too, had seen heaven opened in a ceiled room, the council chamber at Jerusalem, where the sky was certainly invisible to ordinary vision. Did he, as a prosaic commentator explains, "look out of the window?" There are other heavens than science knows of or earthly vision can behold. Things that eye sees not and ear hears not the Spirit of God reveals. There are flashes struck from midnight, Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle. Such was the blinding blaze of sudden glory which smote both the soul and body of Saul. The vision leaves its marks both in his physical and spiritual life. It is no more abstraction of thought, however amazing and inspiring, but concrete experience, incorporated in his very being. The bodily weakness which he carries to the grave-the source of personal suffering and making him the object of self-pitying contempt is but the fellowship of the sufferings of the Lord, the mark of his own death to the law by crucifixion with Christ. But with it is the consciousness of a new life in the Spirit. The power of the resurrection has quelled the inward strife. He has received by gift a righteousness not his own. Well may he count as offal his hereditary and legal claims. To Paul all was of sovereign grace. To him there was no completed intellectual development leading up to a normal surrender to Christ. That process, so far as it existed at all, is suddenly ended by the direct divine revelation. A bolt from the blue has slain him. His vision of the Lord was that had by one torn from the darkness of the womb before the completion of spiritual gestation and suddenly brought into the light of day. He is led a helpless but willing captive in the triumph of the Christ. The veil of law has suddenly been removed, and he sees the true Shekinah. Before his unveiled vision is the Lord, the Spirit, and into that glory his own nature passes. Blinded by the vision, and not yet able to fully realize the sweetness and fullness of that grace which had visited even him who harried the Church of God, he who had left Jerusalem a furious persecutor enters Damascus a humble penitent, to leave it a fervent apostle. In the hostelry of Judas, on that street which is still called "Straight," the word "brother" from a disciple of Jesus assures him of his absolution and turns the vision of glory into the vision of peace. He glories now in what but a week ago he counted as infamy, and willingly becomes an outward sharer in the shame of Jesus by mystical union with the Lord in Christian baptism. The ceremony was strangely significant to Paul by its exact accordance with the revelation that has come to him. He counts himself as dead with Jesus; let the old nature crucified be buried beneath the baptismal flood. It is a new man who rises, still wearing in his dimmed eyes the wonder of a dream. In Paul's conversion is the genesis of the Pauline Gospel. It is not the story of the earthly ministry of Jesus, but the revelation of his risen life and power. This revelation is a personal consciousness of Christ as dead and now alive. He will know nothing but Christ and him crucified. It is this spiritual Christ who has been revealed to him, the divine, eternal, heavenly Man, after the pattern of whose nature God is re-creating all things. His death being the end of the economy of law, the Gentiles are brought nigh. Thus Paul's conversion as a Christian, his system as a theologian, and his vocation as an apostle are all implicit in his vision of the risen Lord. ART. II.-THE PROLEGOMENA OF CRITICISM-II. WE are in sight again of an important principle, encountered during our first inquiry into the nature of type forces and type quality. The primal mode of the mind seems more and more clearly to be feeling, and the process of purely intellectual cognition to be but evolved products of imagination. We may now add that prose appears to be nothing but poetry abbreviated and degraded to fact aspects and relations. It is by no means incumbent upon us here to attempt seriously a demonstration of this principle, belonging as it does to æsthetics and not to the department of literature. But it will be helpful to the discussion we have in hand to survey somewhat of the evidence. The child at birth is devoid of all intellectual knowledge, and amounts to nothing but a homogeneous and helpless bundle of nerves, pitched to an intense and exquisite susceptivity. Little by little the child's experiences translate themselves out of vagueness into definite and identifiable sensations, which in due time begin to associate themselves with distinct objects or acts as causes. Similarly, the vague and vast outside world is reduced from confusion and mystery to orderly and detailed acquaintance with individual phenomena and things. Thus it is that the first activity of the soul, so far as we can know, is feeling, and the initial mode of the mind is imagination. The normally organized child brain is