all men in all things, not seeking mine own profit, but the
profit of many, that they may be saved.' Noble words, and inspiring to
read. Yes: but look within, and think what Paul must have passed
through; think what he must have been put through before he,--a man of
like selfish passions as we are, a man of like selfish passions as
Anything was,--could say all that. Let his crosses and his thorns; his
raptures up to the third heaven, and his body of death that he bore about
with him all his days; let his magnificent spiritual gifts, and his still
more magnificent spiritual graces tell how they all worked together to
make the chief of sinners out of the blameless Pharisee, and, at the same
time, Christ's own chosen vessel and the apostle of all the churches.
Boasting about his patron apostle, St. Augustine says: 'Far be it from so
great an apostle, a vessel elect of God, an organ of the Holy Ghost, to
be one man when he preached and another when he wrote; one man in private
and another in public. He was made all things to all men, not by the
craft of a deceiver, but from the affection of a sympathiser, succouring
the diverse diseases of souls with the diverse emotions of compassion; to
the little ones dispensing the lesser doctrines, not false ones, but the
higher mysteries to the perfect--all of them, however, true, harmonious,
and divine.' The exquisite irony of Socrates comes into my mind in this
connection, and will not be kept out of my mind. By instinct as well as
by art Socrates mixed up the profoundest seriousness with the humorous
affectation of qualities of mind and even of character the exact opposite
of what all who loved him knew to be the real Socrates. 'Intellectually,'
says Dr. Thomson, 'the acutest man of his age, Socrates represents
himself in all companies as the dullest person present. Morally the
purest, he affects to be the slave of passion and borrows the language
even of the lewd to describe a love and a good-will far too exalted for
the comprehension of his contemporaries. This irony of his disarmed
ridicule by anticipating it; it allayed jealousy and propitiated envy;
and it possibly procured him admission into gay circles from which a more
solemn teacher would have been excluded. But all the time it had for its
basis a real greatness of soul, a hearty and an unaffected disregard of
public opinion, a perfect disinterestedness, and an entire abnegation of
self. He made himself a fool in