us to maintain that St. Paul was perfect.
But we only understand these passages aright when we remember that
there runs through them all a conscious irony. The basis of St. Paul's
whole theology was the denial of any possible ground for a man to boast
in himself. 'Where is boasting? it is excluded.' 'He that boasteth,
let him boast in the Lord.' It is Christ who 'leads St. Paul in' His
'triumph.' What he boasts of is not his own, but Christ's. Of course,
this sort of language very easily admits of self-deception. St. Paul
shows himself conscious of its danger[16]. But there can {182} be no
question of the vehement sincerity of St. Paul in repudiating any
homage to himself which seemed to put him in the place of Christ, or to
substitute the teacher for his message[17]. And where his personal
gifts of intellect might most easily have shone, he had determined to
abjure all 'the wisdom of men' in the method of his preaching[18]. It
is remarkable again that as soon as ever the real peril from Judaism
was over in the Church, St. Paul drops his anti-Judaistic polemic, and
all that brings the personal element into prominence. He is absolutely
free from the charge of pursuing his advantage so as to magnify a
personal victory. The more thoroughly we grow to know St. Paul, the
more, I think, we feel that his profession is true that he will 'boast'
only 'in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ'; and that truly the world,
with all its personal ambitions, had been for him nailed to the cross
and killed[19].

But what exactly was it that St. Paul had to 'boast' that Christ had
wrought through him?

He had, he says, accomplished the preaching of the gospel in an
irregular circuit from Jerusalem to Illyria. After he had made a
beginning of Christian preaching at Damascus, he {183} had, in fact,
shared the apostolic preaching at Jerusalem (Acts ix. 29), but his own
special work began at Tarsus, or rather at Antioch. After that he had
'fulfilled the proclamation of the gospel,' so far, that is to say, as
it belonged to the apostolic office, by founding churches in a
gradually enlarging circuit, especially in the chief centres, as the
narrative of the Acts shows us, till travelling by the Egnatian way he
would have come within sight of the Illyrian mountains at
Thessalonica[20]. He may even have entered Illyria when the Acts
vaguely describes him as going to Macedonia and then 'passing through
those parts[21]'; but the expre