FARRAR'S LIFE OF ST. PAUL.*
A LWE of St. Paul, following on a life of Christ, ought to present us with a. vivid and. life-like picture of the rise and early pro- gress of Christianity. The life of the Founder and of the chief of his Apostles certainly afford scope and opportunity to set forth the conditions and circumstances of the time, the pre- paredness of heart and mind of Jew and Gentile for a great moral and spiritual revolution, the supreme personality of the Master, and the life and work of the greatest of his followers. We have in our hands now Canon Farrar's completed, picture of the first seventy years of Christianity. We have now his con- ception of the history of these years, of the work of Christ, and. of the character and mission of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Canon Farrar's work has met with popular approval. His Life (1 Christ has been bought and sold in tens of thousands, and the lufe of St. Paul has already met with a rapid sale, amid we have no doubt that sale will go on. The verdict of the reading. public is strongly in favour of the eloquent Canon and his work. The success which his work has met with is easily understood. There , is the charm of a refined rhetorical style, not too iheavily weighted with thought. The reader floats easily and lazily along, past all the whirl- pools of modern criticism, and without a jar arrives at the destined conclusion. The flavour of learning of a vast and multi- tudinous kind is present. There is everywhere a studied rever- ence, and a careful setting-forth of conclusions precious to the hearts of thousands ; and great care is taken to keep the dry details of history out of view. But those qualities which have gone far to secure the literary success of these works, to some extent depreciate their value from a scientific point of view. We cannot accept them as an adequate or accurate rendering of the history of the first seventy years of Christianity. We must enter our protest against the style of Canon Farrar. The elaborate turning of periods, the con- stant stretching of emotions on the rack., the tendency to sensa- tionalism, the spinning-out of thoughts that they may be ornately expressed, become, in the long-run, fatiguing. We long for a return to nature. Growing out of this habit of ornate writing,. we have the practice into which the Canon has fallen of using He- brew, or Greek, or Latin words as if they were English. Scholars do not need that Canon Farrar should print Hebrew and Greek words in Roman characters, and common people do not under- stand them even when so printed. Such a sentence as the following has, no doubt, a sonorous cadence, and falls some- what melodiously on the ear, but it might be open to the censure which Paul passed on those who spoke for their own exaltation, and not for the edification of the Church :—" Disdain- ful Rabbinists were at once amazed and 'disgusted to find that he with whom they now had to deal was no rude provincial, no, illiterate Am ha-arcts, no humble hodiot, like the fishermen and. tax-gatherers of Galilee, but one who had been trained in the culture of heathen cities, as well as in the learning of Jewish communities,—a disputant who could meet them with their own weapons, and speak Greek as fluently as themselves." So much in love is Canon Farrar with the Hebrew Am ha-aretv,. that he uses it not only of Stephen, as in the foregoing sentence, but he uses it again of Paul :—" Paul was no Am ha-arets, on the contrary, he was as much a Rabbi, as much a Chakam, as the best remover of mountains' among them all." Take. another sentence, descriptive of the excitement which prevailed when the Jews recognised Paul in the Temple :—" Instantly the rumour flew from lip to lip that this was Shadl of whom they had heard—Paul the iterrillb; Paul, one of the Galilman Minim one of the believers in the Hung ;' Paul, the renegade Rabbi, * The Life and Work of Bi. Paul. By F. W. Farrar, D.D., F.A.S. 2 vole. Louden ; Cassell, Potter, and Galpin. who taught and wrote that Gentiles were as good as Jews ; the man who blasphemed the Thorah ; the man whom the syna- gogues had scourged in • vain.; the man who went from place to place ;getting them into trouble with the Romans; and that he had been caught • taking with him into the Temple a Gentile dog, an uncircumcised ger.," " Chakam," " Mesith," "Minim," " Thorah," " Ger " are sonorous words, but why Canon Farrar should seek to use them in an English book, we . are at a loss to discover. Nor is this all we have to
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complain of in the style of these volumes. Sense s some- times sacrificed to sound, and in instances not a few it is hard to discover what the author means. The meaning evaporates in a golden haze of words. We have not been so much bewildered with a cataract of words since we read Swinburne on Blake. We remember that we were then so much bewildered with the sonorous and musica'l sentences of Swinburne, which seemed to have a meaning we could not seize, that we cast the book aside and took up a. volume of Shakespeare, to test the alarming question whether sheer in- tellectual incapacity had not fallen on us. We found com- fort in Shakespeare, for he had a meaning. We had to re- new the experiment when we read Canon Farrar's Life of St. Paul, and the testing-book this time was Caird on Kant; and when even Caird had a meaning for us, we felt warranted in setting aside the hypothesis of intellectual incapacity, and in seeking an explanation elsewhere. In the rush of impassioned sen- tences, and in the glow of rounded periods, expression has out- run thought, and the seeker after truth is left in the embrace of a cloud.
