The Epistle to the Romans

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS

There is no writing of the New Testament that more needs to be studied in connection with the history of the writer than the Epistle to the Romans. The apostle Paul was born about the year 7 or 8 of our era, in Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, in Asia Minor. Cilicia was populated with Greeks, and Tarsus was no mean city. It was a place of great literary and philosophical activity. It almost ranked with Athens and Alexandria.

The schools of Tarsus were famed throughout the world, and Paul received in his early days the best education in Greek literature and in Greek philosophy. He refers three several times to Greek poets, and there are other indications that he was familiar with Greek poetical literature. In his controversy with the Stoics and Epicureans, he shows a very correct and distinct knowledge of their doctrine.

Paul, although he was born at Tarsus, was a Roman citizen, and a Roman citizen at the time when to be a Roman was almost greater than to be a king. He was a Roman citizen not because all the inhabitants of Tarsus had had Roman citizenship conferred upon them. As a matter of fact, Roman citizenship was conferred upon all the inhabitants of Tarsus at a later time; but at this time Paul was free-born, because his father was already a Roman citizen. The father may have rendered some special service to the state and so may have had Roman citizenship conferred upon him.

There is no question but that this conferring of Roman citizenship must have given to the family of the apostle Paul a high social position; and it is quite evident in all the bearing of the apostle, both in the Acts and in his Epistles, that there was with him that abiding sense of dignity which belongs to one who, from his earliest years, has been accustomed to regard himself as among the best of his fellow citizens. There was a rank and honor which belonged to those who had this dignity of Roman citizenship, and at that distance from Jerusalem there was an enjoyment of some privileges and a broadening of the mind which would not have been possible if Paul had been born at Jerusalem, even though he had been there a Latin and a Roman.

But it is not enough to speak of Paul as a Roman citizen. More than by his Roman citizenship was he characterized by the fact that he was a Jew. He was a Hebrew of the Hebrews. He was a Pharisee, and the son of a Pharisee. He was of the tribe of Benjamin, of the straitest sect of the Jewish religion; and, therefore, in his twelfth year, he appears to have been sent to Jerusalem for his education.

Having what could be gotten at Tarsus, and perhaps returning to Tarsus afterward for certain portions of his study, it would appear that from the age of twelve years a very large portion of his time was spent at Jerusalem. At Jerusalem the very highest advantages that the Jewish religion could afford were his, for he sat at the feet of Gamaliel, the greatest Jewish teacher of his time, and not only a great Jewish teacher, but a great man as well, as appears from the fragments of his teaching that are left to us.

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He sat at the feet of Gamaliel; and at the feet of Gamaliel he seems to have made wonderful progress in the development of his ardent and enthusiastic religious spirit; for he states that he made progress in Judaism beyond all those of his own age, and was looked upon as the most promising of the rising young men among the Jews.

There is no doubt whatever that Paul was a man of ambition. His ambition was of a very lofty sort. There is not the slightest evidence that there was ever a spot or stain upon his moral character. His ambition was to attain the highest legal and moral standing; there was a constant effort at the doing of works of righteousness; he sought to gain the applause of his own conscience, and whatever earthly influence and power might accrue as the result of a noble and unblemished moral development.

There was in the character of the apostle Paul a remarkable union of energy and quickness of mind. He had not only acuteness of intellect, but with it firmness of will. He was not only a thoroughly blameless man in moral character, but a person possessed of an ardent and impetuous nature. He was a man of the warmest and deepest affection; and this union of intellectual power and emotional power is perceptible in every writing and in every speech which is left to us.

The apostle Paul was a great man by nature and a great man by training. He was a great man because in his mental composition there was not simply the intellectual element, but there was also the emotional element. He was greater than Peter, because he had a greater intellect than Peter ever had. He was a greater man than John, because he had greater strength and energy of will than ever John possessed. And so by his character and natural composition of mind and heart, as well as by his birth and education, he was fitted for the special work which God had ordained for him, to be a bridge between the Jews and the Gentiles, fitted for the work of extending the Jewish religion, of freeing it from its husks, and making it the universal religion of the world. The apostle Paul was wonderfully fitted by natural temperament and by education for the peculiar work that God gave him to do; and yet, even though he united Roman citizenship with Greek culture and Jewish legalism, he never could have done the work that he did; he would at most have been famous as a liberal rabbi among the Jews; his fame would have been a narrow and local fame, if it had not been for that wonderful change that came over him on his way to Damascus, that wonderful change which turned the ardent and enthusiastic Jew into the greatest preacher of the gospel that this world has ever seen.

