From “Personal Opinions of Honoré de Balzac,” translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.

SAINT PAUL was a prophet of the future,—a true Apostle; and in order to make worldly minds which treat Christianity so lightly share the admiration felt for the sublime mission of the first Christian artists, a writer should make known the barbarous manners and morals of the ancient peoples; manners and morals which history covers with a glamor of glory, forcing them to appear uncolored of their black and bloody tints through the brilliant veil thrown over them by the chroniclers of the past. By the side of the splendid painting those chroniclers have made of general institutions should be shown the hideous picture of individual baseness and suffering—man worked by man as a beast of burden, without guarantee, without appeal against force; woman treated as a chattel,—not redeeming herself even by the sentiment she inspires; inspiring no trust, no devotion; delivered over to lust and cupidity, or deprived of liberty; children exposed to the slightest caprice of the head of the house; dependent on his mercy for permission to live; the most sacred bonds of social order—marriage, birth, liberty, life itself sometimes—without guarantee and having no protection but the worth of an individual who contracted them.

  This is what ought to be made known and understood in order to indicate the full value of the work of Saint Paul. That great man should be shown founding, in the future, a universal society, and preaching the noble bases of social order which the Christian Church was one day to realize. From his journeys should be drawn the sublime lesson that the earth has to be prepared to receive the seed of the Sacred Word, and to bear, in a coming day, the fruits of that Word. The great Apostle should be pictured to us advancing through the harshest difficulties, the keenest sufferings, from Judea, which had furnished the God, through Greece, which had prepared the intellect, to Rome, which was to give both land and speech; and there, enduring martyrdom when his mission had attained its end.

  What a sublime picture would be presented by an analysis thus conducted of his Epistles! The duties of marriage so admirably shown in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, and in that to the Ephesians; the meeting at the same table of poor and rich; the Communion (I. Corinthians); the duties of charity, the duties of priests, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy (I. Timothy); the deliverance of slaves and the sacred dogma of social equality (Philemon); the union under one law of all peoples and the equality of their deserts before God (Romans); what a future was foreshadowed in these paraphrases of one idea, and what sublime completion of the Master’s Word!

  It is enough to read some of the noble sentences sown broadcast through this great work, and to feel the various and differing characteristics impressed upon its several parts—the severity and authority of I. Corinthians; the consoling paternity of the Second Epistle; the sublime and powerful dialectic in Galatians and in the first part of Romans; the fervent piety, the ardor for martyrdom in Ephesians; the sweet and tender charity of the spiritual father, also in Ephesians; and, lastly, the grandeur of views, the power of creative intellect in the two Epistles to Timothy.

  Have I not shown that an analysis of the Epistles of Saint Paul is still to make? I appeal to men who are meditating history to take up that important work. It is the point of departure of the development of Christian faith, and, consequently, of the establishment of the social bond which has ruled Europe for centuries, and of which our present political institutions are but a derivation.

  But the ungrateful child has cursed its mother; men who are so proud to-day of their civilization forget the great artists who founded it by their predictions and the sublime philosophers who constructed its base.