their will with His except in the rare
moments of their perfect obedience.

True enough, through the insight of the prophets and particularly the
experience of psalmists, this conception of the Apart-God became
increasingly rich in the persuasion of His unfailing care for His
children. None the less, the Hebrew God is a Transcendent God and
Christianity inherits from that. Christianity took over what Judaism
refused--Jesus Christ and His Gospel. But out of the immeasurable wealth
of His teaching apostolic thinking naturally appropriated and made most
of what was nearest in line with the prophets and the lawgivers of their
race. Judaism refused Christ but the Twelve Apostles were Jews and the
greatest of the group--St. Paul--was a Jewish Rabbi before he became a
Christian teacher. He had been nurtured and matured in the schools of
his people and though he was reborn, in renunciations and obediences
distinctly Christian, there were in his very soul inherited rigidities
of form in conformity to which he recast his faith.

More distinctly than he himself could ever have known, he particularized
the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Doubtless his own experience was the deeper
directing force in all this. Theologies always, to begin with, are the
molten outpouring of some transforming experience and they are always,
to begin with, fluid and glowing.

Such glowing experiences as these are hard to communicate; they, too,
soon harden down and we inherit, as cold and rigid form, what was to
begin with the flaming outcome of experience. St. Paul's own struggle
and the bitterness of a divided self which issued in his conversion
naturally gave content to all his after teaching. He worked out his
system strangely apart from the other group of disciples; he had
probably never heard a word of Christ's teaching directly from Christ's
lips; he naturally fell back, therefore, upon his Jewish inheritance and
widened that system of sacrifices and atonements until he found therein
not only a place for the Cross but the necessity for it. He made much,
therefore, of the sense of alienation from God, of sin and human
helplessness, of the need and possibility of redemption.

_The Incarnation as the Bridge Between God and Man; the Cross as the
Instrument of Man's Redemption. The Cross the Supreme Symbol of Western
Theology_

Here, then, are the two speculative backgrounds of historic
Christianity,--God's apartness from man in an inconceivable immen