have no relation to His true nature, merely to stop a hole in his philosophy. On the contrary, the presence of God in Christ — His presence in the eternal truth of His being and character — is for Paul the primary certainty; and that certainty carries with it for him the requirement of a specifically Christian view of the universe. He would not be true to Christ, as Christ had revealed Himself to him in experience, unless he had the courage to Christianise all his thoughts of God, and the world. And this is what he is doing in the Epistle to the Colossians. He is not directly deifying Christ, he is Christianising the universe. He is not exhibiting Christ as divine or quasi-divine, by investing Him in the wavering and uncertain glories of the Alexandrian Logos; he is casting upon all creation and redemption the steadfast and unwavering light of that divine presence of which he was assured in Christ, and for which the Alexandrians had groped in vain. There is nothing in Paul more original, nothing in which his mind is more profoundly stimulated and his faith in Christ more vitally active, than the Epistle to the Colossians; and no greater injustice could be done him than to explain the significance which he here assigns to Christ by pointing to the alien and formal influence of a feeble dualistic philosophy, or to strike out of the epistle, as some would do, the very sentences which are the key to the whole.1 If there is anything in Paul's writings which is his very own, born of his own experience, his own reflection, the necessities of his own thought, it is the conception of Christ as an eternal or divine person characteristic of this epistle.
Here again, therefore, we find our previous observation of the New Testament confirmed. Christ has a place in the faith of Christians which is without parallel elsewhere. But while we must not fail to recognise this,
1See Von Soden, Hand Commentary, iii. 32 f.
