It may still, however, be said that these indications of the Apostle's knowledge of the Gospel history are less than we might fairly expect; and we may still be inclined to ask why, when there are so many resemblances, there are not more? why, if he knew so much as these resemblances imply, he yet says so little?

It is perhaps impossible to answer this fully, or, at any rate, to answer as it deserves within the limits here prescribed. But some suggestions may be made, which, even if they do not entirely meet the case, may yet be sufficiently important to deserve consideration.

First, it must be remarked that the representation of the life, and work, and character of Christ, in all probability, belonged to the oral, and not the written, teaching of the Apostle. The Gospels themselves have every appearance of having grown up out of oral communications of this kind; and the word "Gospel,” which must have been employed by the Apostle substantially for the same kind of instruction as that to which it is applied in the titles of the histories of our Lord's life, is by him usually, if not always, used in reference not to what he is actually communicating in his Epistles, but to what he had already communicated to his converts when present.1 This supposition is confirmed by the fact that the most express quotation of a distinct saying of Christ occurs, not in a letter of the Apostle, but in the eminently characteristic speech to the Ephesian elders (Acts, xx. 18-35.), and that in the two passages in the Epistles to the Corinthians, where he most clearly refers to what he had "delivered" to them whilst he was with them (1 Cor. xi. 23-26.; xv. 3—7.), it is clear that his instructions turned not merely on the general truths of the Christian Faith, but on the detailed accounts of the Last Supper, and of the Re

1 See Notes on 1 Cor. xv. 1-10.

surrection. Had other subjects equally appropriate, in the Gospel history, been required for his special purpose, there seems no reason why he should not equally have referred to these also, as communicated by him during his stay at Corinth. His oral teachingthat is to say, his first communication with his converts -would naturally touch on those subjects in which all believers took a common interest. The instances of that teaching, in other words, the everlasting principles of the Gospel are contained, not in tradition, nor yet (except through these general allusions) in his own writings, but in the Four Gospels. His subsequent teaching in the Epistles would naturally relate more to his peculiar mission would turn more on special occasions would embody more of his own personal and individual mind. "I, not the Lord."1 And in ancient times, even more than in our own, in sacred authors no less than classical, we must take into account the effect of the entire absorption of the writer in his immediate subject, to the exclusion of persons and events of the utmost importance immediately beyond. Who would infer from the history of Thucydides the existence of his contemporary Socrates? How different, again, is the Socrates of Xenophon from the Socrates of Plato! Except so far as the great truth of the admission of the Gentiles was, in a certain sense, what he occasionally calls it, "his own" peculiar "Gospel," he had already "preached the Gospel" to his converts before he began his Epistles to them. In the Epistles he was not employed in "laying the foundation" (that was laid once for all in "Jesus Christ," 1 Cor. iii. 10.), but in "building up," "strengthening," "exhorting," "settling."

11 Cor. vii. 12.

But, over and above this almost inevitable distinction, he was in his Epistles-in his individual dealings with his converts -swayed by a principle which, though implied throughout his writings, is nowhere so strongly expressed as in these two. When called to reply to his Jewish opponents, who prided themselves on their outward connexion with Christ, as Hebrews, as Israelites, as Ministers of Christ, as Apostles of Christ, as specially belonging to Christ (2 Cor. v. 12., x. 7., xi. 22. 13.), when taunted by them with the very charge which, in a somewhat altered form, we are now considering, that he had "not seen Jesus Christ our Lord" (1 Cor. ix. 1.), his reply is to a certain extent a concession of the fact, or rather an assertion of the principle, by which he desired to confront any such accusations. With the strongest sense of freedom from all personal and local ties, with the deepest consciousness that from the moment of his conversion all his past life had vanished far away into the distance, he answers, "Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet henceforth know we Him no more." (2 Cor. v. 10.) Startling as this declaration is, and called forth by a special occasion, it yet involved a general truth. It is, in fact, the same profound instinct or feeling which penetrated, more or less, the whole Apostolical, and even the succeeding, age with regard to our Lord's earthly course. It is the same feeling which appears in the fact, strange if it were not well known, that no authentic or even pretended likeness of Christ should have been handed down from the first century; that the very site of His dwelling-place at Capernaum should have been entirely obliterated from human memory; that the very notion of seeking for relics of His life and death, though afterwards so abundant, first began in the age of Constantine. It is the same feeling which, in the Gospel narratives themselves, is expressed

in the almost entire absence of precision as to time and place in the emphatic separation of our Lord from His kinsmen after the flesh, even from His mother herself-in His own solemn warning, "What, and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascend up where he was before: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life. It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing." And this is the more observable when contrasted with the Apocryphal Gospels, which do to a great extent condescend to the natural or Judaic tendency, which the Gospels of the New Testament thus silently rebuke. There we find a "Gospel of the Infancy," filled with the fleshly marvels that delighted afterwards the childish minds of the Bedouin Arabs; there first are mentioned the local traditions of the scene of the Annunciation, of the Nativity, of the abode in Egypt; there is to be found the story, on which so great a superstructure has been built in later ages, of the parents and birth of her whom the Gospel history calls "blessed," but studiously conceals from view.1

The Apostle's reserve no doubt was strengthened by his antagonism with his Jewish opponents; but the principle on which he acted is applicable to all times. It explains in what sense our Lord's life is an example, and in what sense it is not. That life is not, nor ever could be, an example to be literally and exactly copied. It has been so understood, on the one hand, even by such holy men as Francis of Assisi, who thought that the true "Imitation of Christ" was to reproduce a facsimile of all its outward circumstances in his own person. It has been so understood, on the other hand, by some in our own day, who have attacked it on the express ground

See "Evangelia Apocrypha” (ed. Tischendorf), pp. 1–11. 68. 79–81.

184. 191-201.

that it could not, without impropriety, be literally re-enacted by any ordinary person in England in the nineteenth century. But it is not an example in detail; and those who try to make it so, whether in defence or in attack, are but neglecting the warning which Bacon so beautifully gives on the story of the rich young man in the Gospels: "Beware how, in making the portraiture, thou breakest the pattern." In this sense the Christian Church, as well as the Apostle, ought to "know Christ henceforth no more according to the flesh." All such considerations ought to be swallowed up in the overwhelming sense of the moral and spiritual state in which we stand towards Him. In this sense (if we may so say) He is more truly to us the Son of God than He is the Son of Man. life is our example-not in its outward acts, but in the spirit, the atmosphere which it breathes,-in the ideal which it sets before us-in the principles, the motives, the object with which it supplies us.

His

This brings us to yet one more reason why St. Paul's Epistles contain no further details of our Lord's ministry. It was because they were to him, and to his converts, superseded by an evidence to himself, and to them, far more convincing than any particular proofs or facts could have for them-the evidence of his own life, of his own constant communion with Him in whom he lived, and moved, and had his being. He had, no doubt, his own peculiarities of character, his own especial call to the Gentiles. These gave a turn to his life, to his teaching, to his writings. These gave the Epistles a character of their own, which will always distinguish them from the Gospels. But still the spirit which pervaded both alike was (to use his

1 Bacon's Essays, vol. i. p. 41.