tile was he to them, that he had assisted at the death of the first martyr.

As the attestation of one notorious enemy in favour of a cause is considered equivalent to that of many friends, thus did this distinguished adversary seem to be raised up to confirm and ratify all the truths he had so furiously opposed; to become the most able advocate of the cause he had reprobated, the most powerful champion of the Saviour he had vilified. He was raised up to unfold more at large those doctrines which could not be so explicitly developed in the historical portions, while an immediate revelation from heaven supplied to him the actual opportunities and advantages which the Evangelists had enjoyed. Nothing short of such a Divine communication could have placed Saint Paul on a level with the other apostles; had he been taught of man, he must have been inferior to those who were taught of Jesus.

For Saint Paul had not the honour to be the personal disciple of his Lord. His conversion and preaching were subsequent to the first illumination of the Gospel; an intimation, possibly, that though revelation and human learning should not be considered as sharing between them the work of spiritual instruction, yet that human learning might henceforward become a valuable adjunct, and a most suitable, though subordinate, accessory in maintaining the cause

of that Divine truth which it had no hand in establishing.

The ministry of Saint Paul was not to be circumscribed, as that of his immediate precursors had been, by the narrow limits of the Jewish church. As he was designated to be the Apostle of the Gentiles, as he was to bear his testimony before rulers and scholars; as he was to carry his mission into the presence of "kings, and not to be ashamed," it pleased Infinite Wisdom, which always fits the instrument to the work, and the talent to the exigence, to accommodate most exactly the endowments of Paul to the demands that would be made upon them; and as Divine Providence caused Moses to acquire in Egypt the learning which was to prepare him for the legislator of a people so differently circumstanced, it pleased the same Infinite Wisdom to convey to Paul, through the mouth of a Jewish teacher, the knowledge he was to employ for the Gentiles, and to adapt his varied acquirements to the various ranks, characters, prejudices, and local circumstances of those before whom he was to advocate the noblest cause ever assigned to man.

Of all these providential advantages he availed himself with a wisdom, aptness, and appropriateness, without a parallel; a wisdom derived from that Divine Spirit which guided all his thoughts, words, and actions; and with a teach

ableness which evidently proved that he was never disobedient to the heavenly vision.

Indeed it seemed necessary, in order to demonstrate that the principles of Christianity are not unattainable, nor its precepts impracticable, that the New Testament should, in some part, present to us a full exemplification of its doctrines and of its spirit; that they should, to produce their practical effect, be embodied in a form purely human,- for the character of the founder of its religion is incarnate Deity. Did the Scriptures present no such exhibition, infidelity might have availed itself of the omission, for the purpose of asserting that Christianity was only a bright chimera, a beautiful fiction of the imagination; and Plato's fair idea might have been brought into competition with the doctrines of the Gospel. But in Saint Paul is exhibited a portrait which not only illustrates its Divine truth, but establishes its moral efficacy;-a portrait entirely free from any distortion in the drawing, from any extravagance in the colouring.

It is the representation of a man struggling with the sins and infirmities natural to man; yet habitually triumphing over them by that Divine grace which had first rescued him from prejudice, bigotry, and unbelief. It represents him not only resisting such temptations as are com. mon to men, but surmounting trials to which no other man was ever called; furnishing in his

whole practice not only an instructor but a model; showing every where in his writings that the same offers, the same supports, the same victories, are tendered to every suffering child of mortality, — that the waters of eternal life are not restricted to prophets and apostles, but are offered freely to every one that thirsteth, offered without money and without price.

32

CHAP. III.

ON THE EPISTOLARY WRITERS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, PARTICULARLY SAINT PAUL.

CAN the reader of taste and feeling, who has followed the much-enduring hero of the Odyssey with growing delight and increasing sympathy, though in a work of fiction, through all his wanderings, peruse with inferior interest the genuine voyages of the Apostle of the Gentiles over nearly the same seas? The fabulous adventurer, once landed, and safe on the shores of his own Ithaca, the reader's mind is satisfied, for the object of his anxiety is at rest. But not so ends the tale of the Christian hero. Who ever closed Saint Luke's narrative of the diversified events of Saint Paul's travels; who ever accompanied him with the interest his history demands, from the commencement of his trials at Damascus to his last deliverance from shipwreck, and left him preaching in his own hired house at Rome, without feeling as if he had abruptly lost sight of some one very dear to him, without sorrowing that they should see his face no more, without indulging a wish that the intercourse could have been carried on to the end, though that end were martyrdom?