It would seem that at his thirtieth year Paul entered public life. It was at that time, apparently, that, in response to an inward impulse to do more than he had ever done hitherto, he undertook the persecution of the Christians. This impulse to do more than he had ever done, this longing to work out a righteousness of his own which should commend him to God, was parallel to that impulse that possessed the mind of Luther during so many years; and it would seem almost as if this impulse, this sense of dissatisfaction with himself, this desire to do something more than he had ever done before, led him to seek an enterprise that had in it hazard and also something of faith; a perverted faith. In other words, he would prove that he was a Jew beyond all other Jews by his determined opposition to everything in the way of heresy, the new religion; and so he sought from the high priest the letters to Damascus, in which he was authorized to apprehend Christians and to bring them by force to the holy city for trial and punishment. But before that mission was executed an event took place which unquestionably had permanent influence upon the apostle's mind, and that was the martyrdom of Stephen.

Although Paul does not appear to have been an active participant in that martyrdom, as he only held the clothes of those who were stoning Stephen to death, yet there was something on the appealing face of that martyr as he looked up to heaven, something in that cry of Stephen, "Lord, receive my spirit," something in the calm with which the man who was just on the verge of death rejoiced in the presence of Christ and in the assurance that his spirit was going to be with him in glory; there was something in that scene which stirred the apostle's mind after Stephen's death, although he was not an apostle then, and which apparently—all the way on that journey to Damascus—was agitating his soul with the feeling that all was not right within, and was preparing the way for the manifestation of Christ's power to him in that supernatural light from heaven.

As he was nearing Damascus he was stricken down by a light that was brighter than the light of the sun; he heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" and he cried, "Who art thou, Lord?" The answer was, "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest; it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks," hard for thee to resist this inner stirring of the Holy Spirit, hard for thee to go on in this everlasting struggle of will against conscience. So a wonderful change took place. He bowed himself to this Christ, whose followers he had been persecuting; and the evidence of his submission was these words: "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? I hear thy voice, from this instant I give myself to thee "; and the answer was that he was to go into the city, and it should be told him what he should do. There have been manifold attempts to explain this transaction upon naturalistic grounds. The two chief explanations that have been given are the explanations of Baur and Renan.

Baur would explain the outward from the inward, and he says that it was simply an intense and sudden conviction of the truth of Christian religion and of Christ's spiritual presence, that Paul translated into an outward scene and an outward event. The whole transaction was within. Unfortunately, we cannot translate the inward into the outward here, because this experience was not peculiar to the apostle alone. His companions with him heard the sound, heard the voice, though they could not understand the words. And Baur himself, at a later period in his life, was obliged to confess that the conversion of the apostle Paul and the effects that followed from it constitute an inexplicable psychological enigma, which is simply an acknowledgment that he has no answer or explanation to give.

Renan, on the other hand, would explain the inward from the outward, and he tells us that there was a sudden storm, that there was a flash of lightning, or that there was a sudden access of ophthalmic fever, which Paul took as a scene from heaven. Unfortunately for this explanation, it is utterly impossible for any mere outward event or scene, any mere outward transaction of that sort to explain the inward effects that followed. No ordinary sickness, no ophthalmic fever, no flash of lightning, no storm, would ever of itself be sufficient to change the persecutor of the Christian church into the greatest advocate of Christian religion that the world has seen; and the apostle Paul gives us very distinctly to understand that he knew the difference between inward and outward experiences. He was not the man to translate inward experiences into outward ones, nor outward into inward ones; because, on another occasion, when there was a very peculiar experience and he was caught up into the third heaven, he tells us, "Whether I was in the body or out of the body I know not." That transaction was one which he could not explain, but his experience on the way to Damascus was very different. Then he saw the living, risen Christ in bodily form, for he tells us afterward that, last of all Christ's appearances to his disciples after his resurrection, the Lord was seen of him also, and that constituted his authority in his apostleship.

