: this is indubitably the place which Jesus filled in his religious life. It is not putting it too strongly to say that He had for Paul the religious value of God. To suppose that Paul could have classified Him, and put Him in a series along with other great men who have contributed to the spiritual elevation of the race, is to deride his sincerity and passion. In the religion of the apostle, Jesus held a place which no human being could share. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the First and the Last.

Although we are not concerned with the Christology of the apostle, in the strict sense of the term, but only with the significance which Christ had for his faith, it will exhibit that significance more clearly, and so contribute to our purpose, if we look at the principal ways in which he seems to have conceived Christ. In a sense, this is entering the region of doctrine rather than of faith, but it is not with a doctrinal purpose; what we wish is to see through the doctrine what Christ was in the life of Paul. There are three distinguishable forms in which Christ is present to the mind of the apostle, and in different ways the same religious conclusion can be drawn from all.

(1) The simplest way to conceive Christ is that which regards Him as an individual historical person, practically contemporary with Paul himself; one who had lived and died in Palestine, and been familiarly known to many who were yet alive. No doubt Paul often thought of Him in this light; it would be impossible for any one