been made by the Spirit, to the Lord Jesus his Master, that his whole life, after his conversion, presents the rarest, most exquisite spectacle of self-forgetetfulness and self-sacrifice that the world has ever witnessed.
It is therefore no absorbing thought of self, no exaggeration of personal pride or self importance, which led the Apostle to speak of himself, and to make so many personal allusions. It has a far different origin. It proceeds from a deep mastery of the Gospel over his soul, and from the most solemn convictions of personal duty connected therewith. Underlying all this frequent and multiform egoism, there is a most painful sense of man's spiritual needs, and a most yearning desire to meet and supply them. The two feelings seem to mingle and unite in his soul, to so overpower all other feelings, to so intensify all other sentiments and emotions, that the Gospel and himself become, as it were, identical in his soul: this is his life; aside from this he has no being; and hence he ever speaks as though he bore the whole burden of the Gospel—as though he, Paul, alone was sot for the defence and confirmation of the Gospel. And therefore he pours forth his ardor, his desire, his zealous flame, in a continual strain of egoisms, through the whole of his thirteen epistles; the significance of which may be best comprehended by that one singular, personal expression—"I am crucified with Christ; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."
