with distrust and oppugnancy, and had sought " to add affliction to his bonds." As to all non-essentials in practice, he is the consistent advocate of the largest liberty, if only within the bonds of charity. For those wedded to the ritual of the abrogated religion he has not a word of censure, but commends their scrupulousness to the forbearance of those of more enlightened conscience. Even as to social intercourse with idolaters, he removes every restriction not absolutely demanded by Christian integrity; and in mixed families and communities, is solicitous to leave all the bonds of kindred, friendship, and neighborhood intact, choosing to win the unbelieving by every lawful compliance and amenity, rather than to repel them by creating a class of harsh and morose separatists.

What St. Paul was in person we can infer but vaguely. He quotes those who speak of his "bodily presence as weak and his speech as contemptible;" and there is reason to believe that the "thorn in the flesh," to which he refers, was the close-clinging consciousness of a physical nature ill adapted to win respect and deference. Yet, wherever he appeared, he seems to have commanded profound attention, and to have awakened lasting interest in the truths that he dispensed. If insignificant in outward aspect, his presence exerted a controlling influence. If lame in speech, results prove him to have been the most eloquent man of his age. We can conceive that he may have derived added power from the very infirmities of which he was so painfully conscious. The most ample physical endowments are overprone to fasten regard on the orator, rather than on his cause. The brilliant harangue attracts more praise for its rhetoric than heed to its doctrine. Nay, there is prone to adhere, to those who are eloquent by the gift of nature, the suspicion of excessive self-reference; and many are the earnest men in professional and public life, the efficacy of whose words would be greatly enhanced by diminished symmetry of form and feature, or by something less than faultless accent and modulation. On the other hand, a spirit of superior brightness and energy, when lodged in a diminutive, feeble, or deformed body, frees itself to an amazing degree from all bodily circumscription, works itself loose

from organic laws, and becomes endowed with a power of action and influence far beyond the measure of its apparent means and opportunities. Thus too, a slender, shrill, harsh, or intractable voice, when laden with great thoughts and fervent emotion, either rises into an eloquence as far above artistical rules as it is wide of them; or else, in its utter inadequacy there is an inexplicable charm, which brings hearers into that close intimacy with the speaker, in which his spirit seems to be transfusing itself directly into theirs, rather than communing with them through the medium of language. We conceive of St. Paul's person as in itself unattractive, but as irradiated in countenance, gesture, and mien, as absolutely transfigured and glorified, by the vividness of his spiritual perceptions, the intensity of his zeal, the fervor of his piety. His voice, too, may have been beneath the capacity of culture; yet it must have swelled and surged, grown majestic in its intonation and rhythm, trembled with deep emotion, risen into grandeur, as it spoke of Christ and heaven, and struck the most gentle chords when moved by pity and sympathy. Such a soul as his could have assimilated the meanest apparatus of bodily functions to its own intense and noble vitality, could have become transparent through the most opaque medium, could have made itself profoundly felt even with a stammering tongue or a barbarous dialect.

It would be superfluous for us to attempt to trace St. Paul's itinerary. It would embrace almost a complete geographical list of the provinces and dependencies of the Roman empire. According to Lardner's chronology, his martyrdom occurred in the thirtieth year of his apostleship. During this entire period he was in active service; for his prolonged seasons of imprisonment hardly constitute an exception to this statement, since his pen at such times replaced and multiplied his bodily presence; nor have we reason to suppose that he was ever confined in such a way as not to afford him large opportunities of social intercourse. Though capable of extreme rapidity in his movements, (considering the means of transit at his command,) he was equally capable of persistent labor on the same ground; and, as the case seemed to require, either made a hurried visit, and left the "seed of the kingdom" to

the hospitalities of the soil, or remained stationary for months, or even years, watered where he had planted, fenced in what he had reclaimed from the waste, and trained other cultivators to assume the charge on his departure. And over the churches which he had thus established he maintained a watchful oversight, holding frequent communication with them by letter, deciding their controversies, directing in the discipline of heretical or refractory members, and sometimes convening the elders for his paternal counsel when he had not time to appear in public, or to meet the whole body of believers. Asia Minor was as his peculiar diocese, with Corinth and Macedonia as outlying parishes; and within this immense region, on both sides of the Ægean, there can hardly have been an individual disciple who did not look upon the great apostle as his or her own superior pastor, and we might almost say, there were few who had not seen his face, and hung upon his words.