It was necessary, in order to be an apostle, that one should have seen the risen Christ, and so should be a credible witness of his resurrection. All the apostles had seen Jesus Christ in bodily form after he had risen from the dead. Nothing but the seeing of the living, risen Christ would ever have enabled such a monotheist as Paul to talk about Christ as being the fulness of the Godhead, bodily. Paul knew the difference between a vision and an outward, bodily manifestation of Christ; and he has maintained the distinction between those two with perfect accuracy and uniformity throughout all his writings.

This outward manifestation had a wonderful effect upon Paul. The inward experience, the revelation of his sin was only the accompaniment of Christ's outward revelation of himself to Paul. In the first place, this visible manifestation of the heavenly purity, that was ineffably glorious beyond the brightness of the sun, was the death-blow to all Paul's hope of legal righteousness. The instant he saw this Christ in his divinely holy manifestation he was like Isaiah of old, who, in the presence of the holiness of Christ, as we are told in John 12 : 41, put himself in the position of the leper and cried, "Unclean, unclean!" and in the position of Peter, who, when the power of Jesus was manifested to him, cried: "Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man!"

From that moment all idea of ever commending himself to the holy God by any works of righteousness that he had done or could do was dispelled forever; and in the place of hope that he could do anything or claim anything good in his imperfection and in his sin, there arose in his mind a new conception of the sacrifice for sin. Those old Jewish types in which he had been educated assumed an entirely new significance; this Jesus, whom he had been persecuting as a false teacher, was the Messiah, was the Christ, was the divinely appointed sacrifice for sin, was God himself coming in human form and offering sacrifices for sin, to exhibit his justice and make possible the salvation of the lost.

Paul sees the sin, Paul sees the sacrifice for sin, and then Paul sees who this is that has offered this sacrifice: it is none other than the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, God manifest in the flesh. In connection with this there arises in his mind the idea of the universality of the salvation. If God has offered this sacrifice, if this Christ is the God offered upon the altar of sacrifice for human sin, then the validity of this sacrifice must be universal, not simply to the Jews, but to all the nations of mankind.

So from this point must be dated not only Paul's conversion, but also Paul's calling to his apostleship and to his work in the world, and to his understanding of the nature and meaning of that work. He comes, little by little, to see that God has called him to be an apostle to the heathen world, and he devotes himself to missionary labors. A man not strong in his physique, and with a malady upon him which requires the constant attendance of the physician Luke, he, notwithstanding, with a perfectly indefatigable zeal, with an absoluteness of devotion such as the world never saw before or since, devotes himself to the evangelization of the world.

He goes out in successive missionary journeys in wider and wider circles. First, a narrow circle through Asia Minor, then a wider circle through Asia Minor, and finally another one through Asia Minor into Greece. From Corinth he looks out wistfully toward Rome, the center and metropolis of the world; and he longs there, among the masters of the world, to preach this gospel of Jesus Christ.

There is something magnificent in this life of the apostle! I do not wonder that Doctor Peabody, of Harvard College, when he attended, not long ago, the centennial celebration of the birth of Adoniram Judson, in Maiden, Massachusetts, said in the pulpit that Doctor Judson, in his judgment, was the greatest man that had appeared on this earth since the days of the apostle Paul.

I wonder that it did not occur to Doctor Peabody, with his unwillingness to grant the absolute deity of Jesus Christ, I wonder that it did not occur to him that Unitarianism has never produced such a man as Judson, or such a man as Paul, and that the spirit of Unitarianism is a different spirit from the spirit of either Judson or Paul.

There was a doctrine to preach, now that Paul had found Christ. There was a doctrine to preach, now that Paul had come to recognize Jesus as the living God, and it was a doctrine for which he could sacrifice life itself when, at last, he went to his martyrdom at Rome.

I cannot tell the other steps of his life-story, and it is not necessary for my purpose; but how perfectly plain it is that when Paul comes to write his Epistles, all his natural character and all his Christian experience are wrought into them. These Epistles are Epistles of fellowship, you might say. The apostle does not stand upon a lofty elevation and talk down to those whom he is addressing, but puts himself, so to speak, upon their level. They are letters of friendship.

