s of life. The light which Christianity
cast on the universe was to him, he says, like the morning of
creation, when God said, Let there be light, and there was light.
Before, all was darkness and chaos, but then all became sunshine and
order. He often speaks with wondering gratitude of the fact that the
mystery which had been hidden from ages and from generations had been
revealed to him: Eye had not seen, nor ear heard, neither had entered
into the heart of man, the things which God had prepared for them that
love Him, but God had revealed them unto him by His Spirit. And by
this mystery he meant the tangle of God's providence in history,
which the coming of Christ disentangled and smoothed out into a web
whose pattern the mind could discern.

Having himself received Christianity as an intellectual system, he
very specially addressed himself to the intellect of others. The door
of the kingdom of heaven, it has been beautifully said, can only be
opened from the inside; but to that observation this other may be
added, that in a sense there are many doors, but each man can only
open to others the one by which he has entered himself. Christianity
had come to St. Paul as the truth about God and the world and himself.
There was plenty of emotion besides; but the emotion for him came
after the clear intellectual conviction and sprang out of it. And he
expected that others would receive Christianity in the same way.
Therefore he never spared the minds of those he addressed; he expected
them to think; and he would have said that, if they would not open and
exert their minds, they could not receive Christianity.

I hardly know anything more puzzling than the audacity with which he
cast himself on the minds of his hearers and trusted them to
understand him, when he was thinking his strongest and his deepest.
Imagine an epistle of his arriving in Rome or Ephesus, and read out
in the audience of the church for the first time. Who were the
hearers? The majority of them were slaves; many had till a short time
before been unconcerned about religion; in all probability not a tithe
of them could read or write. Yet what did Paul give them? Not milk for
babes; not a compost of stories and practical remarks; but the Epistle
to the Romans, with its strict logic and grand ideas, or the Epistle
to the Ephesians, with its involved sentences and profound mysticism.
He must have believed that they would understand what he wrote, though
schola