for the free inclusion of all who would accept Jesus as
the Messiah, and would impose no further requirement of ceremony or
dogma, trusting all to the guidance of "the Spirit"--the Spirit of which
the sufficient fruit and evidence was "love, joy, peace, long-suffering,
gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." The other party, led
by disciples who had known and followed Jesus himself, maintained that
the entire Jewish law was still in force, and treated Paul as a dangerous
heretic. To narrate the struggle and the final reconcilement is beyond
the purpose of this book, but we must pause a moment on the figure of
Paul.

It marks the extraordinary force and vividness of Paul's character, that
in a few pages of letters, in which the autobiography is only brief and
incidental, he has so displayed himself that few historical characters
are more familiar.

We see him,--deep-hearted, vehement, irascible, tender, self-assertive;
intensely bent on the higher life; thwarted in that aspiration by unruly
passion,--lust of the flesh and pride of the spirit; stumbling,
stammering, conquering; a nature full of internal conflict, brought into
harmony by one sublime spiritual affection; thenceforth throwing its
whole energy into the diffusion of a like harmony throughout this world
of troubled conflict.

We see a mind guided in its deepest workings by the realities of personal
experience, but wholly untrained in logic, unversed in accurate
knowledge; acquainted with history only through the Old Testament;
ignorant of the philosophy of Greece; taught by intimate association with
many men and women in their deepest personal experiences; familiar by
travel and observation with the broad life of the time, and judging it
from a lofty ethical standpoint; wholly credulous as to miracle; wholly
confident in its own theories--theories gendered in the strangest wedding
of fact and fancy; using constantly the form of argument, which often is
pure fantasy; illumined by gleams of spiritual insight, which sometimes
broaden into pure radiance; striving always to express the conscious fact
of a great freedom of the soul which binds it fast to all duty; aiming at
a human society dominated wholly and solely by the same spiritual
principle; but often clothing both the personal and social ideal in forms
of thought which have become obsolete, so that for us to-day his truth
has to be stated in other language, and broadened by other truths.

W