I wish the word "letters" could be substituted for the word " Epistles," as applied to Paul's communications to the churches; for they are letters of Christian fellowship; and underneath and through them all there is the life of the apostle, so to speak, and the assurance that the Holy Spirit is with him in his speaking. There is constantly present and constantly manifest the throbbing of a warm and sincere heart, as well as the working of an energetic and organizing intellect.

It is necessary to say a word with regard to the church at Rome, to which this Epistle to the Romans was addressed. Rome, of course, was the greatest city and the greatest center of power in the world; and Paul, as he looked off toward the West and knew that from that city the greatest influences must emanate in future time, for the welfare of the nations to which he was called to minister, had longed for years that he might preach the gospel there also. But church after church was laid upon him, constituting a new burden of anxiety and care; and the personal relations between himself and those converted under his ministry were kept up year after year, so that he could speak of the burden of all the churches as one of the heavy things laid upon him by God. And yet his heart goes out beyond the churches to which he has personally ministered; and since he cannot instruct the Romans in their great center of influence and power by personal work and words, he feels it a duty to give them the gospel by written instruction, and so the Epistle to the Romans is written.

Paul, of course, was not the founder of the Roman church. Some have said that it was founded by those Jews and proselytes of Rome who were present at the day of Pentecost, and who went back, bringing the glad news to their fellow countrymen; but with regard to that there may be considerable doubt. It seems very likely to me that the church at Rome was founded by Gentile converts that had made their way there from Asia Minor, just as, at an earlier time, they had made their way to Antioch and afterward to Alexandria.

The tradition that Peter was the founder of the church at Rome is decisively negatived by this very Epistle of Paul. This Epistle of Paul cuts absolutely at the root of the historical basis of the papacy, because it is perfectly evident in this Epistle that Paul knows nothing of any previous work of Peter there. In all the salutations there is no allusion to Peter; and if the Epistle to the Romans had been written to a church of which such a person as the apostle Peter had been the founder, we may be sure there would have been an allusion to Peter's work and teaching. Letters of apostolic instruction to churches founded by other apostles were not according to Paul's rule. He never built upon another man's foundation. It was always new work that he did.

There is no reason to believe that Peter had ever seen Rome when this Epistle to the Romans was written, and therefore no reason to believe that the apostle Peter was ever a founder of the Roman church. Peter, if he ever did visit Rome, visited it after this time. It is just possible that after this time he may have visited it, and that he may have founded a church there; and the fact that the succession of Roman bishops presents a double list at the very beginning may possibly be explained in this way: that there were two churches in Rome, and that the bishops of the one were bishops or pastors of the church to which Paul wrote, and the others were pastors of the church in whose foundation Peter was concerned. But even with regard to this there is no certainty at all. It is by no means certain that the apostle Peter ever visited Rome at all.

We do know, however, with regard to this church at Rome to which the apostle Paul wrote, that it was a church prevailingly of Gentile Christians, persons that were brought in from among the Gentiles and not from among the Jews. And yet they had with them, doubtless, many who were converts from among the Jews also. While the letter shows that the majority of believers among them were Gentile Christians, yet at the same time we cannot deny that there were also among them converts from among the Jews, and it was from the fact that there were those two classes in the church that one of the particular necessities of writing the Epistle arose. There were diversities of opinion between these two classes, and one of the objects of Paul's writing was to reconcile these two, bring about a compromise, induce a spirit of material consideration and helpfulness between them; and the fifteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans is written expressly with this aim.

The letter itself was probably written from Corinth, in the year 56, as Paul was on his third missionary journey, and was just preparing to go to Jerusalem;

and, therefore, before his imprisonment at Qesarea and during those three months of comparative leisure and rest when Paul was at Corinth, when he had succeeded in reducing the difficulties and troubles of the Corinthian church and had, apparently, a period of rest and relaxation preparatory to the great trials that were just before him in his imprisonment at Jerusalem, his imprisonment at Caesarea, and his trial at Rome.

So we come to what we have been aiming at all the time: the object of the Epistle to the Romans. What was the object of this Epistle? I have indicated that there were subsidiary objects, such as the reconciliation of these diverse opinions between Jew and Gentile Christians. Undoubtedly there were such subsidiary objects as this; and still, I think, when you look at the Epistle as a whole, you cannot doubt that Paul seized upon Rome and the writing of the Epistle to the Romans as a means of setting forth in more philosophical, more organic, and more complete form than ever had been attained heretofore, the gospel which he preached.

