I shall be asked, Was the apostle Paul, then, not an inspired man and infallible teacher? I reply, Yes, but clearly not in virtue of a laying on of hands. He himself placed it as in virtue of a meeting with the risen Christ, and a personal commission received from Him: JI. Cor. 9: 1, Acts 26: 15-19, Gal. 1: 11-12, 15-17. Ever after that supreme moment, the apostle consistently refused any qualification of his apostleship so received, such as would be implied by a further commission from mere men (apostles though they might be), which might be reported to bestow or qualify the character of infallibility which Christ Himself had already vouchsafed. The.last passage cited above proves to the hilt that Paul was an inspired layman, in the sense that he did not owe his inspiration to the imposition of human hands, for his argument throughout the prologue to the Galatian Epistle plainly is: his right to teach the Gospel which Christ had revealed to him, without submitting it first to his brother-apostles, and although unordained by them. It is also clear from-Gal. 2: 7-9 that the other apostles, nevertheless, endorsed his teaching afterwards.
I entirely repudiate, therefore, Rev. A. N. Rowland's suggestion that the apostle "broke into the of the Church like a new ation." We are all aware of the suggestion of Modernist propaganda that Paul was a liberal theologian. But we constantly find him in his Epistles harking back to the most-primitive incidents of Old Testament history as inspired and incontrovertible facts, in order to establish those very positions in his teaching which seemed new in his day, and upon which the claim that he was a liberal is based, e.g., Rom. 4: 10-13, I. Cor: 10: 1-11, Gal. 4: 22-31, I. Tim. 2: 13-14. In all these passages, Paul simply shows that it was Jewish exposition which had itself departed from the didactic intention of all the great types in primitive inspired history, and the essential force of all such passages in the apostle's writings is therefore ultra-conservative. It is impossible to imagine two things more fundamentally opposite than the complete Pauline dependence upon and reverence for "all Scripture," continually upheld and expounded by him as "God-breathed," and this unscientific, illogical and reckless thing called Modernism, with its half-mock and half-bow, and its piebald rhetoric, calmly claiming inspiration for what it avows to be forgery. If Paul, on the grounds alleged, is to be labelled Viberal, then the modernist theologian is a roaring Bolshevik, for_there is little in either O.T. or N.T. that he will ultimately respect.
AN INFALLIBLE BOOK, But how shall the average person recognize what is truth in spiritual things? It is impossible to discuss it adequately within the limits of a letter. But I commence with this great portent in human history, an infallible Book, triumphant in its science, demonstrated in its facts, faithful in its dark portraiture of human need, and radiant throughout with the promise and fulfilment of God made flesh for our salvation: a Book round which human history has helplessly swung, as the earth round the sun: a Book hated and blaspbemed by evil men, reserved, wrested or burned by fanaticism, rent asunder by a criticism married to elaborate and learned fables: yet visibly protected by Divine power, and preserved through every vicissitude where every other book of equal antiquiry has perished out of human ken: now penetrating over 500 languages: and welcomed as a God-sent Lamp in the darkest places of earth.
In the Name of Christ I deny that this Book cannot be understood bu plain and wayfaring men. Its fundamental and essential positions are perfétly clear tu those who are uilling to obey them: John 7: 17: 1f, beyond these essentials, there were no mysteries in it, it would not be Divine. If it taught men how to make money, or how {to be happy without being holy, or how to sin with impunity, then, however enigmatical its presentation of these subjects might be, men would sweat and pore over it till they understood, and they would not blaspheme the presentation. But as it stands, they are person-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.