should attach any importance to this Paul.  This outsider was a Pharisee from top to toe even after he became a Christian’—­and much more to the same effect.  Nietzsche describes him as ’one of the most ambitious of men, whose superstition was only equalled by his cunning.  A much tortured, much to be pitied man, an exceedingly unpleasant person both to himself and to others....  He had a great deal on his conscience.  He alludes to enmity, murder, sorcery, idolatry, impurity, drunkenness, and the love of carousing.’  Renan, who could never have made himself ridiculous by such ebullitions as these, does not disguise his repugnance for the ‘ugly little Jew’ whose character he can neither understand nor admire.  These outbursts of personal animosity, so strange in modern critics dealing with a personage of ancient history, show how vividly his figure stands out from the canvas.  There are very few historical characters who are alive enough to be hated.

It is, however, only in our own day that the personal characteristics of St. Paul have been intelligently studied; and the most valuable books about him are later than the unbalanced tirades of Lagarde and Nietzsche, and the carping estimate of Renan.  In the nineteenth century, Paul was obscured behind Paulinism.  His letters were studied as treatises on systematic theology.  Elaborate theories of atonement, justification, and grace were expounded on his authority, as if he had been a religious philosopher or theological professor like Origen and Thomas Aquinas.  The name of the apostle came to be associated with angular and frigid disquisitions which were rapidly losing their connexion with vital religion.  It has been left for the scholars of the present century to give us a picture of St. Paul as he really was—­a man much nearer to George Fox or John Wesley than to Origen or Calvin; the greatest of missionaries and pioneers, and only incidentally a great theologian.  The critical study of the New Testament has opened our eyes to see this and many other things.  Much new light has also been thrown by studies in the historical geography of Asia Minor, a work in which British scholars have characteristically taken a prominent part.  The delightful books of Sir W.M.  Ramsay have now been supplemented by the equally attractive volume of another travelling scholar, Professor Deissmann.  A third source of new information is the mass of inscriptions and papyri which have been discovered in the last twenty years.  The social life of the middle and lower classes in the Levant, their religious beliefs and practices, and the language which they spoke, are now partially known to us, as they never were before.  The human interest of the Pauline Epistles, and of the Acts, is largely increased by these accessions to knowledge.