makes earnest appeals to their moral knowledge. Christianity and Hellenism begin to amalgamate in the preaching of the apostle who was in so many ways opposed to everything that was Greek.

St Paul's object in thus bringing the Gentile hearers face to face with the near approaching judgment, utterly degraded and fallen away from God as they were, was not to lead them to repentance in the earlier sense of the word, but to faith. To repent meant, with Jesus, to turn round and do God's will. Paul does not at all believe that his hearers can do that. In spite of all the power that a man possesses of forming moral judgments, it is perfectly useless to appeal to his reason as long as it is held captive by his senses by the law of sin in the flesh. His own experience had shattered his faith in the victorious power of the will; this, however, was not the only or even the decisive reason for the new demand for faith. As the whole object of his missionary labours is to win over the Gentiles for the Christian Churches, Paul can never grant that any awakening of new moral power would be possible through man's unaided efforts apart from the Church. He must, on the contrary, be so entirely broken and powerless that no other path of safety remains open to him in the whole world but faith-i.e. entrance into the Christian fellowship. This is the point where Jesus and His apostle are furthest apart from each other. With Jesus, courage, joy, and feeling of strength and entire health; as He Himself does God's will so He bids others do it, without attaching any ecclesiastical limitation. In Paul's case we have the description of a weak and heartbroken man who can only gain the

victory within the Church and by supernatural grace. Extreme pessimism and the dogma of salvation by faith alone and in the Church-" extra ecclesiam nulla salus" are correlatives. Jesus knows neither the one

nor the other.

Oppressed by the burden of his sin, and trembling at the thought of the judgment, the convert is brought to Jesus his Redeemer not the Jesus of the Gospels who promised the kingdom of God, revealed God's will, drove out demons and made God and man at one : this Jesus Paul himself never knew. He would, accordingly, have been obliged to have preached Him on the authority of the early apostles. But in their message He appeared as a prophet and a lawgiver, and that did not suit Paul's purpose. Jesus the crucified alone, or the crucified and risen Son of God, such is the Redeemer in St Paul's preaching. He gives a short title to the whole of his message—the "word of the Cross." Now the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are not really deeds of Jesus, but experiences in which He played a very passive part. From an external point of view they are purely historical facts-paradoxes for the understanding, miracles and mysteries. Paul grants all this. The statement, Jesus the crucified is our Redeemer, is merely folly for the understanding; it is only through faith, that makes its way through all that is repulsive and paradoxical, that it becomes a power unto salvation.

Christianity, says St Paul to the Corinthians, so clearly that there can be no possibility of a mistake, Christianity is not a philosophy: it is no rational system, but it is something historical, irrational and

paradoxical, in which faith either recognizes God's power or else it does not. True, the facts have their meaning. The Cross implies God's love, grace, and forgiveness; the Resurrection the beginning of the life to come; but this meaning itself exists for faith alone. It is, of course, in any case painful for us to observe how the rich contents of the life of Christ and, above all, His message--though this, to be sure, we do meet with later on in the apostle's preaching—are entirely sacrificed to these two facts. But then what does this loss signify when we balance it against the immense simplification and concentration of this preaching of salvation? Simplification is always the mark of great men. In the preaching of St Peter and the other twelve all was presented side by side: the promise, the commandments, the miracles, the cross and the resurrection. It would have been difficult, especially for Greeks, to distinguish the redemptive power of Jesus in all this mass of material, whereas Paul brought them something which was simple and great that roused their enthusiasm (in spite of all paradox). There must surely be something divine when One that was crucified was made the object of such love and such enthusiasm. And when, thereupon, he exclaimed at the end of his address, “This is the way to salvation on the judgment day-faith in the crucified Saviour; here is atonement, grace, peace and certain salvation," then his words found their way home and faith cried Amen.'

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Furthermore, this preaching, paradoxical as it was, contained elements that were extremely congenial to the Greek mind. The crucified Lord is the Son of God, who according to St Paul descended from

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heaven. However incomprehensible the death of a heavenly being must have appeared to the Greeks in this statement for the ideas of divinity and of death are incompatible they were perfectly familiar with the title Son of God' and with the idea of the descent of such an one from heaven. And as in addition to this Jesus' resurrection follows on the third day after His death and is then in turn succeeded by the Ascension to heaven, the divine nature is restored to its rights and a portion at least of the difficulty is removed. St Paul's christology appeared therefore to the Greeks simply as the revelation of a new myth, like those with which they were already familiar, only surpassing them all in grandeur and power. In spite of the apostle's firm belief in the parousia, the emphasis in his christology is laid so entirely on past historical events, that for the hearers at any rate it is not the expected Messiah but the Son of God who has already come down from heaven, that becomes the centre of their faith. But the real stumbling-block still remained Christ's death. St Paul attempted to familiarize the Greeks with the idea by means of the conception of sacrifice. However Jewish his methods might be, his arguments after all contained elements common to the universal religious experience of mankind-sacrifice, vicarious atonement, and expiation. The greater part of his hearers especially, belonging as they did to classes that were morally degraded, were only too ready to accept the atoning death of Jesus which promised them remission of their punishment. In spite of all, however, there was paradox enough to cause amazement and surprise.

When once this first step had been taken, when faith had been aroused and the enthusiastic confession had fallen from the convert's lips-"Jesus is the Lord (the apostle uses this title and not 'Messiah' amongst the Greeks) St Paul immediately proceeded to gather the disciples together into an organzied community. No Christian could have fought his way through the great dark night of idolatry and immorality as an isolated unit: the community-St Paul calls it Church, using a Jewish word -was here the necessary condition for all permanent life. Here, again, many points of contact were presented by the Greek system of guilds and confraternities, of which the Jews had already made some use.

At the present day we are scarcely in a position to decide whether Paul exclusively followed Jewish patterns, or whether in some points he modelled his organizations directly upon the Greek type. As in addition he was bound to take over the characteristic rites of the Jewish Christian Church, and many of its forms and customs, he in any case created something that was entirely new to the world in which he lived. Through this amalgamation of Jewish, Greek, and Christian elements arose the Christian Church of the Gentiles, which throughout its future history remained ever open to receive new impressions, as a direct consequence of its origin from different sources. Baptism in the name of Jesus the Crucified was the form of entrance. Then followed very numerous meetings, for meals partaken in common, for divine worship, and also for the support of the poor brethren in the different localities as well as at Jerusalem. They were true communities of brethren, closely knit