Paul is an avowed minister of the religion of the Spirit. To be sure, there was a time when he could not have said, "We glory in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the things of the flesh;" but that time is passed, and now the man tells us openly that he is a minister of the religion of the Spirit. Who is the male who has gone through this change? What were the steps in this revolution which came in him rather than to him? What was the content of this new gospel of liberalism which was disclosed to, him? These are questions which we naturally ask ourselves as we turn our attention to Paul's conception of the religion of the Spirit.

In the first place, we have to remind ourselves that Paul is a highly educated man; he is the first writer in the New Testament of whom that can be said, using the word education, of course, in its ordinary use. There is a vast difference between the Gospels and the Epistles. The Gospels are full of nature; they are full of the inspirations of untutored men and genius which never was gathered through classics; the Gospels abound in beatitudes, in parables; the Gospels are a series of moving pictures; it is humanity all passing before us. But when we step into the Epistles of Paul the scene is entirely changed. The one short chapter or two of the epistle of St. James has more nature in it than all of Paul's epistles. Though he lived in the objective world, the world of nature seemed not to speak to him. He never tells us how the sun set in Rome; he never intimates that the sunrise in Athens was any different from what it was in old Tarsus. In all of his journeyings across the sea he never dilates, as so many travelers do, on the beauties of other climes; he is engaged in other things; he is a scholar; he is speculative; great plans are moving in his mind that concern not the world of things but the world of man.

One thinks that we do not sufficiently take this into account, for Tarsus, the birthplace of St. Paul, or at least what he claimed as his home, was a university center; it was not simply a Jewish colony; it was a metropolitan city abounding in educational institutions where people and persons of all classes and of all conditions met and mingled and were educated. There were universities in Tarsus; it was the meeting point, so to speak, for Oriental culture. And here Paul was educated. While we are not justified in saying that we have evidence for supposing that Paul had received what we call a classical education, yet, nevertheless, we may infer that this man who appears to show his familiarity with Greek literature had imbibed more or less of the spirit of foreign culture.

But, above all, Paul was a born dogmatist, a Pharisee of the Pharisees. His religion was the religion of the letter. He would at that time have called the religion of the Spirit vague and unsatisfying enough. Probably such lectures as he had listened to simply drove him into himself and made him more of a literalist and more of a dogmatist than ever. But, with all, Paul was a sincere man, and being sincere and being, a dogmatist there was only one thing that he could do. In the language of the school room he had to ultimate his logic; he had to say to himself ; "If I am right in my religion then other people must be wrong: if my creed is the true creed then all other creeds must be erroneous; if other men are mistaken, it is my business to correct them, and if I can not correct them I can at least harry and persecute them until they come into the true faith." So far as his spirit was concerned he was a dogmatist and literalist and the persecutor. And, with all that persecuting spirit, having heard of the early Christians, he seeks and gains authority of the high priests and proceeds on his way to Damascus to harry and persecute the small sect of people who were to be called Christians.

But St. Paul, though he arrived at Damascus, arrived not as a persecutor, but as a disciple. What happened to him meantime? How was it that Paul was converted from being a dogmatist to becoming an avowed minister of the religion of the Spirit? What were the secret forces at work to change him from the religion of the letter to the religion of the Spirit? The answer that forthwith comes to one, of course, is the conversion of St. Paul.

I do not wish to minimize the various accounts of the conversion of St. Paul, but I venture to think that they throw very little light on the inner workings of this man's mind. It does not matter to us much whether Paul had a sunstroke and in the swoon which followed the overpowering heat his subjective mind was elevated into the area of consciousness, and there he became a sensitive organ to the things of the Spirit. It does not matter whether that was what happened, or whether the whole thing is a dream, or whether, on the other hand, we are to take the record literally and to say that as he and his companions were on the way to Damascus there came this marvelous revelation from the high God to change Saul of Tarsus into St. Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles. I say these things have been exaggerated in our minds; they throw very little light on the inner workings of this man's mind. But there is perfectly plain to any one who will study the life of St. Paul a certain force at work which one could see sooner or later was bound to bring this result.

