… κατελήφθην ὑπὸ τοῦ Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ.—PHIL 3:12.
“Opfert freudig aus was ihr besessen
Was ihr einst gewesen, was ihr seyd;
Und in einem seligen Vergessen
Schwinde die Vergangenheit.”—SCHILLER.
ARMED with his credentials Saul started from Jerusalem for his journey of nearly 150 miles. That journey would probably be performed exactly as it is now performed with horses and mules, which are indispensable to the traveller along those rough, bad roads, and up and down those steep and fatiguing hills. Saul, it must be remembered, was travelling in a manner very different from that of our Lord and His humble followers. They who, in preaching the Gospel to the poor, assumed no higher earthly dignity than that of the carpenter of Nazareth and the fishermen of Galilee, would go on foot with staff and scrip from village to village, like the other “people of the land” whom long–robed Scribes despised. Saul was in a very different position, and the little retinue which was assigned him would treat him with all the deference due to a Pharisee and a Rabbi—a legate àlatereof Theophilus, the powerful High Priest.
But, however performed, the journey could not occupy less than a week, and even the fiery zeal of the persecutor would scarcely enable him to get rid of the habitual leisureliness of Eastern travelling. And thus, as they made their way along the difficult and narrow roads, Saul would be doomed to a week of necessary reflection. Hitherto, ever since those hot disputes in the synagogues of Cilician Hellenists, he had been living in a whirl of business which could have left him but little time for quiet thought. That active inquisition, those domiciliary visits, those incessant trials, that perpetual presiding over the scourgings, imprisonments, perhaps even actual stonings of men and women, into which he had been plunged, must have absorbed his whole energies, and left him no inclination to face the difficult questions, or to lay the secret misgivings, which had begun to rise in his mind.1 Pride—the pride of system, the pride of nature, the rank pride of the self–styled theologian, the exclusive national Pharisaic pride in which he had been trained—forbade him to examine seriously whether he might not after all be in the wrong. Without humility there can be no sincerity; without sincerity, no attainment of the truth. Saul felt that he could not and would not let himself be convinced; he could not and would not admit that much of the learning of his thirty years of life was a mass of worthless cobwebs, and that all the righteousness with which he had striven to hasten the coming of the Messiah was as filthy rags. He could not and would not admit the possibility that people like Peter and Stephen could be right, while people like himself and the Sanhedrin could be mistaken; or that the Messiah could be a Nazarene who had been crucified as a malefactor; or that after looking for Him so many generations, and making their whole religious life turn on His expected Advent, Israel should have been found sleeping, and have murdered Him when at last He came. If haunting doubts could for a moment thrust themselves into his thoughts, the vehement self–assertion of contempt would sweep them out, and they would be expiated by fresh zeal against the seductive glamour of the heresy which thus dared to insinuate itself like a serpent into the very hearts of its avengers. What could it be but diabolic influence which made the words and the arguments of these blasphemers of the Law and the Temple fasten involuntarily upon his mind and memory? Never would he too be seduced into the position of a mesîth! Never would he degrade himself to the ignorant level of people who knew not the Law and were accursed!
But the ghosts of these obstinate questionings would not always be so laid. As long as he had work to do he could crush by passion and energy such obtruding fancies. But when his work was done—when there were in Jerusalem no more Hellenists to persecute—when even the Galilæans had fled or been silenced, or been slain—then such doubts would again thicken round him, and he would hear the approach of them like the sound of a stealthy footfall on the turf. Was it not this that kindled his excessive madness— this that made him still breathe out threats and blood? Was not this a part of the motive which had driven him to the wily Sadducee with the demand for a fresh commission? Would not this work for the Law protect him from the perplexing complications of a will that plunged and struggled to resist the agonising goad–thrusts of a ruinous misgiving?
