rapid changes, growing with his growth,
always suffused from the soul with emotions which struggled against the
prison bars of thought and speech. His intensely speculative mind had
furnished a system of thought into which he built such ideas as these: The
pre-existence of Christ, as, in some mystic, undefined way, the Head of
Humanity; the sacrificial nature of His death; the justification of the
sinner through faith; the life of Christ within the soul, as the Human
Ideal; the speedy return of Christ in person to reign on earth (at least
in the early part of his career); the resurrection of the pious dead; the
translation of living believers; the final victory of goodness over evil;
and the ending of the mediatorship of Christ, God then becoming all in
all.

This was the form which the mystery of God's relationship to man took in
the mind of this great genius, and around which the fiery passion of his
hunger after righteousness shaped itself.

In the Epistle of St. James, assuming the traditional authorship, how much
of this theology can you find? The incarnation is nowhere clearly stated.
The name of Christ occurs but twice. His atonement is scarcely mentioned.
The prophets are held up as examples of patience, under suffering without
any reference to Christ. Paul's especial doctrine of justification by
faith is explicitly denied. Of his fellowship with the Gentiles and his
broad human sympathies, there is nothing whatever. All is intensely
Jewish. If Paul's theology is orthodoxy, James is dreadfully unsound.[33]
"The fundamentals" are all lacking.

Both Paul and James differ very decidedly from the mystic soul who wrote
the First Epistle of John; and all three differ again, quite as much, from
the philosopher who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews. How little have
either the Apocalypse or Jude in common with Paul! We can no more make a
uniform theology out of the New Testament writers than we can out of
Calvinism, Arminianism Catholicism, and Unitarianism.

These various theologies can be traced to the elements making up the
individualities of the different writers. The idiosyncracies of Paul are
clearly marked. He was a man of strong speculative mind, of mystic piety,
of lofty enthusiasm for great ideals, a-hungered after righteousness. A
Jew and yet a Roman citizen, his education developed the two-fold
sympathies of an Israelite of the dispersion. At the feet of the liberal
rabbi, Gamaliel, he learned the curious