nto the wonderful forms we
inherit in his Gospel and Epistles. But even the mind of John was not
equal to the exigency of the Church; it was too fine, mystical,
unusual. His thoughts to this day remain the property only of the few
finest minds. There was needed a thinker of broader and more massive
make to sketch the first outlines of Christian doctrine; and he was
found in Paul.

7. Paul was a born thinker. His mind was of majestic breadth and
force. It was restlessly busy, never able to leave any object with
which it had to deal until it had pursued it back to its remotest
causes and forward into all its consequences. It was not enough for
him to know that Christ was the Son of God: he had to unfold this
statement into its elements and understand precisely what it meant. It
was not enough for him to believe that Christ died for sin: he had to
go farther and inquire why it was necessary that He should do so and
how His death took sin away.

But not only had he from nature this speculative gift: his talent was
trained by education. The other apostles were unlettered men; but he
enjoyed the fullest scholastic advantages of the period. In the
rabbinical school he learned how to arrange and state and defend his
ideas. We have the issue of all this in his Epistles, which contain
the best explanation of Christianity possessed by the world. The right
way to look at them is to regard them as the continuation of Christ's
own teaching. They contain the thoughts which Christ carried away from
the earth with him unuttered. Of course Jesus would have uttered them
differently and far better. Paul's thoughts have everywhere the
coloring of his own mental peculiarities. But the substance of them is
what Christ's must have been if he had himself given them expression.

8. There was one great subject especially which Christ had to leave
unexplained--his own death. He could not explain it before it had
taken place. This became the leading topic of Paul's thinking--to show
why it was needed and what were its blessed results. But, indeed,
there was no aspect of the appearance of Christ into which his
restlessly inquiring mind did not penetrate. His thirteen Epistles,
when arranged in chronological order, show that his mind was constantly
getting deeper and deeper into the subject. The progress of his
thinking was determined partly by the natural progress of his own
advance in the knowledge of Christ, for he alw