“judged of no man.”  It is, we must admit frankly, a dangerous claim, and one which may easily be subversive of all discipline.  “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty”; but such liberty may become a cloak of maliciousness.  The fact is that St. Paul had himself trusted in “the Law,” and it had led him into grievous error.  As usually happens in such cases, his recoil from it was almost violent.  He exalts the inner light into an absolute criterion of right and wrong, that no corner of the moral life may remain in bondage to Pharisaism.  The crucifixion of the Lord Jesus and the stoning of Stephen were a crushing condemnation of legal and ceremonial righteousness; the law written in the heart of man, or rather spoken there by the living voice of the Holy Spirit, could never so mislead men as to make them think that they were doing God service by condemning and killing the just.  Such memories might well lead St. Paul to use language capable of giving encouragement even to fanatical Anabaptists.  But it is significant that the boldest claims on behalf of liberty all occur in the earlier Epistles.

The subject of St. Paul’s visions and revelations is one of great difficulty.  In the Acts we have full accounts of the appearance in the sky which caused, or immediately preceded, his conversion.  It is quite clear that St. Paul himself regarded this as an appearance of the same kind as the other Christophanies granted to apostles and “brethren,” and of a different kind from such visions as might be seen by any Christian.  It was an unique favour, conferring upon him the apostolic prerogatives of an eye-witness.  Other passages in the Acts show that during his missionary journeys St. Paul saw visions and heard voices, and that he believed himself to be guided by the “Spirit of Jesus.”  Lastly, in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians he records that “more than fourteen years ago” he was in an ecstasy, in which he was “caught up into the third heaven,” and saw things unutterable.  The form in which this experience is narrated suggests a recollection of Rabbinical pseudo-science; the substance of the vision St. Paul will not reveal, nor will he claim its authority for any of his teaching.[80] These recorded experiences are of great psychological interest; but, as I said in my last Lecture, they do not seem to me to belong to the essence of Mysticism.

Another mystical idea, which is never absent from the mind of St. Paul, is that the individual Christian must live through, and experience personally, the redemptive process of Christ.  The life, death, and resurrection of Christ were for him the revelation of a law, the law of redemption through suffering.  The victory over sin and death was won for us; but it must also be won in us.  The process is an universal law, not a mere event in the past.[81] It has been exemplified in history, which is a progressive unfurling or revelation of a great mystery, the meaning of which is now at last made plain