"SUPERNATURAL RELIGION."—(VOL. III.)

[TO THE EDITOR OF TUB "SPECTATOR."]

Sin,—" It is a most striking and extraordinary fact that the life and teaching of Jesus have scarcely a place in the teaching of Paul. Had we been dependent upon him, we should have had no idea of the Great Master who preached the 'Sermon on the Mount,' and embodied pure truths in parables of such luminous Simplicity. His noble morality would have remained unknown, and his lessons of incomparable spiritual excellence have been lost to the world."

These striking sentences, from the conclusion to Vol. III. of "Supernatural Religion," are worth consideration, because they prominently express a notion which, I fear, is fast becoming a popular delusion. It is natural that as theology is more and more proved to be precarious, stress should be laid on the moral teaching of Christ's "Sermon on the Mount," and parables, as the kernel of the Christian faith. It is also natural that as more and more the dates and authorship and accuracy of the Gospels and Acts are found to be uncertain, stress should be laid upon the Epistles of St. Paul, as probably the earliest documentary evidence of what Christianity was. But strange to say, we are told in the same breath that had we been dependent upon St. Paul, Christ's toble morality would have remained unknown, St. Paul having Substituted for it a theology of his own which for 1800 years has usurped the name of Christianity and reigned in its stead.

Now, it is worth consideration whether St. Paul is realty open to this charge.

The author of "Supernatural Religion" has insisted that What St. Paul taught must be learned, not from the Acts, but from his own four undisputed Epistles, viz., those to the Romans (Without the last two chapters), Corinthians, and Galatians. Thus the charge is based on four stray letters of the Apostle, cast up like pieces of wreck upon Christian shores, and preserved as relics of the thoughts and spirit of their writer. Because these stray letters happen to bear upon theological disputes in which those to whom he was writing were engaged, and because Christians of all ages since have been absorbed in theological dis- putes, and because, by a monstrous assumption, quite foreign to their contents, dicta found in these stray letters have been con- sidered by theologians as verbally inspired, and therefore as affording miraculous authority for dogmas otherwise without loundation,—because of all this, we are asked to jump to the conclusion that St. Paul himself was lost in dreary theological mists, and that he had no clear perception of the moral teaching of Christ.

It may be observed that even had it happened that the four stray letters had contained nothing but theology, still they would have afforded very limping and inconclusive evidence at best that theology was the main staple of St. Paul's teaching. Why may he not have written a hundred other letters, not theological at all, and therefore of no special ecclesiastical value, and perhaps, for that very reason, not preserved by the Churches ? But after all, what do these Epistles contain ?— 1. I think they contain possibly the earliest, and certainly the 'roost convincing, evidence existing that the main teaching of Christ was not a system of theology, but in fact, exactly such truths as are set forth in the "Sermon on the Mount." The -direct object even of the theological arguments they contain seems to me to be, not to impose a new system of theology on the Churches, but to free Christianity from the bondage of the existing Jewish system.

2. I think they contain the noblest confession ever made by a theologian that, whilst giving his opinion on theological disputes, St. Paul considered his own theology as precarious and provi- sional,—as the sight of one seeing, as he was conscious that he did, through a glass darkly ; and that whatever his theological views were, they were entirely subordinated in his own mind to the main object of his teaching, which was as clear as the day,—viz., to change the moral nature of men from the state described in these Epistles again and again so vividly as the "old man" and "the flesh" into "the new man,"—into that loveliness of spirit described so delicately in the Epistle to the Corinthians, and

declared in every Epistle to be the spirit of Christ and of God "So" had Paul "learned Christ," and this did he teach to be "the truth as it is in Jesus." And therefore was his whole work one vast labour to reproduce in men that "holy spirit" which was to regenerate the world, and so bring about the "kingdom of God" upon earth.

No doubt he shared mentally the Jewish illusion of an outward Messianic reign and many other misconceptions of his time, but modern criticism will be a miserable failure, if it cannot distin- guish the enduring sunlight from the evanescent clouds which pass across the sky of a particular day.

I confess that the more I reflect upon these four stray Epistles of St. Paul, the more I stand amazed at the greatness of the moral change which he was daring to aim at and succeeding in effecting ; and the more certain does the conviction become that a power far vaster than the strange fascinations of theology was needed to accomplish such a work, and that the power which really did it is plainly traceable, upon St. Paul's own clear showing, to One who for two short years had,—

" Lived with God in such untroubled love,

And with men oven in such harmony Of brotherhood, that whatsoever spark Of pure and true in any human heart Flickered and lived, it burned itself towards Him In an elootrie current, through all bonds Of intervening race and °rood and time;

And drew together in a central eoil

Magnetic all the noblest of all hearts, And made them one with Him, in a live flame, That is the purifying and the warmth Of all the earth, even to those latter days.

Who, looking with miraculous, tender oyes Upon the perishing and gone-astray, Lifted the hands of help, alone, unarmed, Struck singly out, and dashed upon the rooks. And in that shook did meet his human doom Of suffering, and took it for a crown.

. ........ •

So that for ever since, in minds of mon,

By some true instinct, this life has survived,

In a religions, immemorial light,

Pre-eminent in one thing most of all,—

The Man of sorrows ;—And the Cross of Christ

Is more to us than all His miracles."

This is the mental result, to me, of the perusal of three volumes of laboured disproof of miracles. Whilst with Don Quixote's fervour they make a valiant assault upon theological windmills, they leave untouched and apparently unperceived the great moral miracle, which, after all, is Christianity.—I am, Sir, 8co.,