varice and darker sins--he
felt intense pain, crying out like one wounded, and he hurled the
accusations from him with the energy of a self-respecting nature. It
was always his endeavour to keep a conscience void of offence not only
towards God, but also towards men; and one of his most frequently
reiterated injunctions to those who were in any way witnesses for
Christ was to seek to approve themselves as honest men even to those
who were without. He was speaking out of his own heart when he said to
all, "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest,
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
things are of good report: if there be any virtue, and if there be any
praise, think on these things."

I cannot help pausing here to say, that he will never be a preacher
who does not know how to get at the conscience; but how should he know
who has not himself a keen sense of honour and an awful reverence for
moral purity? We are making a great mistake about this. We are
preaching to the fancy, to the imagination, to intellect, to feeling,
to will; and, no doubt, all these must be preached to; but it is in
the conscience that the battle is to be won or lost.[43] The great
difficulty of missionary work is that in the heathen there is, as a
rule, hardly any conscience: it has almost to be created before they
can be Christianized. In many parts of Christendom it is dying out;
and, where it is extinct, the whole work of Christianity has to be
done over again.

2. St. Paul's intellectual gifts are so universally recognised that it
is hardly worth while to refer to them. They are most conspicuously
displayed in his exposition of Christianity, on which I shall speak in
the closing lecture. But in the meantime I remark, that his
intellectual make was not at all that usually associated in our minds
with the system-builder.

It was, indeed, massive, thorough and severe. But it was not in the
least degree stiff and pedantic. It was, on the contrary, an intellect
of marvelous flexibility. There was no material to which it could not
adapt itself and no feat which it could not perform. You may observe
this, for example, in the diverse ways in which he addresses different
audiences. In one town he has to address a congregation of Jews; in
another a gathering of heathen rustics; in a third a crowd of
philosophers. To the Jews he invariably speaks, to begin with, about
the heroes of their national history