and mystical lore of the rabbins,
while drinking in from his Master the spirit of freedom. Thrown from a
child in constant contact with the Gentiles of his native city, Tarsus,
race prejudices had been sapped unconsciously; while in youth or manhood
the wisdom and beauty of the Greek genius had apparently been opened to
him.

Paul's personality, fusing the materials of his education, and out of them
building a body of thought around The Christ, explains his theology. He
reproduces the conceptions of the rabbis, of the popular Jewish belief, of
Gamaliel, of Tarsus, of Athens; transfigured on the heights of thought to
which he climbed, in his intense musings over the problem of Jesus of
Nazareth, while buried away in Arabia.

The small amount of theology in the practical Epistle of James is quite as
plainly Jewish, of the school of the Sages, with a touch of Essenism. The
theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews shows throughout the influences of
the philosophy of Alexandria. The theology of the introduction to the
Gospel according to St. John is just as unquestionably this same
Alexandrian philosophy, still further developed.

These variant schools of Christian theology, so plainly revealing the
sources of their variations, deny the existence of any one uniform system
of thought in the New Testament writers, and pronounce the different
systems transient and not final forms.

Whatever the Church may offer us, the New Testament offers us no fixed and
final body of thought. In the Bible, Christian theology is still a soft
vase, plastic to the touch of each worker upon it. Had Paul's fine hand
played around it even another decade, how different the shape it might
have taken.

With the incoming of a more rational, ethical, and spiritual age, we may
surely expect a finer fashioning of the forms of thought blocked out in
the New Testament, under the first, fresh inspiration of the age of Jesus;
into whose larger patterns shall be taken up all the truths revealed
through the various sciences of these rich later ages; while all shall
still take on the shape of Him who is the image of the invisible God.

"The Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy word."

The true Biblical theology is--Christ himself. His thought of God, and not
even Paul's thoughts about Christ, are to mould our thinking. The Supreme
Son of Man must have had the truest thought of God. Two words formulate
his theology as bodied not in a cre