But it is mainly through his Epistles that St. Paul wields, at the present day, upon the church, equally a transmitted influence of opinions, true or false, which have sought support from their text, and a direct agency in the piety and zeal that derive nourishment from their spirit.

These Epistles hold an important place among the evidences of Christianity. They at once establish their own genuineness, and furnish ample confirmation of the authenticity of the historical books of the New Testament. We refer not merely to the unmistakable identity of the Paul of the Acts of the Apostles with the reputed author of these pastoral letters, nor yet to the numerous latent and undesigned coincidences in St. Luke's narrative and the Epistles, which have been so happily disinterred by Paley, in the Horæ Paulinæ. These Epistles imply, at the time of their authorship, the existence of precisely the condition of things that must have existed if Jesus Christ lived and taught, died and rose from the dead, when, where, and as he is said to have done in the Gospels. They discuss such questions as must needs have arisen in the course of Christian experience, cases of casuistry, scruples of the morbidly conscientious, the limits of toleration and fellowship, the marks and tests of religious.

character and progress; in fine, questions parallel with those which every devout mind in Christendom is asking at the present day. Such discussions we do not find in the Gospels, which contain simply the elements and fundamental principles of Christianity, in the form in which they needed to be first delivered to those who were just emerging from the twilight of Judaism. Moreover, the questions which St. Paul discusses in his Epistles are such as could have been asked only by the merest novices. Now this must have been precisely the case if the Gospels are both authentic in their his tory, and the genuine works of their reputed writers. The date of St. Paul's Epistles is limited by abundant testimony to the first century of the Christian era. Had the Gospels been of later origin, had they emanated in their present form from a post-apostolic generation, it is impossible that they should not have borne numerous marks of the then condition of Christian experience, that they should not have adapted the words put into the Saviour's lips to the then existing exigencies of the Church. That they contain only the rudiments, and not the diversified applications, of Christian doctrine, can be accounted for only by the theory that they are literal history, written by men who had direct access to the historical fountains. In concurrence with this evidence, St. Paul's Epistles prove that authentic Christian history had its beginnings thus early, that Christianity had its clearly defined existence among the religions of the world, its strongly attached adherents, its recognized laws and standards. They are thus fatal to the "development theory," according to which Christianity could hardly have assumed its definite shape and consistency, or the person of Christ from that of a wise and virtuous Jewish peasant have towered by mythical accretions to the vastness and grandeur which it evidently bore in St. Paul's belief, before the close of the second century.

The importance of these Epistles, as a portion of the canon of Scripture, it is impossible to overrate. If we wished to get a clear and full insight into the principles and spirit of the Constitution of the United States, so as to regard all its provisions in the light in which they were regarded by its

founders, it would not be enough to make ourselves familiar with the contents of that document. Its articles are brief, sententious, abstract. It brings up no actually existing cases, by which we can see how it works. We should therefore

deem it essential to study, in connection with it, the earliest decisions of the Supreme Court, when the bench was filled by men who had assisted in the formation of the government, and were in intimate communion with the minds of all its illustrious founders. We should feel confident that these men applied the provisions of the constitution as it was intended that they should be applied. Were there any ambiguous questions of interpretation, we should receive their solution as authoritative, and we should shape our judgment in new cases now occurring by the analogy of their dicta. To the Christian Church Jesus gave its constitution in his teachings and his life. It is written out in perfect clearness, yet still with great conciseness, and with very few detailed applications. But in St. Paul we have a judge on whom the Master's spirit rested, and who held for many years the chief place in the ecclesiastical administration. To him were brought, for adjudication, numerous subjects of doubt and controversy, and his decisions remain on record in our canonical Scriptures. The questions of those earlier ages have indeed long since passed away. But their discussion and decision show us the working of Christianity as the constitution of an organized body of believers. And strictly analogous questions, depending on the very same principles for their solution, are constantly recurring. The heart's inmost experiences, needs, and cravings are the same in America, in the nineteenth century, as they were in Europe and Asia, in the first; and those who will acquaint themselves with these writings, can hardly derive from them less instruction and edification than those to whom they were originally addressed.

Yet we cannot but express, in all candor, our belief that the Epistles of St. Paul have been a copious fountain of false doctrine; nor has there ever been a heresy so absurd, or a vagary so wild, as not to resort for its proof-texts, primarily, to this portion of the sacred volume. In saying this we are only stating a patent fact, and are not giving vent to any loose