icant to our human
experience!

What concerns us historically as to Paul is that he was the conspicuous
agent in transforming this sentiment into a moral force. The belief that
Jesus was risen had great emotional power, but that emotion might easily
waste itself, might even undermine the solid foundations of character.
Paul held the belief in its literal form, but it had for him a further
significance, as the symbol and type of the soul's experience in its
every-day walk. The death we are most concerned about is the extinction
of evil act and desire. Life--the only life worth thinking of, here or
hereafter--is lofty, pure, and tender life. Die to sin, live to
holiness, and present or future is safe with God.

Paul's theology is in one sense a passage in a long chapter of
pseudo-science. It is one of a series of attempts to explain the
universe from a starting-point of fable. These have been the
accompaniment--sometimes as help, sometimes as obstacle--of a spiritual
life far deeper than the stammering language they found. And it is to be
noted that Paul himself when at his best rises above his theology or
forgets it. The words of his which have lodged deepest in the world's
heart are the vital precepts of conduct, and the utterances of love and
hope. In one matchless passage, he celebrates "charity"--simple human
love--as the one sufficient, supreme, and eternal good.

Some misconceptions in his philosophy became the fruitful seeds of
mischievous harvests. One such seed was the ambiguous sense of
"faith"--the confusing of intellectual credence with moral fidelity.
This misconception--which underlies much of the New Testament--was an
almost inevitable incident of a religion generated as this was.
Christianity based itself, in its own theory, on the bodily resurrection
of Jesus from the dead. This was offered as a basis for the whole appeal
which the church made to the world. Thus Belief--or Credulity--usurped
the place among the virtues which of right belongs to Truth.

Another misconception lay in the use of "flesh," the antithesis of
"spirit," as the name of the evil principle. Paul indeed uses "the
flesh" in no restricted sense of merely sensual sin. With him it equally
includes all other forms of wrong, like malevolence and pride and
self-seeking. But the nomenclature and the way of thought which it
reflected put a stigma on the whole physical nature of man. In that
stigma lay the germ of asceticis