But now that he was journeying day after day towards Damascus, how could he save himself from his own thoughts? He could not converse with the attendants who were to execute his decisions. They were mere subordinates—mere apparitors of the Sanhedrin— members, perhaps, of the Temple guard—ignorant Levites, whose function it would be to drag with them on his return the miserable gang of trembling heretics. We may be sure that the vacuity of thought in which most men live was for Saul a thing impossible. He could not help meditating as the sages bade the religious Jew to meditate, on the precepts and promises of his own Law. For the first time perhaps since he bad encountered Stephen he had the uninterrupted leisure to face the whole question calmly and seriously, in the solitude of thoughts which could no longer be sophisticated by the applause of Pharisaic partisans. He was forced to go up into the dark tribunal of his own conscience and set himself before himself. More terrible by far was the solemnity, more impartial the judgment of that stern session, than those either of the Jewish Sanhedrin, or of that other Areopagus in which he would one day stand. If there be in the character any seriousness at all; if the cancer of conceit or vice have not eaten out all of the heart that is not frivolous and base, then how many a man’s intellectual conclusions, how many a man’s moral life has been completely changed—and for how many would they not at this moment be completely changed—by the necessityfor serious reflection during a few days of unbroken leisure?
And so we may be quite sure that day after day, as he rode on under the morning sunlight or the bright stars of an Eastern night, the thoughts of Saul would be overwhelmingly engaged. They would wander back over the past; they would glance sadly at the future. Those were happy years in Tarsus; happy walks in childhood beside “the silver Cydnus;” happy hours in the school of Gamaliel, where there first dawned upon his soul the glories of Moses and Solomon, of the Law and the Temple, of the Priesthood and the chosen race. Those were golden days when he listened to the promised triumphs of the Messiah, and was told how near was that day when the Holy Land should be exalted as the Lady of kingdoms, and the vaunted strength of Rome, which now lay so heavy on his subjugated people, be shattered like a potsherd! But had not something of the splendour faded from these more youthful dreams? What had the righteousness of the Law done for him? He had lived, as far as men were concerned, an honourable life. He had been exceedingly zealous, exceedingly blameless in the traditions of the fathers; but what inward joy had he derived from them?—what enlightenment?—what deliverance from that law of his members, which, do what he would, still worked fatally against the law in his mind? His sins of pride and passion, and frailty—would not a jealous God avenge them? Was there any exemption at all from the Law’s curse of “death?” Was there any deliverance at all from this ceaseless trouble of a nature dissatisfied with itself, and therefore wavering like a wave of the troubled sea?
Would the deliverance be secured by the coming of the Messiah? That advent for the nation would be triumph and victory; would it be for the individual also, peace of conscience, justification, release from heavy bondage, forgiveness of past sins, strength in present weakness?
And then it must have flashed across him that these Nazarenes, at any rate, whom he had been hunting and slaying, said that it would. For them the Messiah had come, and certainly they had found peace. It was true that their Messiah was despised and rejected; but was not that the very thing which had been said of the Servant of Jehovah in that prophecy to which they always appealed, and which also said that which his troubled conscience needed most:—
“Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”2
This passage certainly gave a very different aspect to the conception of the Messiah from any which he had been taught to contemplate. Yet the Rabbis had said that all prophecies were Messianic. Jesus had been crucified. A crucified Messiah was a horrible thought; but was it worse than a Messiah who should be a leper? Yet here the ideal servant of Jehovah was called a leper.3 And if His physical condition turned out to be meaner than Israel had always expected, yet surely the moral conception, the spiritual conception, as he had heard it from those hated Galilæans, was infinitely lovelier! They spoke—and oh, undeniably those were blessed words!—of a Messiah through whom they obtained forgiveness of sins.
