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rected the Western Book Agents to see that the work was done. They in turn committed the duty of collating and restoring to the writer. This work required a painstaking search among the scattered literature of the time, such as biographies, autobiographies, histories, private journals, and other sources of information belonging to that period. As the most of the transactions of that General Conference were incorporated in the Book of Discipline for 1792, the work also required a comparison of every paragraph, word, and letter of the Discipline of that year with its immediate predecessor, the Discipline of the year 1791. In this way, from contemporary writings, from contemporaries who later wrote their recollections of the General Conference of 1792, and more particularly from a comparison of the two above-mentioned Books of Discipline, we have been able to present a reproduction of the doings of the General Conference of 1792, which, made up from these reliable sources, we believe will be found accurate, and will thus complete the series of Journals of the General Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church." It is bound in sheep for the benefit of those who may wish to complete their set of General Conference Journals.

Individuality, or the Apostolic Twelve Before and After Pentecost. By Rev. J. L. Sooy, D.D., author of Bible Talks with Children and Bible Studies for the Home. 12mo, pp. 303. Cincinnati: Curts and Jennings. New York: Eaton & Mains. Price, cloth, $1.

The great truth of individuality, which the author of this volume ably sets forth in his opening chapter, had its marked illustration in the case of the first disciples. "Our Lord chose the twelve possessing different temperaments. He did it purposely. He did it because the leading characteristics of the Gospel were to be exhibited in these twelve men; they were to be the representatives and helpers of all the diverse and many-colored temperaments which hereafter should be found in the Church. . . . But when the results are before us, no one could venture to pronounce which of the twelve was the most fitted for the grand work Christ gave them all to do. Each was the best for his own work." With this position as a starting point Dr. Sooy divides the twelve into four groups, whose keywords are respectively "impulse," "affection," "intellect," and "administrative ability." To the first group belong Simon Peter, Andrew, and James (son of Zebedee); to the second, John, Philip, and Bartholomew (Nathanael); to the third, Thomas (Didymus), Matthew (Levi), and James (son of Alphæus); to the fourth, Lebbæus (Thaddeus, Judas), Simon (Canaanite, Zelotes), and Judas Iscariot. Following this division-which may be arbitrary, and yet is one to which the author is fully entitled-the book reviews the personal characteristics of the first disciples and includes a general consideration of the qualities of later discipleship which were typified in the original twelve. The volume is able in its construction, and cannot fail to be instructive to those who are ambitious for high Christian living.

METHODIST REVIEW.

MAY, 1900.

ART. I.-THE CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL.

Of the myriad trees that fill the forests few are tall or straight enough to be chosen to hold up the wires through which flashes the subtle fire that carries with it the thoughts of men. So, among the millions of men, there are but a few elect souls so lofty and so true that they can pass forward from generation to generation the flaming torch of truth or the mighty currents of spiritual energy. Tallest of these, and straightest, stands the apostle to the Gentiles. It would be difficult to name another who has so powerfully influenced the thinking of the modern world. Perhaps not even Plato has been so potent. But Plato is a vanishing force, while the ideas of Paul, like the person of his Master, grow in their grasp upon the minds of men. Just as every age, spiritu ally earnest and ethically alive, sounds the watchword "Back to Jesus!" so has every awakening of reflective Christian thought been a fresh return to the ideas of Paul. Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther alike base their systems in his teaching. Our own critical age, if happily less disposed to system-building, has more closely realized his life and thought as the historic method is slowly recovering for us the real Paul, unobscured by the dogmatic reflection which has perhaps as much darkened as developed his ideas.

Our chief difficulty in understanding the Pauline theology is that only with great care can we keep Paul's ideas from being confused with our Paulinism, whether it be that of the dogmatic systems or that of the popular theology. Most of us interpret so private and personal a fact as our own Chris

