ish his periods.
Often, indeed, his ideas, by the mere virtue of their fineness and
beauty, run into forms of exquisite language, or there is in them such
a sustained throb of emotion that they shape themselves spontaneously
into sentences of noble eloquence. But oftener his language is rugged
and formless; no doubt it was the first which came to hand for
expressing what he had to say. He begins sentences and omits to finish
them; he goes off into digressions and forgets to pick up the line of
thought he has dropped; he throws out his ideas in lumps instead of
fusing them into mutual coherence.

Nowhere perhaps will there be found so exact a parallel to the style of
Paul as in the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. In the
Protector's brain there lay the best and truest thoughts about England
and her complicated affairs which existed at the time in that island;
but, when he tried to express them in speech or letter, there issued
from his mind the most extraordinary mixture of exclamations,
questions, arguments soon losing themselves in the sands of words,
unwieldy parentheses, and morsels of beautiful pathos or subduing
eloquence. Yet, as you read these amazing utterances, you come by
degrees to feel that you are getting to see the very heart and soul of
the Puritan Era, and that you would rather be beside this man than any
other representative of the period. You see the events and ideas of
the time in the very process of birth.

Perhaps, indeed, a certain formlessness is a natural accompaniment of
the very highest originality. The perfect expression and orderly
arrangement of ideas is a later process; but, when great thoughts are
for the first time coming forth, there is a kind of primordial
roughness about them, as if the earth out of which they are arising
were still clinging to them: the polishing of the gold comes late and
has to be preceded by the heaving of the ore out of the bowels of
nature. Paul in his writings is hurling forth the original ore of
truth. We owe to him hundreds of ideas which were never uttered before.

After the original man has got his idea out, the most commonplace
scribe may be able to express it for others better than he, though he
could never have originated it. So throughout the writings of Paul
there are materials which others may combine into systems of theology
and ethics, and it is the duty of the Church to do so. But his
Epistles permit us to see revelation in the