While we thus somewhat energetically utter our protest against the fashion in which Canon Farrar has been pleased to convey to us the-result of his researches into the life and work of Paul, we are far from asserting that the work is valueless. True, indeed, we get little help from Canon Farrar to the solution of the many critical problems•which have arisen in recent years in relation to the Epistles of Paul and to the Acts of the Apostles. These critical difficulties have been stated anew in the third volume of Supernatural Religion. An account of the life and-work of Paul ought to have -taken some account of these problems, for on the kind of answer we give to these difficulties will •depend the estimate we form of the personality of Paul, his apostolic work, and the place he fills in the history of Christianity. What is his relation to the other Apostles, to the Jewish Church P What is the independent value of the Acts of the Apostles as a source of history, and what is the recon- ciliation of the apparent discrepancies between the Acts and the Epistles, both in matters of fact and in matters of principle ? These are questions which we expected to have settled, or at least we hoped to have received some help towards their settlement. But we have found little or none, unless it be a help to find Canon Farrar proceeding as if these difficulties had not emerged, and. weaving the scattered notices of fact and doctrine into a web, which is certainly gorgeous enough. Canon Farrar has solved no critical problem, and in truth the reader of these volumes might read them through without becoming aware of the weighty controversies which are now agitating the Churches on these questions. This may add, perhaps, to the popularity of the work, but it detracts much from its scientific value.
With all thee drawbacks, it is, however, true that readers of this book will gain a more vivid conception of the moral, social, and religious condition of the world when Christianity went forth for the regeneration of the nations. Canon Farrar has painted well the decaying faiths, the haggard doubts, the weariness of life, the social disorganisation, and the immorality of the Gentile world. We see the vivid faith and fresh enthusiasm and moral purity of Christianity coming into contact with the effete systems of Greece and Rome; simplicity of life in contact with the ponder- ous 'forms of a complex civilisation ; and intense earnestness of purpose in conflict with the careless scepticism of a cultured, scornful age. Canon Farrar has largely succeeded in setting forth the outward circumstances, the social forces, the special training which moulded the character of Paul, and helped to make him the man he was. He has done good service in showing the small share which Greek literature and philosophy had in his training, and the decisive importance to be attached to the Hellenistic and Hebrew factors in his education. His large acquaintance with the Jewish literature, outside of and beyond the sacred books, ancl his profuse citation of relevant passages, often throw a flood of light on obscure passages in the life of Paul, and on difficult passages in his writings, while the description he gives of the great controversy of the early Church, and of the intense bitterness which marked that coliflict, is characterised both by fullness of information and accuracy of statement. The influence of the early training of Paul is traced throughout his writings. It is evident that everywhere we are in contact with a man whose early years were passed, not amidst green fields, and ameng woods, and hills, and flowing streams, but in the stress and strain of a large city. The contrast in this respect is great between the Gospels and the Epistles. In the Gospels the speaker speaks of the lilies of the field, of the trees of the wood, of the manifold life and glory of sea and mountain, of .field and. forest. The writer of the Epistles has grown up in the street of a great city, under the influence of a traffic which flows from all the ends of the earth. His metaphors are drawn either from the narrow sphere of household life, or from the buildings, the traffic, the halls of justice, the public meeting, the garrison life, of the town, or from incidents which always arise where men gather themselves together in city life. That special aptitude whereby Paul made himself all things to men, and was able to put himself in the place of the strong and of the weak, of Jew and of Gentile, is one not likely to spring up in the rugged independ- ence and partial solitude ;of the country, but usually grows up out of the gracious courtesy and social intercourse of the town. The home life in the Hebrew family, amongst the beloved. circle of the race of Abraham, as well as the contact with many ranks, conditions, and families of men, and the necessity of intercourse with persons of all kinds of tempera- ment and character, helped to give to Paul that knowledge of men, that polished courtesy of manner, that suavity of address, that quickness in finding out a common ground of interest, that power of organisation, of holding a hundred different interests in his hand, and causing them to converge to a given end, which have aroused the wonder and extorted the admiration of all students of his life and work. To this also may be traced much of that dislike of solitude, and longing for the society of intimate friends, which finds touching expression in many parts of. all his Epistles. It appears to us that in this relation, as indeed all through, Canon Farrar makes far too much of the physical illness and weakness to which Paul was subject. These longings after the society of friends, these allusions to weakness and sufferings, need not be interpreted. in the merely physical sense attributed to them by Canon Farrar. The hypochondriac, who throws his melancholy shadow over the pages. of these volumes, is not the Paul of the Epistles, though he bears a striking resemblance to the Paul of Renan.
