appropriated that theocratic spirit so prominent in his Judaizing days, and overlooked the enlarged liberty and charity of his matured experience. She has claimed to derive from him the keys, rather as he may have understood them in the twilight of his faith at Cæsarea Philippi than in the meridian of light that burst upon him from Calvary and Olivet and the great Pentecost. Hence the abominations that led Dominic to murder his fellow-men in the name of Peter and of Rome, and prompted Tetzel to sell absolutions as the merchant sells his merchandise, to the highest bidder. Hence the great reaction, — the Reformation that seized the keys in the spirit of the primitive keeper, and opened the Bible and the divine kingdom to every heart of faith and love.

What thoughts shall we bear with us now, as we part with the name of this powerful Apostle on our lips. He is the type of the strong man, alike in his wavering and his constancy, his fall and his rise. As such look upon him, and learn.

God has been pleased to endow some men with eminent executive ability, and they become, either for good or ill, the strong men of our race. Their strength gives them power, more power than comes merely from goodness or from wisdom not allied with active might. The strong man becomes the statesman, soldier, navigator, the doer of great things whether in peace or war, braving man or nature, serving gold or God. Strong in active force, he may yet be very weak and wavering in respect to the great good, and, like many of our noted men, the prey of vehement impulse without regulating principle, may be like the mighty Apostle in his vacillation and fall, without

sinking into his penitence and rising into his faith and devotion. Is there not a fatal element of moral weakness in our leading strong men, and in the chief thing do they not sadly fail?

We need the strong men on the right side. Alas! too often the strong are not good, and the good are not strong. How much of the masculine energy and executive talent of the world is utterly aside from religion, and, if not opposed to its principles, completely engrossed with material interests! Christianity needs the strong man, like Peter, as well as the mild, contemplative pietist, like John. The service of God is not complete unless offered by all the orders of mind and power which he has created. Our own type of religion has perhaps glorified too exclusively the meditative devotion of John and the reasoning faith of Paul, and slighted the genius of him to whose executive force our Lord especially committed the charge of his spiritual kingdom.

O men endowed of God with faculties of energy and enterprise! awake from your moral torpor, and do something for the kingdom of God upon earth. Lovers of things real, strive to realize or make real on earth the truths of God and eternity. Use your own minds and your own powers as you may think best, calling no man master, but looking solely to Him who is the Messiah of the Most High. Suspicious of mere dreamers, and determined to be doers, be not the vainest of dreamers by mistaking the evanescent for the eternal. Be doers of the word, realists in the noble sense of that glorious faith that came into this world to give God and heaven reality among men, to establish right principles, humane and pious affections,

and win man and the world to the service of Him of
whom and through whom and to whom are all things.
So we may
derive power from the man of the keys,
not by prostrating ourselves before the papal chair,
but by looking to him who gave the Apostle his
faith and unction, and by asking, "Lord, what wilt
thou have me to do?" Still then will the Apostle
give light and power to the churches. Says one,
whose poetry we like better than his creed concerning
Peter:

"Thus some fair star, on its ethereal way,
Seems gazing on the golden orb of day,

And drinks his radiance, till itself, made bright,
When the sun sinks, for others lights the night."

XII.

PAUL AND GOSPEL LIBERTY.

"WHERE the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” These words most eloquently express the principle of their author's life, character, and influence. They embody his darling sentiment, his characteristic idea. Where spiritual liberty was, either to proclaim her principles or to redress her wrongs, there was the heart and home of the Apostle Paul.

We have spoken of the preparation for the Messiah, of his coming, plan, ministry, and also of the service rendered by the most active and energetic of the original twelve Apostles. From Peter, the champion of unity and concentrated power, essentially the theocratic man, we turn to him who was the champion of mental freedom and universality, identified as much with Gospel liberty as St. John with Gospel love in the work of enlarging and liberalizing the primitive Church.

To find our man we must look to a singular quarter. For the lawgiver who led the old Israel from the land of bondage, we looked to the house of Pharaoh. Now, for the leader of the new exodus from Jewish exclusiveness to Christian universality, we enter the straitest sect of the Pharisees, and the most raging zealot in their councils is the man.

In sketching the career of an Apostle so familiar to our reading, we need use no more particularity than suffices to show the sequence of his labors and the connections of his history. Three words indicate his preparation for his work,— Tarsus, Jerusalem, Damascus.

Take first the central point, and look behind and before. Begin with Jerusalem, and then think of Tarsus and Damascus. In the city of David the Christian Church had its origin and the divine kingdom had its centre. There the Saviour held his last interview with his disciples, and there too from the unseen world gave them the first witness of his spiritual presence, and taught them thus to follow him as their heavenly prince, and live as under his ministering love. A great impression was forthwith made upon minds of all classes, alike upon the thoroughgoing Jews of the priestly and Pharisaic class, and upon the Hellenistic or Greek Jews, who had greater mental enlargement and superior intellectual culture. These Greek Jews, when converted, being more obnoxious to the priesthood on account of their somewhat Protestant spirit, were the first victims of persecution. Stephen was of this class, a Greek Jew, and to him belongs the glory of leading, next to Jesus Christ, his Master, the noble army of martyrs. When Stephen fell, his murderers, justifying their atrocity by the forms of law, laid their garments at the feet of a young man high in the estimate of the Pharisees, noted for his zeal as for his knowledge, Saul.

Tarsus was his native home, a city that vied in its literary pretensions with Athens and Alexandria. There he had been educated in his childhood upon