and the Roman in creating the Mediterranean empire of the Caesars and the Catholic Church of the Popes.  The Jewish people were unable to make so great a sacrifice of their national hopes.  With the matchless tenacity which characterises their race they clung to their tribal God and their temporal and local millennium.  The disasters of A.D. 70 and of the revolt under Hadrian destroyed a great part of the race, and at last uprooted it from the soil of Palestine.  But conservatism, as usual, has had its partial justification.  Judaism has refused to acknowledge the religion of the civilised world as her legitimate child; but the nation has refused also to surrender its life.  There are no more Greeks and Romans; but the Jews we have always with us.

St. Paul saw that the Gospel was a far greater and more revolutionary scheme than the Galilean apostles had dreamed of.  In principle he committed himself from the first to the complete emancipation of Christianity from Judaism.  But it was inevitable that he did not at first realise all that he had undertaken.  And, fortunately for us, the most rapid evolution in his thought took place daring the ten years to which his extant letters belong.  It is exceedingly interesting to trace his gradual progress away from Apocalyptic Messianism to a position very near that of the fourth Gospel.  The evangelist whom we call St. John is the best commentator on Paulinism.  This is one of the most important discoveries of recent New Testament criticism.

In the earliest Epistles—­those to the Thessalonians—­we have the naive picture of Messiah coming on the clouds, which, as we now know, was part of the Pharisaic tradition.  In the central group the Christology is far more complex.  Besides the Pharisaic Messiah, and the records of the historical Jesus of Nazareth, we have now to reckon with the Jewish-Alexandrian idea of the generic, archetypal man, which is unintelligible without reference to the Platonic philosophy.  Philo is here a great help towards understanding one of the most difficult parts of the Apostle’s teaching.  We have also, fully developed, the mystical doctrine of the Spirit of Christ immanent in the soul of the believer, a conception which was the core of St. Paul’s personal religion, and more than anything else emancipated him from apocalyptic dreams of the future.  We have also a fourth conception, quite distinct from the three which have been mentioned—­that of Christ as a cosmic principle, the instrument in creation and the sustainer of all his in the universe.  We must again have recourse to Philo and his doctrine of the Logos, to understand the genesis of this idea, and to the Fourth Gospel to find it stated in clear philosophical form.  In this second period, these theories about the Person of Christ are held concurrently, without any attempt to reconcile or systematise them.  The eschatology is being seriously modified by the conception of a ‘spiritual body,’ which is prepared for us so soon as our ‘outward man’