The facts of Christianity were at this time published for the most part only in an oral gospel, although our Mark, and the sayings of Jesus which Matthew incorporated, were already written. Paul was not so much concerned about putting these facts into written form, although a little later it would seem that he had some influence in the composition of Luke's Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. But Paul was not a witness of the events of Jesus' life, and, moreover, Paul was called as an apostle after Jesus' death, with an obvious end in view. It was not without a purpose that Paul had not been with Jesus Christ all through his life. He could see the life of our Lord as a whole, in a way that the first apostles could not.

It was necessary that the Gospels should be written by eye-witnesses and by those who had seen the eyewitnesses; but it was also necessary that a beginning should be made in reducing Christianity to a system. In this organizing of Christian facts into doctrine, the writer needed to be conversant with the results rather than with the events themselves. It was necessary, in other words, that Paul should have his peculiar mind and his peculiar religious and philosophical training in order to write the Epistle to the Romans, and the Epistle itself is therefore a semi-philosophical exposition of the Pauline Gospel.

We have here the summary of Christian doctrine as it appeared to the apostle Paul. Paul was perfectly capable of doing this, and he had special preparation for it. This will be more evident, I think, when you remember that in Ephesus, for two years, every single day Paul lectured in the school of the rhetorician Tyrannus. Can you imagine a man of the skill of Paul lecturing for two whole years, every single day, without having any plan for his discourses? You may be very sure that, in the mind of the apostle as he discussed these things, there was an order and a system. When he came to write the Epistle to the Romans all this was ready to his hand. As he wrote, it was inevitable that his material should be molded by his individual characteristics and training, and by the special purpose he had in preaching and lecturing about the gospel of Christ. And so we have in this Epistle to the Romans an exposition of the truth of Christianity as it was preached by the apostle Paul.

But this does not absolve us from the necessity of showing what was the particular end and aim of this Epistle. Christianity was a broad thing. It took all the apostles to see Christianity and see Christ aright. Christianity and Christ were many-sided, and not one apostle, but all the apostles together were needed to see them in their various aspects. The apostle Paul represents Christ from his point of view, and that point of view is the doctrine of faith as opposed to the doctrine of works. The subject of the Epistle to the Romans is salvation by faith in distinction from salvation by works.

Right here there is an important remark which I wish to make, and which may correct some misapprehension you have had in the past. It is often said that the subject of this Epistle is justification by faith. That is only a part of the truth. To say that the subject of the Epistle to the Romans is justification by faith is to narrow our conception of the apostle Paul and his ideas of Christianity.

When you look at the Epistle to the Romans as a whole, you find that although the doctrine of justification by faith is one of the largest parts of it, it is only a part. The subject of the Epistle to the Romans is salvation by faith; and salvation by faith consists of two things: first, justification by faith; and, secondly, sanctification by faith. First, bringing in of the ship safe; and then, secondly, the making of it sound. It is one thing to bring the ship in after a tempest and moor it safely to the dock—that is justification; but it is quite another thing to see that that ship is thoroughly repaired—that is sanctification.

Now the totality of salvation is the subject of the Epistle. Justification first, the securing of a new access to God, pardon, the remission of sin, outward favor, external justification; and then the renewal of the heart, the increase of right affections, the subduing of the whole man to obedience to Christ, and filling him with peace and joy, internal sanctification.

The whole man is included, and all God does for man is in view when the apostle writes. So you find that after Paul has introduced his letter with an apostolic introduction, and has defined his subject as the righteousness which God provides by faith, he goes on, first, to speak from the first chapter and seventeenth verse to the fifth chapter and eleventh verse, inclusive, of justification by faith; and then from the fifth chapter and twelfth verse to the end of the eighth chapter, of sanctification by faith. If this is all by faith, how can we explain God's calling of the Jews in times past, God's election, and their rejection? Two explanatory chapters, the ninth and tenth, are added to make that matter clear, and to show that the Jews have been cast off because of their own wilful unbelief, and that the Gentiles have been brought in in the fulness of God's mercy. And then, after this salvation by faith as coming from God has been set forth in its two parts of justification and sanctification, we have the ethical portion of the Epistle, with which the twelfth chapter begins; that wonderful portion which tells us how this gospel will manifest itself in practical life, and Christian perfection will reveal itself to the world.

