lders us by the intricacy and variety of his thoughts;
but like the innumerable leaves and twigs of some finely-grown tree
which emerge, all of them, through branches and boughs, out of one
great trunk, strong and straight, and one deep and firmly-set root, so
it is with the infinitely various topics and suggestions of St. Paul.
They run back {7} into a few dominant thoughts, which in their turn
have one trunk-line of developement and one root. The root is the
conviction, finally smitten into the soul of St. Paul at the moment of
his conversion on the road to Damascus, that Jesus is the Christ; and
the trunk-line of development is that which is involved in St. Paul's
special commission to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, that is to
say, the principle that the Christ is the saviour of Gentiles as of
Jews and on an equal basis--or in other words, that the Christian
church is catholic.

When St. Paul acknowledged that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, this
of course meant that he remained no less than formerly an adherent of
the Jewish faith, and that he 'worshipped' without any breach of
continuity, 'the God of his fathers.' So he is fond of insisting[2].
Thus to him the Church of Christ is still 'the commonwealth of Israel,'
God's ancient church, though reconstructed[3]. For the religion of
Israel had had for its main motive the hope of the Christ. All that
St. Paul now believed was that this hope had been realized, and
realized to the shame of Israel in One whom they had rejected {8} and
crucified. But if to believe that Jesus was the Christ involved no
breach with the religion of Israel, yet it did involve the recognition
that it had been reconstituted on a new basis, and in a way that
suggested to existing Israelites nothing less than a revolution. The
church of God had, in St. Paul's present belief, widened out from being
the church of one nation into being a catholic society, a society for
all mankind.

If St. Paul's epistles are taken in those groups into which they
naturally divide themselves, we find that in the first group, that of
the two epistles to the Thessalonians, all his favourite topics are
present as it were in the germ, but nothing that is specially
characteristic of him is yet developed. The free admission of the
Gentiles into the Church is, with the accompanying hostility of the
Jews, assumed[4], but not much insisted upon; but in the interval
between these epistles and that to the Galatia