filled with experiences of the sublime and of beauty, or their opposites, all the day long. The coming over of clouds in the outer sky, or five minutes' absence from his nurse or mother, will cover his inner world with gloom from horizon to horizon. Every dark corner or closet even of his nursery is potential to him of untold demons and dangers. There is nothing neutral or prosaic in his environment. Whatever is not awesome, or does not promise urgent experiences of delight, is repellant and unsufferable. His education consists for the most part in taming and wearying the imperious type forces within. Thus is knowledge with him, in the main, a residuum after active experiences of feeling. Consciousness, science tells us, keeps always in advance of organic evolution. The idea of movement, of locomotion, was first before hands and feet and wings. These were each a product of feeling, of desire to walk, to grasp or handle, and to fly. But the processes of God have never made greater speed in the eons of the past than they are registering to-day. The aspirations that we feel within to mount above the sordid and the earthly and the sensual will, in the same course of evolution, enable and insure correspondent spiritualization of our race. Similarly, the thirst for knowledge, which is always antecedent to learning and scholarship and science, is slowly but palpably enlarging the intelligence of mankind. Thus the God-given ideal precedes the real; the aimed at tends to become the grasped. The type forces within are in some way breathed upon by the divine afflatus, and arouse us tirelessly and helplessly to act. The method of nature is everywhere from feeling to knowing, from poetry to prose. Our minds are impressed with great spiritual lessons before detailed intellectual knowledge can evolve itself. Such is the message of the mountains, as of the Alps and the Spanish peaks of Colorado, when we first approach. We can later separate the blue mass of domes and ridges into individual details, and subtract from the sum of influence whatever we may learn of specific altitudes and names. The beauty of a forest possesses without thought or recognition of the hemlock or chestnut or poplar trees that may probably compose it. The first effect of seeing a landscape is an experience of delight, in which there is no mental reference to the particular parcels of land that make it up or to the farmers who are severally proprietors over each. We are at pains to ignore and eschew such knowledge, though after we have settled in the locality that sort of information becomes definitively and of necessity our own. There are further examples yet more striking. The instant effect of woman's presence and beauty is admiration, and so absolute and uncalculating is her influence that all civilized society is ruled by it. The world at large is but poorly advised as to the reasons. Woman herself does not in general understand her secret, but takes it all superbly for granted; while few of the brother sex ever reach the philosophy of the case, but obey blindly the inner type forces that compel her supremacy. The man who does despite to woman's dignity and name is at once an outlaw. Unreasoningly and almost unwittingly the best law-abiding community will pursue him and punish him to the death. There is surely here but little knowing after and in consequence of feeling. Sex phenomena of like sort appear through many of the lower orders, as Darwin has shown, though with the beauty and the obligations of it shifted generally to the male. The ulterior design of inspiring feelings of repugnance or terror by first impressions is seen at large in the reptilians, as also in many rapacious birds and beasts of prey, which are believed to paralyze their victims or at least to render them in some measure incapable of feeling the agony of the death they fear. The chief and last suggestions come to us from the highest generalizations of science. We are told that from the manifestation of cosmic energy called "ether"-which is a spiritual manifestation, and perhaps the original and ultimate essence of Deity-the First Cause changes himself into the modes of force that are styled "chemic elements," and by another mode or habit of his activity known by us as "chemism" holds molecules together so as to form substance, and by another mode that has been named gravity holds masses of so-called matter in fixed relations and makes suns and worlds and mountains and seas and meadows possible. If this is true, then there is an emotional basis of all things; then do we live and move and have our being in a fundamental sentiment of the soul of God. As a mother keeps herself in subjection to her household, hushing it to stillness while her baby sleeps; as a father denies himself recreation and comforts, carrying various and grievous burdens, with his heart all the day long upon his family-so the great All-Father postures himself |