I HAVE certainly more of the Pauline Epistles than of the four Gospels in my nature, though the latter are our foundation. Paul was from first to last a man of law; and the Pauline relations of law and Gospel have taken a very deep hold of me. Paul, too, has more variety than any of the Apostles. He has his own distinctive features, and he has a good deal of the Johannean and the Petrine besides. And honest James was like one of the old prophets risen again. He reads just like a prophet. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity.’ ‘Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries, or the vine figs?’ ‘Go to, now, ye rich men, weep for your miseries,’ etc., etc. He had to write in the same strain to ‘the twelve tribes scattered abroad,’ as Joel and the rest of old. The Jews had not improved much. They are a strange people. I have often pitied Moses, for he had a stiff, rebellious race to manage. Yet I feel that I, with many others, have been disproportionately Pauline. These Epistles presuppose the Gospels (having been sent to those churches that possessed the materials of the latter). Hence, though for the balancing of truth there is nothing like the Pauline letters; for vitality and freshness, there is nothing like the facts of the Gospel; and were I a younger man, and to begin my studies again, the four Gospels would bulk more prominently in my attention than they have done. The bearing of the life, death, and teaching of Christ on the whole economy of God’s government—that is, the Pauline sphere. With his own nature rooted in Christ, Paul surveys the relations which He bears to the universe. John, again, with the eagle eye, is content to gaze, and to rest gazing, on “the light, which is the life of men.” John was an intense intuitionist. His Gospel and first Epistle, taken together, make a good apologetical manual. His Epistle gives the philosophy of the Gospel.