areful winnowing; for, while one man
tells us that the Apostle Paul, in his intense appreciation of
the "spiritual element," made light even of the "resurrection of
Christ," and everywhere shows his superiority to the beggarly elements
of history, dogma, and ritual, another declares that he was so
enslaved by his Jewish prejudices and the trumpery he had picked up
at the feet of Gamaliel, that he knew but little or next to nothing
of the real mystery of the very Gospel he preached; that while he
proclaims that it is "revealed, after having been hidden from ages
generations," he himself manages to hide it afresh. This you will be
told is a perpetual process, going on even now; that as all the
"earlier prophets" were unconscious instruments of a purpose beyond
their immediate range of thought, so the Apostles themselves
similarly illustrated the shallowness of their range of thought;
that, in fact, the true significance of the Gospel lay beyond them,
and doubtless also, for the very same reasons, lies beyond us. In
other words, this class of spiritualists tell us that Christianity
is a "development," as the Papists also assert, and the New Testament
its first imperfect and rudimentary product; only, unhappily, as the
development, it seems, may be things so very different as Popery and
Infidelity, we are as far as ever from any criterion as to which, out
of the ten thousand possible developments, is the true; but it is a
matter of the less consequence, since it will, on such reasoning, be
always something future.

"Unhappy Paul!" you will say. Yes, it is no better with him than it
was in our youth some five-and-twenty years ago. Do you not remember
the astute old German Professor in his lecture-room introducing the
Apostle as examining with ever-increasing wonder the various
contradictory systems which the perverseness of exegesis had
extracted from his Epistles, and at length, as he saw one from which
every feature of Christianity had been erased, exclaiming in a
fright, "Was ist das?" But I will not detain you on the vagaries of
the new school of spiritualists. I shall hear enough of them, I have
no doubt, from Harrington; he will riot in their extravagances and
contradictions as a justification of his own scepticism. In very
truth their authors are fit for nothing else than to be recruiting
officers for undisguised infidelity; and this has been the consistent
termination with very many of their converts. Yet, many of t