, with all sorts
of fine qualities and occasional illuminations, but always hopelessly in
the toils of Sin, Death, and Logic, which had no power over Jesus. As we
have seen, it was by introducing this bondage and terror of his into the
Christian doctrine that he adapted it to the Church and State systems
which Jesus transcended, and made it practicable by destroying the
specifically Jesuist side of it. He would have been quite in his place
in any modern Protestant State; and he, not Jesus, is the true head and
founder of our Reformed Church, as Peter is of the Roman Church. The
followers of Paul and Peter made Christendom, whilst the Nazarenes were
wiped out.

THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES.

Here we may return to the narrative called The Acts of the Apostles,
which we left at the point where the stoning of Stephen was followed
by the introduction of Paul. The author of The Acts, though a good
story-teller, like Luke, was (herein also like Luke) much weaker in
power of thought than in imaginative literary art. Hence we find Luke
credited with the authorship of The Acts by people who like stories and
have no aptitude for theology, whilst the book itself is denounced
as spurious by Pauline theologians because Paul, and indeed all the
apostles, are represented in it as very commonplace revivalists,
interesting us by their adventures more than by any qualities of mind
or character. Indeed, but for the epistles, we should have a very poor
opinion of the apostles. Paul in particular is described as setting a
fashion which has remained in continual use to this day. Whenever he
addresses an audience, he dwells with great zest on his misdeeds before
his pseudo conversion, with the effect of throwing into stronger
relief his present state of blessedness; and he tells the story of that
conversion over and over again, ending with exhortations to the hearers
to come and be saved, and threats of the wrath that will overtake them
if they refuse. At any revival meeting today the same thing may be
heard, followed by the same conversions. This is natural enough; but
it is totally unlike the preaching of Jesus, who never talked about his
personal history, and never "worked up" an audience to hysteria. It
aims at a purely nervous effect; it brings no enlightenment; the most
ignorant man has only to become intoxicated with his own vanity, and
mistake his self-satisfaction for the Holy Ghost, to become qualified as
an apostle; and it has a