I have said that St. Paul was a Pharisee of the Pharisees. Now, the one thing that the Pharisee did was to read his Bible. The Bible of the Pharisee we still have; it is the Old Testament; Paul had read it, studied it, and meditated on it; passages of various kinds were evidently lodged in his mind. Like the child that he was in his mental development at that stage, there were passages whose meaning had not dawned on him, and yet whose words still lingered in his mind. Now, psychologically, probably this is what happened: On the way to Damascus as he "ultimated his logic" he began to review his life in Jerusalem, and the inner workings of his spirit showed him that he was not doing fairly by himself. Even as a Pharisee it was a thankless task that he was going on; he had no business going to Damascus to persecute people; a Pharisee had no right to do that; the dogmatist on his own ground ought to allow other people to be dogmatists as well as himself. Now, if you ask what these passages are you will find them in certain of the Psalms. In the second Psalm in the seventh verse it says: "Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee." That old psalm was written evidently for the coronation of some great king, and as the king came to take the scepter and crown, and to be mounted on his throne, this was the poem that the great poet had written in honor of the king. "The king," says the poet, "is the son of the Most High God; the power which he wields he wields not simply as a sovereign, but as a representative of God, and the moment he takes the oath of kingship he also takes another oath of allegiance to God; this day he is born as a Son of God."

In the eighty-second Psalm and the sixth verse there is another passage that the Pharisee must have read. It says: "Ye are all Sons of the Most High."

In the eighty-ninth Psalm there is another coronation ode which says of the King: "I will make him MY first born; he shall cry unto me, 'Thou art my father,' and I will say unto him 'Thou art my Son.' "

These were in the Bible of the Pharisee; they were also in the mind of the Pharisee. And on his way as he was working out his salvation these passages must have come to his mind, and he must have said to himself: "This man whom I am persecuting I am persecuting because he is a Son of God; these Christians whom I am worrying and harrying I am tormenting because they call themselves children of God." Forthwith as in a flash these echoes came to him from his own Bible: "All of you are Sons of the Most High." "He shall cry unto me, 'Thou art my father,' and *1 will say unto him, 'Thou art my Son."' "Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee." What flashed upon Saul, then, was that through a Pharisee, he was first, last, and all the time a son of God.

Are we thus drawing on our imagination? Not wholly. As plainly as language can put it Paul says: "My gospel came not to me from other men; it came to me by revelation." Now, we must remember that revelation simply means uncovering. His gospel came by the uncovering of his spiritual nature, making an exit for his better self; it came to him not from man, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ; that is an insight into the moral grandeur of this supreme Son of God. Then he says distinctly: "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me." Now, observe the words. It does not say that it pleased God to reveal Jesus Christ to me as an objective reality; but what he does say is that it pleased God to reveal His Son or, as we should say, sonship in me. In other words there came into his consciousness the conviction that it was not simply a king who is the Son of God, but it was every man with power, and was not Saul a man of power; did he not have this signed and sealed document authorizing him to worry these Christians of Damascus? Here is a king; here is a man with power, and it pleased God to fulfil in him as he did in this man of the Psalms. "Thou art my son; this day on your way to Damascus I have been born in thee; you are now not simply Saul the Pharisee, now you are Paul the child of the living God.

