I propose to take St. Paul’s Epistles in the order in which I find them in the Canon. But there is one passage which is so important for its own sake, so important as connecting the narrative in St. Luke with the internal life of the Apostle, so specially important because it occurs in that Epistle which brings out the opposition between St. Peter and St. Paul at Antioch—the one which modern Paulines therefore delight to dwell upon above all others—that I must make it an introduction to all my subsequent remarks.
It is this (Gal. i. 15, 16): “But when it pleased God, who had chosen me from my mother’s womb, and called me by His grace to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood.” This is, in the strictest sense, St. Paul’s account of his own conversion. It will not be supposed that he made light of the vision which he saw on the way to Damascus; he records that vision again and again with its different details; he presumes the Galatians to be acquainted with it; no fact less signal could bridge over the chasm between the time past in which he persecuted the Church of God and wasted it, and that in which he preached the faith he once destroyed. But we are not satisfied with the outward fact; we want to know what it signifies, what processes within corresponded to it, what discovery was actually made to the mind of the Apostle which a light in the outward heaven could not make. Here he tells us; “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me;” He discovered to me that there was One against whose admonitions and invitations I had been kicking, One who was my Lord, and yet whom I had been persecuting. This revelation it was which first confounded and blinded me, then illuminated all the dark passages of my previous life. From this Son of God had proceeded every right desire and true thought that had ever been in me; from myself resisting and disowning Him, all that had been evil and false. But was this Son of God only in me? Was He revealed to me only that I might know my own blessing and my own evil? Was He revealed to me because I was different from the rest of my Jewish brethren? Was He revealed to me only because I was one of them? No; but He was revealed in me for this end, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles. I was made to understand that which was true of me as a man; so I was fitted to be a missionary to men. Hence too I was enabled to fulfil the office and calling of a Jew; I was chosen from my mother’s womb to assist in carrying out the covenant to Abraham: “In thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed!” Therefore I could not confer with flesh and blood; I could not for the present avail myself of outward instruction; I went into Arabia to be taught thoroughly in silence and retirement the meaning of this wonderful communication; how it must affect myself and the world: to wait for the answer to my question: “Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do?”
I conceive then that we have the highest warrant for believing that St. Paul’s special work was to carry this message to the nations, to tell men that the Son of God was in them, that He was the real head and root of their humanity, that apart from Him they had no life, or righteousness, or unity at all; to bring out this fact in relation to the experiences of their own minds, to the facts of history, to the calling of the chosen people, to their law, to the order of Society, to the past, present, future condition of the world. He was to show how our Lord’s Incarnation, His death, resurrection, ascension, bore upon and explained His relation to human beings, expounded the riddle of their own existence, confuted the innumerable evidences which outward and inward facts seemed to oppose to a belief in His actual fellowship with them and dominion over them.
Such, I say, would be the rough notion one would form of the object of St. Paul’s life from this memorable passage. By assuming it as the basis of our inquiry we may perhaps be able to trace the distinct objects of his different epistles more clearly, without departing from the most admitted maxims respecting them, provided those maxims are not directly inconsistent with the statements of the Apostle himself.