enuine experience, the permanent reality and truth, which vivified this
world-scheme.

In Paul before his conversion we see the man who struggles to conform to
a standard of conduct so high, exacting, and minute, that it touches
every particular of life, and who yet is beset by a constant sense of
failure and disappointment. From this slough of despond he is
lifted--how? By the sense of a love which extends to him from the unseen
world. It takes form to him as the personal love of one who has lived,
has died, and in some inexpressible way still lives. This friendship in
the unseen world is the sufficient, the absolute pledge of a God who
loves and saves. No matter what be the theory about it, of incarnation
or atonement, here is the reality as it comes home: the man Jesus,
highest, noblest, dearest, makes himself real and present to me, though
long ago he died and was laid in the grave. This one fact carries answer
enough for all the craving of heart and soul. That I shall at last
triumph over all besetting evils, that the ruler of the universe is my
friend, that earth is the vestibule of heaven,--all this I can joyfully
believe when once I have the sense of that single human friend still
befriending me in the unseen world.

This was what the risen Christ meant to the early church. This was the
common belief that bound its two parties, the Jewish and the Pauline
Christians, at last into one. This was what gave the full meaning to all
the stories of Jesus told over and over and at last written down. This
was what fired the common heart of mankind as not the wisdom of Plato nor
the nobility of Epictetus had touched it.

Paul's experience is the more remarkable because he had never even seen
Jesus in the flesh. He had borne in a sense a personal relation to him,
in the fact that he had hated and persecuted his followers. The
conviction that he had been in the wrong came to him with a tremendous
revulsion of feeling. The poignancy of remorse was followed by an
exquisite sense of forgiveness, which shed its depth and tenderness on
his whole after-life. In him we first see the power of the personality
of Jesus to touch those who never had seen him.

At such points we feel how shallow is the plummet-line with which our
so-called psychology measures the "soul" it deals with. The influence,
the presence, the living love, of one who has died,--how paradoxical, how
unintelligible, to our human science; how signif