"I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service." What a source of gratitude that this doctrine is not a mere abstraction, not a matter of mere theory, but that it leads to a holy life! What that life will be is explained from the beginning of the twelfth chapter, and the rest of the Epistle is ethical as the first eleven chapters have been doctrinal.

Under the first head of justification by faith it was necessary for the apostle to show that such a thing was needed, because no one could ever be justified in any other way; and so, from the eighteenth verse of the first chapter to the twentieth verse of the third chapter, he shows the need of a divinely provided righteousness by proving that man could not work out any such righteousness by himself. The wrath of God rested both upon Gentiles and upon Jews.

See how Paul is simply reproducing his own experience, and is applying to all men just that truth of which he had been deeply conscious in his own soul; and having proved this, he says that God has provided a righteousness, a righteousness in Christ who is made an atonement for sin. Then you have the way in which the giving of this gospel to man absolutely excludes boasting and self-praise; and the proof that, even under the Old Testament, the law of salvation was precisely the same. Abraham was saved by faith just as we are. He cast himself upon the mercy of God when he had no righteousness of his own. There is something wonderful in this presentation of the gospel of Christ.

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The great difference between men is not that one man is a sinner and the other is not. We are all sinners and we are shut up in sin. The question is quite a different one from that. Are you willing to recognize the fact that you are a sinner, that you are condemned and helpless and lost, dependent upon the free grace of God in Jesus Christ for your salvation? Are you willing to trust this provision of God's mercy which he has made in Jesus Christ? If you will not, if you set up your own righteousness and pride and trust to that, then you are surely lost, and just as surely lost as that you live to-day. There is the difference. He that will acknowledge himself to be a lost sinner and depend upon the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ, his crucified God, for salvation, is saved. If he is in a heathen land, and casts himself upon God's mercy, he can be saved even though he may not know of the name of the Christ who saves him.

There is a great deal of difference between heathen morality and Christian morality. Heathenism is man's vain effort to lift himself up to God. Judaism had in it something of the heathen element, and just so far as it had, Paul rejected it and cast it out. But while heathenism is man's vain effort to lift himself to God, Christianity is God's coming down to man and lifting him up to himself. Heathenism is the work of man's selfrighteousness and pride; Christianity is the humble reception of salvation as the free gift of infinite grace to a lost sinner through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Now the object of the apostle Paul, his great object in writing the Epistle to the Romans, was to set forth this truth of universal significance, this truth which is an article of standing or falling faith, of standing or falling salvation; and I have tried to set before you, in a very imperfect way, the order of its treatment. It simply carries out the one great aim to which the apostle Paul devoted his life, though he had been prepared for it by his own inner experience, namely, the aim of proclaiming to the whole world the gospel of salvation by faith, a salvation which included both justification and sanctification.

It is very remarkable that the apostle Paul, who, before his conversion, was the greatest enemy of Christianity, has become the founder of the great majority of Christian churches, for the churches that were founded by the Twelve have died out. Paul is the principal author of the New Testament; for, including Luke and Acts, which were probably written under his supervision and with his sanction, the major part of the New Testament may be attributed to Paul. Christian doctrine owes more to him than to all the other twelve apostles put together; and this Epistle to the Romans is the summary of Christian doctrine as given us by the apostle Paul.

Coleridge said of this Epistle to the Romans that it was the profoundest work in existence. Godet calls it the very cathedral of the Christian faith. It is the magna charta of our religion; and it is a wonderful proof that God can take even his enemies and can make them praise him. How can you explain this except by the supernatural power and grace of God?

There was a man named Julian who was educated as a Christian and professed Christianity; and then, under the influence of the Platonic philosophy, he gave up his faith and spent all his days and all his influence (for he was emperor of the East) in waging war with the Christianity he had once professed. But at the last he felt that Christianity was too much for him, and with his dying breath he exclaimed, in agony and despair, "O Nazarene, thou hast conquered!" And here was the apostle Paul who, being the persecutor of Christianity, turned to Christ and became the greatestpower in the world.

No other man has exercised in this world such influence as the apostle Paul, and that influence is beneficial beyond all expression to-day. Ah, let us not be broken like Julian, but let us bow like Paul!