We may remind ourselves incidentally that this is not the only instance of this kind. Was the experience of Paul akin to the experience of Luther? When Luther, the Roman Catholic, went to Rome, and in the spirit of devotion started to make the ascent of the Santa Scala, whence came the voice to him: "The just shall live by faith?" It came from the same inner source that all good things come to all good people everywhere and in all ways. It is the same Voice, and the best of all instances is in that of the Nazarene himself. He called himself, as he was, God's Son. But how did he learn that? Here is the picture. John is down in the wilderness preaching a gospel of stern ethics and self-denial, and practising the simple life, suggested by baptism in the flowing stream. Here is a young man from a family whose father is a carpenter; whose mother was evidently a woman of great personal purity and spiritual power. At the height of his manhood it dawns upon this young man that he ought to live the religious life; he has heard the fame of John; he goes and submits himself as a candidate for baptism; he goes into the water doing his duty, and is that all? No; it is never all when a man is doing his duty. The great things of life come to us on the fly; they come to us when we are doing something else. While John is in the act of baptism, or soon after, the narrative says, the heavens open-what heavens? Why the heaven of opportunity, the heaven of future work that he was to do. The heavens opened; the Holy Spirit descended as a dove, which means, as we should say, that the spirit of peace pervaded him; spirit of peace that every man has as he, does his duty; the heavens of opportunity opened before him; sweet peace steals in like a dove, and a Voice spoke as it speaks to every man who obeys the last voice, and this is what the Voice said. Remember these three psalms; "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." The Son of God, sonship, was born in Saul of Tarsus probably in the same way. Is not that sufficient to change a man from a persecutor to a preacher? If a man is a sane man must he not begin to catechize himself and say, "Why, if I am a Son of God, then these people about me are my brothers and my sisters, and these Christians at Damascus, whom I propose to persecute, are members of my family. If they are members of my family I ought not to persecute them, but to love them. If the family of God has younger children as well as older children, ought not I to communicate to the younger members of this family the meaning of this spiritual experience which has come to me? It was a great shock to Paul. He goes on toward Damascus as he had intended to. Saul never arrived at Damascus; Paul did. The man who left Tarsus never went back, for we are like Melchisedek, without genealogy, and in the realm of spiritual experience, without visible father and mother. He stays in Damascus long enough to get his eyes open. Some of us know what it means to get our eyes open. Ananias, a good old man, laid his hands symbolically on Paul and said to him "Brother Saul." The one thing which Saul least expected. Just think, somebody calling him "Brother!" It was like a visit to the Masonic lodge. He had thought that Christians were heathen, and here is an old man who comes to him; "Brother Saul, receive thy sight," and forthwith there fall from his eyes as it had been scales. And Paul does the wise thing of his life. He gets out of Damascus. If he had stayed there long enough Ananias and the others would have rehearsed the whole gospel to him, with their additions. They would have told him that they thought it wise for him to become a preacher, and that it was the northeast corner of Damascus in which he should preach; that he must be careful not to offend the Christian people, because they were very sensitive and conservative. What Paul did was to get right out of Damascus and stay out for three years. He went off to get acquainted with himself. It is a very good thing to do some times. He did it in very quick time. Few of us get on good terms with ourselves in such short order. Where Paul went we have no knowledge. Did he go to some eastern monastery and study Buddhism? There are people who think so, but nobody knows. Did he go to Athens and study Greek culture? Nobody knows. Did he change his name and go back to Tarsus and see how it would seem to hear some of these lectures from a new point of view? Nobody knows. It is not at all likely that a man of his high nature and high aspirations spent three years doing nothing, but what we do know is that when Paul emerges again he is now the most glorious missionary; he was a cosmopolitan; he is to be, a cosmopolitan missionary; no Jerusalem or Damascus for him, he is to be an apostle to the Gentiles, a missionary to the foreigners. He is to help other people to understand and pass through his experience, and the rest of his life is spent in that kind of work.

Now, what is his gospel? What did he have to tell them? "The gospel whereof I was made a minister, to fulfil the word of God, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory." A short gospel and a glorious one, There had been awakened in his mind the consciousness that man is a spiritual being; that by virtue of his being human he is also divine; that he is naturally and inevitably a Son of God; that there is a Spirit in man that is capable of responding to these higher impulses; that the Christ life, as he calls it, is resident and latent in each one. So he goes over land and water preaching this glorious gospel, telling men and women that the hope of their life, the hope of the glorious life, is having Christ in them; having this type of life brought up into prominence and reproducing in their experience the Christian life.

See for a moment how significant that is. Man is a son of God; God is the Father; I am the child. Very well, if I am the child of God I have personal relations with God; if he wishes to tell me something he does not have to use an interpreter; we speak the same language; we are members of the same family; his Spirit of yearning in me is my way of answering back, Abba, Father. "The Holy Spirit," Paul says, "has been shed abroad in our hearts " he has given us the Spirit of Jesus Christ; he has given us the Spirit whereby we cry, Abba, Father. We are able to say "Father," because he has made us sons. "Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee." If I am a son, I am free. I have the range of all my Father's house; this world is one room in the many mansions; I am not afraid of science; that is one of the ways in which the Father speaks to me; I am not afraid of art, beauty, music; I am a free man. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." That is what Paul says. He knew it. Where the Son is there is growth, for the religion of the Spirit is progressive. In the divine family there are children of all ages, some of them just in the kindergarten stage; some older grown, and some older and wiser whom we see not with the eyes of the flesh. So Paul says: "When I was a child over in Tarsus, to be sure I was forty years of age, but that did not matter, when I was a child I thought as a child; I felt as a child; I spoke as a child, but now I am become a man; I put away childish things; Phariseeism has been shed; it is a thing of the past. Now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things. I have discovered that the great things in religion and in life are only three-faith, hope, and love-and that of these three the greatest is love."

It takes a man a long while to come to that, but that is to be the working religion of every one of us sooner or later. Our Pharaseeism will not stick to us; the literalism and dogmatism will pass away. Sooner or later we are to discover that we are our Father's sons and daughters, and, being such, we are bound more and more to grow into his likeness. We are sons; we are not only free and our thought is progressive, but it must be practical; there are other children who need our help; they need clothing, food; they need to be instructed. I have a work to do

among my own people; in my own home I have my duties; the religion of the Spirit is a real and practical thing.

