letters--written for the occasion to particular people, and not
meant for us. The stamp of genuineness is on them--of life, real
life. The German scholar, Norden, in his Kunstprosa, says there is
much in Paul that he does not understand, but he catches in him
again after three hundred years that note of life that marks the
great literature of Greece. That is not easily forged. Luther and
Erasmus were right when they said--each of them has said it, however
it happened--that Paul "spoke pure flame." The letters, and the
theology and its influence, establish at once Paul's claim to be a
historical character. We may then ask, how a man of his ability
failed to observe that a non-historical Jesus, a pure figment, was
being palmed off on him--on a contemporary, it should be marked--and
by a combination of Jesus' own disciples with earlier friends of
Paul, who were trying to exterminate them. Paul knew priests and
Pharisees; he knew James and John and Peter; and he never detected
that they were in collusion, yes, and to the point of martyring
Stephen--to impose on him and on the world a non-historical Jesus.
To such straits are we brought, if Jesus never existed. History
becomes pure nonsense, and knowledge of historical fact impossible;
and, it may be noted, all knowledge is abolished if history is
beyond reach.

But we are not dependent on books for our evidence of the
historicity of Jesus. The whole story of the Church implies him. He
is inwrought in every feature of its being. Every great religious
movement, of which we know, has depended on a personal impulse, and
has behind it some real, living and inspiring personality. It is
true that at a comparatively late stage of Hinduism a personal
devotion to Shri Krishna grew up, just as in the hour of decline of
the old Mediterranean paganism we find Julian the Apostate using a