es to our thoughts about Christ. To know Christ
after the flesh is to know Him, not as man, but as _a_ man. St. Paul
in this verse condemns all religious materialism, whether it take the
form of hysterical meditation upon the physical details of the
passion, or of an over-curious interest in the manner of the
resurrection. There is no trace whatever in St. Paul of any aspiration
to rise above Christ to the contemplation of the Absolute--to treat
Him as only a step in the ladder. This is an error of false Mysticism;
the true mystic follows St. Paul in choosing as his ultimate goal the
fulness of Christ, and not the emptiness of the undifferentiated
Godhead.

The second point in which St. Paul has been supposed to sanction an
exaggerated form of Mysticism, is his extreme disparagement of
external religion--of forms and ceremonies and holy days and the like.
"One man hath faith to eat all things; but he that is weak eateth
herbs.[101]" "One man esteemeth one day above another, another
esteemeth every day alike." "He that eateth, eateth unto the Lord, and
giveth God thanks; and he that eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not,
and giveth God thanks." "Why turn ye back to the weak and beggarly
rudiments, whereunto ye desire to be in bondage again? Ye observe
days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I
have bestowed labour upon you in vain.[102]" "Why do ye subject
yourselves to ordinances, handle not, nor taste, nor touch, after the
precepts and doctrines of men?[103]" These are strongly-worded
passages, and I have no wish to attenuate their significance. Any
Christian priest who puts the observance of human ordinances--
fast-days, for example--at all on the same level as such duties as
charity, generosity, or purity, is teaching, not Christianity, but that
debased Judaism against which St. Paul waged an unceasing polemic, and
which is one of those dead religions which has to be killed again in
almost every generation.[104] But we must not forget that these vigorous
denunciations _do_ occur in a polemic against Judaism. They bear the
stamp of the time at which they were written perhaps more than any other
part of St. Paul's Epistles, except those thoughts which were connected
with his belief in the approaching end of the world. St. Paul certainly
did not intend his Christian converts to be anarchists in religious
matters. There is evidence, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians,
that his spiritual pr