Epistle consecutively, and note its transitions. The Apostle begins by speaking of the divine righteousness which comes by faith (i. 17), and dwells with bitter horror upon the vices which he knows to prevail in the great cities. Then he shows the helplessness alike of Jewish law and Gentile ethics in face of this corruption, and is led by degrees into the historic and doctrinal discussions of which I shall speak later.1 But at his twelfth chapter he returns, as if with a sigh of relief, to the ethical question, and to a description of the kind of life which should prevail in the Church. And as he does so his tone changes; the man is no longer dominated by the rabbi; the missionary breaks free from the meshes of criticism; the preacher pours out his heart among his converts.

The ethical teaching of Paul is full of genius and of originality. I do not of course mean that he sets up as virtues traits which had been condemned as vicious, or that he treats the virtues of the good people about him as worthless. But he exhibits a new spirit, and accepts a new standpoint, whence the whole land of conduct seems to those versed in ancient morality to show new aspects. The life of virtue is not to him, as to Aristotle, a pursuit of the mean between extremes, but an enthusiasm, a passion.

It is not, however, right to pass directly from the ethics of Aristotle to those of St Paul. For in the interval between the two an immense change had come over the ethics, if not of mankind, at all events of the upper strata of society. This was in part due to the 1 Below, chap. ix.

ethical conservatism of Rome, to the relics of the sturdy old republican righteousness which had marked the early history of the ruling city, and had survived all the catastrophes which followed, to the Roman piety which Augustus and his successors tried to re-establish.1 But in a higher degree it was due to the spread of the Stoic morality. Stoicism, as is well known, was really a great humanitarian movement covered by only a thin veneer of Greek philosophy. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was a Phoenician of Cyprus. Chrysippus, Aratus, and several other prominent Stoics were, like Paul himself, Cilicians. With the acceptance of Stoicism by its leaders and public men, the ancient world gave up the merely tribal morality of the Greek cities; it gave up the search for happiness as the end of life, and adopted instead views as to the dignity of human nature, the brotherhood of all men, the duty of conforming to the order visible in the material universe, which were destined, when mingled with Christianity, immensely to influence the world's history.

As religion had been partly orientalised, and in a great degree spiritualised, by the coming in of the religions of the Mysteries, so morality had been partly orientalised and infinitely widened by the spread of the Stoic ethics. Tarsus, when Paul was born, was one of the chief seats of the Stoic philosophy, and the Apostle was almost as much born into the ethics of this sect as he was into rabbinical ways of argument. This was

1 On this point I am glad to be now able to refer the reader to Mr Warde Fowler's Religious Experience of the Roman People (Lecture XIX.), a work which is a model of scientific method and of insight.

his starting-point, and, alike in the phrases he uses and his ways of regarding vice, he is under strong Stoic influence.

It is well known that the resemblances between the Pauline ethics and those of Seneca are so notable that a forged series of letters between the great contemporaries was invented. Some of the Christian Fathers speak of Seneca and Epictetus as nostri, "of our persuasion." The Stoic ethics had that inwardness which is the most indelible mark of the teaching alike of Paul and of his Master. Parallel passages exhibiting the likeness between the Stoic teaching, that of the Sermon on the Mount, and that of the Pauline Epistles, are set forth in a well-known dissertation by Bishop Lightfoot,1 and I need not here repeat them.

Nevertheless, taking a broad view of the ethics of Paul, one sees that he differs widely from the morality current in his time. His opposition to the Pharisaic view that a man can attain to righteousness by selfdiscipline and a strict observance of the Jewish law is constant and passionate. His opposition to the Stoic morality is no less keen. The root principles of the Stoic ethics are a sense of the dignity of human nature and a determination to live according to the visible order of the universe. Paul, on the other hand, regarded human nature as corrupt and perverted; and the visible order of the world did not impress his imagination.

The difference between the ethics of Paul and those of the Stoics is really profound. This may be illustrated by placing side by side passages of Seneca and Paul in 1 Dissertations on the Apostolic Age, pp. 247-316.

regard to worldly misfortune.1 "What then?" says

Seneca; "is it death, bonds, fire, all the shafts of fortune that the sage will fear? Not he. He knows that all these are not real, but only apparent evils. He regards them all as mere terrors to human life." Infinitely different is the feeling of Paul: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or anguish, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us." The philosopher rises above calamity by firmness of resolve: the Christian soars above it on the wings of love. In a word, the ethics of Paul were Christian, that is, in accord with the new light which had dawned on the world in the life of Jesus, and went on after his departure in the Christian community.

It is noteworthy that Paul but seldom quotes sayings preserved to us by the Synoptists. The nearest parallel to the Synoptic narrative is to be found in the account of the Lord's Supper in 1 Cor. xi. 23. But there Paul declares that he has received the rite from the Lord Himself. It is with the critics a question whether the Synoptists do not here follow Paul. Luke, in particular, almost certainly does so. The writer of Acts puts into the mouth of Paul one quotation from the words of Jesus: "It is more blessed to give than to receive." This occurs in Paul's speech at Miletus,2 by far the most authentic of his speeches, reported almost certainly

1 This juxtaposition I owe to Clemen, Religionsgesch. Erklärung des neuen Testaments, p. 53.

2 Acts xx. 35.

by an auditor. And the phrase is quite in the manner of Jesus. But it does not occur in our Gospels. Elsewhere occasionally the Apostle seems to go back consciously to the words of his Master. This is the case when he sets forth the rule that they who preach the Gospel shall live by the Gospel,1 which reminds us of the saying, "The labourer is worthy of his hire.” Paul here expressly says that he is repeating an ordinance of the Lord. Again, when he speaks of marriage, he writes, "Unto the married I give charge, not I, but the Lord, that the wife depart not from her husband."2 Here, again, he seems to refer to the Master's teaching as current in the tradition of the society.

More often there is a marked parallelism between the teaching of Paul and the Synoptic discourses, yet Paul does not seem to be consciously borrowing. For example, in Rom. xiii. 6 we have a view of duty to Roman officials which reminds us of the saying of Jesus in regard to the tribute-money. "Rulers are

not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. For this cause ye pay tribute also; for they are ministers of God's service." So again in Rom. xvi. 19 Paul's advice to the disciples to be "wise unto that which is good, and simple unto that which is evil," recalls the charge of Jesus to his missionaries that they should "be wise as serpents, but harmless as doves."

When, however, we turn from mere coincidences in expression or conscious borrowing by Paul from currently reported sayings of his Master, to the spirit

1 1 Cor. ix. 14.

2 1 Cor. vii. 10.