tian experience by his doctrines of grace, which have entered the current evangelical teaching not as in a free solution, the elements of which might be easily precipitated, but as in a chemical compound difficult of analysis. Only by the most rigid use of critical methods and the most careful application of the grammatico-historical exegesis can we reduce to a minimum this error of a personal and dogmatic equation and secure even an approximately scientific result. It might, indeed, be a task of no great difficulty to account for nearly every element in the external form of the Pauline theology. His facile mind had not been uninfluenced by the all-pervading atmosphere of Greek culture which was powerfully permeating Jewish thought, especially by way of Alexandria. He was probably well acquainted with the Wisdom literature, so much superior in its ethical enthusiasm to the later Jewish legalism. But, above all, he was "a Hebrew of the Hebrews." The current synagogue theology in its severest form, that of strict and extreme Pharisaism, had entered into the fiber of his mental and moral being. While he has a Greek passion for ultimate principles and logical coherence, the style of his thinking and reasoning everywhere reveals the rabbinist. He was saturated with the Old Testament and the rabbinical interpretations of it. He seems to have easily accepted the main body of extra-canonical Jewish tradition, not excluding the legends of the Haggadah. A superficial study might imagine that it had thus accounted for Paul, when it had traced his philosophic framework to Plato, his anthropology and transcendental ethics to the Book of Wisdom, and his dogmatic beliefs to the synagogue theology. These things certainly do persist in the Pauline teaching, and determine its form. But that is all. Its content is something entirely new and original. All these constituents of his teaching are but dead materials which are vitalized and organized by a new principle that is at once truth and life. The Pauline theology is the outgrowth of the Pauline experience. The teaching of the great apostle is not so much objective doctrine as an assertion of the facts of his religious

consciousness. It is not in the logic of Paul, however powerful, nor in his learning, however extensive, that we are to look for the vitality and originality of his theology, but in the psychological element. His gospel was given to him "by the revelation of Jesus Christ"-a revelation which was personal and inward in its character. His theology is far less an organized system of thought than it is an immediate appeal to reality. The conversion of Paul will furnish us the key to the theology of Paul.

The chief obstacles in the way of a satisfactory picture of the conversion of St. Paul lie partially in the extreme meagerness and uncertainty of the external facts, but chiefly in the necessary condition that history, when it enters the world of psychic phenomena, soon finds an impassable limit. The realm of religious feeling is not in itself a subject of strictly scientific inquiry. It is not, therefore, surprising that, in the three narrations of the external circumstances connected with the conversion related in the Acts of the Apostles, we find considerable differences in their statements. The variants in the accounts, while by no means sufficient to cast doubt on the central fact itself, and certainly not of a kind to suggest a mythopoeic process behind the narrations, are something more than “mere subordinate adjuncts," as they have been called. They do make it difficult to determine what was actually seen and heard. The general historical character of the Acts of the Apostles is not in question. The historicity of the book and its authorship as a whole by the writer of the third gospel must be maintained. Yet, conceding the general proposition that Luke worked mainly from original sources and is generally credible, account must be taken of his artistic temperament. No writer of the New Testament is so possessed of subjective literary motives, not always easy of comprehension, but always easy of recognition. In this respect he shares with Thucydides the modernity of a Froude or a Macaulay.

The confusion of the narrative comes most probably wholly from the subject matter. The really great moments

of history and of life are rarely well reported. They are so big with spiritual meanings and the ideal side of the phenomena so overmasters its material elements that for one supreme moment spirit is lord of life and all outward things are plastic to the touch of the divine revealing.

Lo, if some pen should write upon your rafter
"Mene" and "Mene" in the folds of flame,
Think you could any memories thereafter
Wholly retrace the couplet as it came?

Lo, if some strange intelligible thunder
Sang to the earth the secret of a star,
Scarce could ye catch, for terror or for wonder,
Shreds of the story that was pealed so far.

Scarcely I catch the words of His revealing;
Hardly I hear him, dimly understand;
Only the Power that is within me pealing

Lives on my lips and beckons to my hand.

On the subjective side we are less in doubt. Never did a soul so disclose its innermost to the gaze of his fellows. His experience as a Pharisee under the discipline of the law, and as a Christian in conscious union with the risen Lord, are pictured with the utmost vividness and reality. His writings are less doctrinal treatises than dramatic monologues, full of autobiographic materials and alive with the most subtle psychological touches. While we may not neglect the external historic facts furnished by Luke, it is Paul himself who chiefly furnishes the materials for the story of his conversion which it is here attempted to reconstruct.

Saul, a Hebrew of the tribe of Benjamin and bearing the name of its greatest hero, born in the brilliant commercial and intellectual city of Tarsus in Cilicia, was the descendant of more than one generation of strict Pharisees. A Hellenist by birth, he seems to have been very little affected in a direct way by Greek culture, nor even to have acquired that more liberal attitude toward the law so common among Hellenistic Jews. Had either his parentage or character per

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