exhibition of religious enthusiasm at Corinth. (On this subject Prof.
Lake's excursus is the most instructive discussion that has yet
appeared. The 'Testament of Job' and the magical papyri show that
gibberish uttered in a state of spiritual excitement was supposed to be
the language of angels and spirits, understood by them and acting upon
them as a charm.) He urges his converts to do all things 'decently and
in order.' He is alarmed at signs of moral laxity on the part of
self-styled 'spiritual persons'--a great danger in all times of ecstatic
enthusiasm. He is also alive to the dangers connected with that kind of
asceticism which is based on theories of the impurity of the body--the
typical Oriental form of world-renunciation. But he does not appear to
have foreseen the unethical and polytheistic developments of sacramental
institutionalism. In this particular his Judaising opponents had a
little more justification than he is willing to allow them.

ST. PAUL

There is something transitional about all St. Paul's teaching. We cannot
take him out of his historical setting, as so many of his commentators
in the nineteenth century tried to do. This is only another way of
saying that he was, to use his own expression, a wise master-builder,
not a detached thinker, an arm-chair philosopher. To the historian,
there must always be something astounding in the magnitude of the task
which he set himself, and in his enormous success. The future history of
the civilised world for two thousand years, perhaps for all time, was
determined by his missionary journeys and hurried writings. It is
impossible to guess what would have become of Christianity if he had
never lived; we cannot even be sure that the religion of Europe would be
called by the name of Christ. This stupendous achievement seems to have
been due to an almost unique practical insight into the essential
factors of a very difficult and complex situation. We watch him, with
breathless interest, steering the vessel which carried the Christian
Church and its fortunes through a narrow channel full of sunken rocks
and shoals. With unerring instinct he avoids them all, and brings the
ship, not into smooth water, but into the open sea, out of that perilous
strait. And so far was his masterly policy from mere opportunism, that
his correspondence has been 'Holy Scripture' for fifty generations of
Christians, and there has been no religious revival within Christianity
that has