But lastly if I am a son, then others are my brothers and my sisters, and the religion of the spirit is free and open and inclusive. There is no more Phariseeism; there are no longer barbarian, Scythian, bond, free, man or woman, but all are one in Christ. That is, the Christ life makes little of those distinctions; it regards the man and his impulses, not his nationality, his sects, his sectarian affiliations; it loves the man behind these things. Something like that Paul meant, though probably he meant vastly more when he said: "The gospel whereof I was made a minister to fulfil the word of God, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory."

Moreover, Paul is the first writer in our Bible to tell us that the life of Christ is the picture of every man's life written large; that my life has not come up to its possibilities until I have recapitulated what has gone before. That is precisely what Herbert Spencer said, but he did not apply it to the realm of religion. Paul applied it to the realm of religion. The Spirit of Christ entered into Jesus of Nazareth, gave us our first Christmas day. The objective history of Jesus of Nazareth is spiritualized by Paul. He even goes so far as to say: "Even though we had known the Christ after the flesh yet so we know him no more." In other words, here is something larger than a mere individual; here is a type of life to which my individual career must conform. "I," says Paul, "I have been crucified with Christ." His experience has become mine." He says to those to whom he writes his letters: "Crucify or atrophy your members which are upon the earth; kill your passions; crucify your lower self. I have been crucified with Christ, yet I live; yet not I, but Christ in me." Or hear him again: "The life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith, by insight, the faith of a Son of God." That is the kind of faith which saves men, not the faith that a brute might have or a bare thinking machine, but the faith that a palpitating child of the Heavenly Father has when he perceives that this life is the real life for which everything else subsists. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is to him the type and the figure of the renovated and rejuvenated Christian character. "If," says he, "If the Spirit which raised Jesus Christ from the dead be in you, this Spirit will also quicken your mortal members."

Writing again to one of the churches, he says to them: "I understand the reformation that has taken place in many of your lives; how many of you used to be lascivious and dishonest are now clean and noble, and I am writing to you to continue the good work. I understand from your bishop that you have been raised from the dead to serve the living God." Then he goes on to say, "If, then, ye have been raised with Christ from the dead, set your mind on high, where Christ is; mortify, put to death, your members which are upon the earth."

This is no adequate account of the religion of the Spirit as preached by St. Paul. It is, however, a not unfair presentation of a certain phase. Paul was a great thinker, greater than we have realized or appreciated; he was a man of high speculative ability, a man with wide and large imaginative grasp. He saved the early church from becoming a mere sect; he took the gospel of his Master, translated it into terms of human experience, welded it with world interest. And you and I are here tonight in a free Christian church to worship by the religion of the Spirit largely because this persecutor, born in Tarsus, destined for Damascus, had this marvelous experience. And it is an experience which is not so mystical as it sounds. You remember the story of one of the pupils of a great painter who went to the art studio with his master to assist his master in mixing the colors, and as he looked at the masterpiece on which his master was working, he ceased to be the disciple and the master was born in him; for he uttered in Italian: "I, too, am a painter." There is to come to you and to me the time - the sooner it comes the better - when we are to discover that we are not simply animals that play, eat and drink; we are not simply finer machines for doing the world's work; we are to discover that we are spiritual beings, and that God so loved us that he has given his only beloved Son in us and for us. He has made us his beloved sons.

Some time ago there was a man by the name of Johannes Scheffer, whose poems some of you have read, who was a Lutheran, and then made the difficult transition from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism. I say difficult for obvious reasons, and more difficult because he made the transition without losing his faith. His religion was practically your religion and mine; it was the religion of the Spirit as preached by St. Paul. For hear the words of one of his meditations which he set in meter:

God's Spirit falls on me as dewdrops on a rose;

If I but like a rose my heart to him unclose.

The soul wherein God dwells: what church can holier be?

Becomes a walking tent of heavenly majesty.

Lo! in the silent night a child to, God is born,

And all is brought again that ere was lost or lorn.

Could but thy soul, 0 man, become a silent night,

God would be born in thee, and set all things aright.

Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,

If He's not born in thee, thy soul is all forlorn.

The Cross on Golgotha will never save thy soul;

The Cross in thine own heart alone can make thee whole.

Christ rose not from the dead, Christ still is in the grave,

If thou for whom He died art still of sin the slave.

Hold there! Where runnest thou? Know heaven is in thee,

Seekest thou for God elsewhere, His face thou'lt never see.

In all eternity no tone can be so sweet

As where man's heart with God's in unison doth beat.