There are other things which we should like to notice, but to one only can we now allude. Of late years, in the stress Of apologetic controversy, an increasing weight has been laid on the testimony of Paul to Christ and to Christianity. What he has said regarding the great facts of the life of Christ, in these Epistles, which even the Tubingen school acknowledge to be his, has been elaborately stated more than once. The value to be attached to his testimony largely depends on the esti- mate we form of his temperament and character. Can we rely on his testimony to objective facts P Was he of a specially emotional temperament, and so constituted as to be apt to mis- take subjective impressions for objective facts P Was Paul "subject to natural ecstatic trances, with all their accompany- ing forms of nervous excitement," kinds of tongues, "visions, and. religious hallucinations," as the author of Snpernatiteal Religion affirms P In that case, the value of his testimony might not bear the Stress laid on it. We think this is a gross mis- representation of the temperament of Paul. But it is a reading of him which finds too mach support in the book of Canon Farrar. And the fashion in which the Canon dilates on his physical weakness, on his nervous temperament, and his ex- citability, as well as the historical parallels he draws between him and others, tend to make Paul's independent testimony to the facts on which Christianity is based of less value then it really is. Add to this that Canon Farrar leaves us in great uncertainty as to his view of the gift of tongues at Pentecost, and as to the character, objective or subjective, of the vision on the way to Damascus, and. we shall see that little help is gained from him in the great controversy of the present time. This is one disadvantage which arises from the wealth of rhetoric at the command of Canon Farrar. It enables him to avoid a plain issue. The idea evaporates, and it is scarcely possible for us to know what his real conviction is. To his brilliant picture of the con- version of Saul, he subjoins a reference to St. Teresa. " Christ stood. before me," said St. Teresa, " I saw him with the eyes -of
the soul more distinctly than I could have seen him with the eyes of the bcxly." Are we to understand that the heavenly vision which Paul saw is of the same kind, and stands on the same level, as the vision of St. Teresa P If not, the reference to Teresa is misleading. If it is, then what is the objective value of the vision of Paul P We quote the Canon's words :—
" The words used for vision means a waking vision,' and in what conceivable respect could St. Paul have been more overpoweringly convinced that he had, in very truth, seen, and heard, and received a visitation awl a mission from the Risen Christ ? Is the essential miracle rendered less miraculous by a questioning of that objectivity to which the language seems
decidedly to Point? Are the eye and the ear the only organs by which definite certainties can be conveyed to the human soul ? Are not rather these organs the poorest, the weakest, the most likely to be deceived ? To the eyes of St. Paul's companions, he spoke by the blinding light ; to their ears, by the awful sound ; but to the soul of his chosen servant he was visible, indeed, in the excellent glory, and he spoke in the Hebrew tongue ; but whether the vision and the voice came through the dull organs of sense, or in presentations infinitely more intense, more vivid, more real, more unutterably convincing to the spirit by which only things spiritual are discerned,—this is a question to which those only will attach importance to whom the soul is nothing but the material organism, who know of no indubitable channels of intercourse between man and his Maker, save those that come clogged with the imperfections of mental sense, and who cannot imagine anything, except that which they can grasp with both hands." (pp. 194-5.)
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