e cannot tell. This is the same
mystery as we encountered in studying the prophets of the Old
Testament. Both prophets and apostles speak with a knowledge of the
mind and will of God which has a certainty and authority peculiar to
their writings. We ought to speak, if we speak at all, with certainty
and authority too; but there is a difference between ours and theirs.
I know how difficult it is to define the difference; we cover it up
with the vague word Inspiration; but I do not see any use in hiding
from ourselves that it exists.

Admitting, however, that there is this mystery, yet we can see, in
some respects, how the truth, when it came, dealt with St. Paul, and
how his mind was exercised about it; and in these respects he is not
beyond our imitation.

What I wish to emphasize in this lecture is, that Christianity did
specially lay hold of him in the region of the intellect. It is meant
to lay hold of all parts of the inner man--the feelings, the
conscience, the will, the intellect; and it may lay hold of certain
people more fully in one part of their being and of others in another
according to their constitutional peculiarities. Some suppose--and
perhaps they are not far wrong--that the first preaching of the Gospel
consisted of little more than the simple story of the life and death
of Jesus; that those who heard it sympathetically began forthwith to
live new lives in imitation of Christ; and that this was the most of
their Christianity. In a fine and peculiar nature like that of St.
John, again, the Gospel caught hold chiefly in the region of the
emotions; and his Christianity was a mystical union and fellowship
between the Saviour and the soul. St. Paul was not by any means
deficient in the other elements of humanity; but he was conspicuously
strong in intellect. That is to say, he was one of those natures to
which it is a necessity to know the why and the wherefore of
everything--of the universe in which they live, of the experiences
through which they pass, of the ends which they are called upon to
pursue. This natural tendency was strengthened by the training of an
educated man. And therefore the Gospel came to him as a message of
truth, which cleared up the mysteries of existence and presented the
universe to the mind as a realm of order.

St. Paul often expresses the intense intellectual satisfaction which
Christianity brought him, and the joy he experienced in applying it to
the solution of the problem