rship has considered it necessary to pile up a mountain of
commentaries on these epistles. Christianity, as it went through the
cities of the world in St. Paul's person, must have gone as a great
intellectual awakening, which taught men to use their minds in
investigating the profoundest problems of life.

How deeply he was interested in the intellectual reception of the
Gospel is shown by the earnestness with which he prays that his
converts may excel in mental grasp of the truth. "I pray," he says,
"that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all
judgment." And again he says, "Making mention of you in my prayers,
that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give
unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him,
the eyes of your understanding being enlightened," etc.

But nothing proves so clearly the value which he set on this element
of Christianity as his earnestness that his version of the Gospel
should be kept pure and entire. He called upon younger ministers, like
Timothy and Titus, to guard it as a precious treasure and to transmit
it to faithful men who would be able to teach others also. It filled
him with the most poignant anxiety and pain when the minds of his
converts were assailed with doctrines subversive of the truth which he
had taught. He had to encounter assaults of this kind coming from the
side of orthodoxy as well as of heterodoxy, and no small portion of
his energy had to be expended in refuting them. You remember, for
example, with what a heat of zeal and affection he cast himself on the
Galatians, when they had lent an ear to false teachers: "O foolish
Galatians, who hath bewitched you?" "If any man preach any other
gospel unto you than that which ye have received, let him be
accursed."

* * * * *

Gentlemen, you are going to be teachers of Christianity, and this
implies that you should yourselves have mastered it in thought. A
certain number of people will be more or less dependent on you for
the view they have of Christianity; and this really means the view
they have of all the most important and solemn objects of existence;
for to them all things will be comprehended in Christianity; and on
you will largely depend whether this view is true or false, narrow or
noble.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance to men and women of
their fundamental convictions about this universe in which the