of their method was to be found in the word atonement in Romans v.  II, which has disappeared from our Revised Version, being replaced by reconciliation.  The other point to be borne in mind is that Paul wrote about Religion “in a vivid and figured way”—­not with the scientific and formal method of a theological treatise; and that, being a Jew, “he uses the Jewish Scriptures in a Jew’s arbitrary and uncritical fashion”; quoting them at haphazard and applying them fantastically.

With these cautions duly noted, Arnold goes to the order in which Paul’s ideas naturally stand, and the connexion between one and another.  Here the unlikeness between Paul and Puritanism at once appears.  “What sets the Calvinist in motion seems to be the desire to flee from the wrath to come; and what sets the Methodist in motion, the desire for eternal bliss.  What is it which sets Paul in motion?  It is the impulse which we have elsewhere noted as the master-impulse of Hebraism—­the desire for righteousness.”  How searching and keen and practical was Paul’s idea of righteousness is shown by his long and frequent lists of moral faults to be avoided and of virtues to be cultivated.  This zeal for righteousness marks the character of Paul both before and after his conversion.  Nay, it explains his conversion.  “Into this spirit, so possessed with the hunger and thirst for righteousness, and precisely because it was so possessed by it, the characteristic doctrines of Christ, which brought a new aliment to feed this hunger and thirst—­of Christ, whom he had never seen, but who was in every one’s words and thoughts, the Teacher who was meek and lowly in heart, who said men were brothers and must love one another, that the last should often be first, that the exercise of dominion and lordship had nothing in them desirable, and that we must become as little children—­sank down and worked there even before Paul ceased to persecute, and had no small part in getting him ready for the crisis of his conversion.”  As soon as that conversion was accomplished, as soon as Paul found himself a teacher and a leader in the new community, he resumed, with all his old vigour, though in an altered fashion, his labours for righteousness.  In all his teaching he harps upon the same string.  If he leaves the enforcement of the law even for a moment, it is only to establish it more victoriously.  “This man, out of whom an astounding criticism has deduced Antinomianism, is in truth so possessed with horror of Antinomianism, that he goes to grace for the sole purpose of extirpating it, and even then cannot rest without perpetually telling us why he is gone there.”