live in this
unhealthy region, but find a Christianity in which the distinctively
Christian element is not a minimum but a maximum. Such was St. Paul's
Christianity. Its most prominent peculiarity was that there was so
much of Christ in it. He expressed this in the characteristic saying,
"To me to live is Christ," which was only a Greek way of saying, To me
life is Christ; and, from whatever side we look at his life, we see
that this was true.

Christ had obtained, and He retained, an extensive hold on his
emotional nature. St. Paul's was a large heart, and it was all
Christ's. We are shy of speaking of our personal feeling towards the
Saviour; and we probably feel pretty often that the conventional
terms of affection for Him, which are made use of, for example, in the
hymns of the Church, transcend our actual experience. St. Paul, on the
contrary, has no hesitation in employing about Christ the language
commonly used to describe the most absorbing passion, when love is
filling life with a sweet delirium and making everything easy which
has to be done for the sake of its object. St. Paul's achievements and
self-denials were almost more than human; but his own explanation of
them was simple: "The love of Christ constraineth us." He had to
forego the prizes which to other men make life worth living; but what
did he care? "I count them but dung," he says, "that I may win
Christ." If only he retained one thing, he was willing to let all
others go: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall
tribulation or distress or persecution, or famine or nakedness, or
peril or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors
through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor
life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor
things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature shall be
able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ our
Lord." These sound like the fervours of first love; but they are the
words of a man at the height of his powers. And in old age he was
still the same: still to him Christ was the star of life, and the hope
of being with Him had annihilated the terrors of death: "I am in a
strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart and to be with Christ,
which is far better."

But Christ was enthroned in St. Paul's intellect no less than in his
heart. It was an intellect vast in its compass and restless in its
movements; but all