Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/532

 *stances of this disagreeable occurrence have already been narrated and commented on, in the Life of Peter,—nor need anything additional be presented here in relation to Paul, except the observation, that his dispute with the chief apostle, and his harsh censure of his conduct, are very much in accordance with the impressions of his character, given in other passages of his life. He was evidently a man of violent and hasty passions; and is uniformly represented, both by his historian and by himself, as exceedingly bitter and harsh in his denunciations of all who differed from him on practical or speculative points, both before and after his calling to the apostleship; and this trait is manifested on such a variety of occasions, as to be very justly considered an inseparable peculiarity of his natural disposition and temperament. Doubtless there are many to whom it seems very strange, that the Apostle Paul should ever be spoken of as having been actually and truly angry, or ever having made an error in his conduct after his conversion; but there are instances enough to show that it was not a mere modest injustice to himself for him to tell the Lystran idolaters that he was a man of like passions with them,—but a plain matter of fact, made evident not only by his own noble and frank confession, but by many unfortunate instances throughout his recorded life. Yet there are a great many Protestants, who have been in the habit of making such a kind of idol or demi-god out of Paul, that they are as little prepared as the Lystrans to appreciate the human imperfections of his character; and if Paul himself could at this moment be made fully sensible of the dumb idolatrous reverence with which many of his modern and enlightened adorers regard him, he would be very apt to burst out in the same earnest and grieved tone, in which he checked the similar folly of the Lystrans,—"Sirs! why do ye these things? I also am a man of like passions with yourselves."—"The spirit of divine truth which actuated me, and guided me in the way of light, by which I led others to life eternal, still did not make me anything more than a man,—a man in moral as in bodily weakness, nor exempt from liabilities to the accidents of passion, any more than to the pains of mortal disease. The Spirit that guided my pen in the record of eternal truth, and my tongue in the preaching of the word of salvation, did not exalt me above the errors, the failings and distresses of mortality; and I was still all my life-*time subject to the bondage of sin, groaning under that body of death, and longing for the day when I should pass away from