Or to take another eminent example, in which not Puritanism only, but, one may say, the whole religious world, by their mechanical use of St. Paul’s writings, can be shown to miss or change his real meaning.  The whole religious world, one may say, use now the word resurrection,—­a word which is so often in their thoughts and on their lips, and which they find so often in St. Paul’s writings,—­in one sense only.  They use it to mean a rising again after the physical death of the body.  Now it is quite true that St. Paul speaks of resurrection in this sense, that he tries to describe and explain it, and that he condemns those who doubt and deny it.  But it is true, also, that in nine cases out of ten where St. Paul thinks and speaks of resurrection, he [180] thinks and speaks of it in a sense different from this; in the sense of a rising to a new life before the physical death of the body, and not after it.  The idea on which we have already touched, the profound idea of being baptized into the death of the great exemplar of self-devotion and self-annulment, of repeating in our own person, by virtue of identification with our exemplar, his course of self-devotion and self-annulment, and of thus coming, within the limits of our present life, to a new life, in which, as in the death going before it, we are identified with our exemplar,—­this is the fruitful and original conception of being risen with Christ which possesses the mind of St. Paul, and this is the central point round which, with such incomparable emotion and eloquence, all his teaching moves.  For him, the life after our physical death is really in the main but a consequence and continuation of the inexhaustible energy of the new life thus originated on this side the grave.  This grand Pauline idea of Christian resurrection is worthily rehearsed in one of the noblest collects of the Prayer-Book, and is destined, no doubt, to fill a more and more important place in the Christianity of the future; but almost as [181] signal as is the essentialness of this characteristic idea in St. Paul’s teaching, is the completeness with which the worshippers of St. Paul’s words, as an absolute final expression of saving truth, have lost it, and have substituted for the apostle’s living and near conception of a resurrection now, their mechanical and remote conception of a resurrection hereafter!

In short, so fatal is the notion of possessing, even in the most precious words or standards, the one thing needful, of having in them, once for all, a full and sufficient measure of light to guide us, and of there being no duty left for us except to make our practice square exactly with them,—­so fatal, I say, is this notion to the right knowledge and comprehension of the very words or standards we thus adopt, and to such strange distortions and perversions of them does it inevitably lead, that whenever we hear that commonplace which Hebraism, if we venture to inquire what a man knows, is so apt to bring out against us in disparagement of what we call culture, and in praise of a man’s sticking to the one thing needful,—­he knows, says Hebraism, his Bible!—­whenever we hear this said, we may, without [182] any elaborate defence of culture, content ourselves with answering simply:  “No man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible.”