If this were true, what infinite comfort it brought! how it ended the hopelessness of the weary struggle! The Law, indeed, promised life to perfect obedience.4 But who ever had attained, who could attain, to that perfect obedience?5 Did he see it in the Gentile world, who, though they had not the Law of Moses, had their own law of nature? Did he see it in the Jewish world?—alas, what a depth of disappointment was involved in the very question! Was Hanan, was Caiaphas, was Theophilus, was Ishmael Ben Phabi a specimen of the righteousness of the Law? And if, as was too true, Israel had not attained—if he himself had not attained—to the law of righteousness, what hope was there?6 Oh, the blessedness of him whose unrighteousness was forgiven, whose sin was covered! Oh, the blessedness of him to whom the Lord would not impute sin! Oh, to have the infinite God who seemed so far away brought near, and to see His face not darkened by the cloud, not glaring through the pillar of fire, but as a man seeth the face of his friend! Oh that a Man were a hiding–place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land!7
And so, again and again, he would realise with a sense of remorse that he was yearning for, that he was gliding into, the very doctrines which he was persecuting to the death. For to these Nazarenes their Son of Man was indeed the image of the Invisible God. Could he be right in thus striving to stamp out a faith so pure, so ennobling? For, whether it was heresy or not, that it was pure and ennobling he could not fail to acknowledge. That face of Stephen which he had seen bathed as with a light from heaven until it had been dimmed in blood, must have haunted him then, as we know it did for long years afterwards. Would the Mosaic law have inspired so heavenly an enthusiasm? would it have breathed into the sufferers so infinite a serenity, so bright a hope? And where in all the Holy Pentateuch could he find utterances so tender, lessons so divine, love so unspeakable, motives which so mastered and entranced the soul, as these had found in the words and in the love of their Lord? Those beatitudes which he had heard them speak of, the deeds of healing tenderness which so many attested, the parables so full of divine illumination—the moral and spiritual truths of a Teacher who, though His nation had crucified Him, had spoken as never man spake—oh, Who was this who had inspired simple fishermen and ignorant publicans with a wisdom unattainable by a Hillel or a Gamaliel? Who was this to whom His followers turned their last gaze and uttered their last prayer in death; who seemed to breathe upon them from the parted heavens a glory as of the Shechinah, a peace that passed all understanding? Who was this who, as they declared, had risen from the dead; whose body certainly had vanished from the rock–hewn sepulchre in which it had been laid; whom these good Galilæans—these men who would rather die than lie—witnessed that they had seen, that they had heard, that He had appeared to them in the garden, in the upper chamber, on the public road, to four of them upon the misty lake, to more than five hundred of them at once upon the Galilæan hill? Could that have been a right path which led him to persecute these? could it be God’s will which had driven him so fiercely along a road that was stained in blood? could he be required to pass through those scenes of horror in which he had haled the wife and the mother to prison, MAP SHOWING THE ROADS FROM JERUSALEM TO DAMASCUS. and seen the coarse menials of the synagogue remorselessly scourge men whose whole life was love and humility and holiness? Had he after all been mistaking pride for faithfulness, and rage for zeal? Had he been murdering the saints that were upon the earth, and them that excelled in virtue? Was Gamaliel right in suggesting the possibility that in meddling with these men they might haply be fighting against God?
So day by day, his mind filled more and more with distracting doubts, his imagination haunted by sights of cruelty which, in spite of all zeal, harrowed up his soul, he journeyed on the road to Damascus. Under ordinary circumstances he might have felt an interest in the towns and scenes through which he passed—in Bethel and Shiloh—in the soft green fields that lie around the base of Mount Gerizim—in Jacob’s tomb and Jacob’s well—in Bethshean, with its memories of the miserable end of that old king of his tribe whose name he bore—in the blue glimpses of the Lake of Galilee with its numberless memorials of that Prophet of Nazareth whose followers he was trying to destroy. But during these days, if I judge rightly, his one desire was to press on, and by vehement action to get rid of painful thought.
And now the journey was nearly over. Hermon had long been gleaming before them, and the chain of Antilibanus. They had been traversing a bare, bleak, glaring, undulating plain, and had reached the village of Kaukab, or “the Star.” At that point a vision of surpassing beauty bursts upon the eye of the weary traveller. Thanks to the “golden Abana” and the winding Pharpar, which flow on either side of the ridge, the wilderness blossoms like the rose. Instead of brown and stony wastes, we begin to pass under the flickering shadows of ancient olive–trees. Below, out of a soft sea of verdure—amid masses of the foliage of walnuts and pomegranates and palms, steeped in the rich haze of sunshine—rise the white terraced roofs and glittering cupolas of the immemorial city of which the beauty has been compared in every age to the beauty of a Paradise of God. There amid its gardens of rose, and groves of delicious fruit, with the gleam of waters that flowed through it, flooded with the gold of breathless morn, lay the eye of the East.8 To that land of streams, to that city of fountains, to that Paradise of God, Saul was hastening—not on messages of mercy, not to add to the happiness and beauty of the world—but to scourge and to slay and to imprison, those perhaps of all its inhabitants who were the meekest, the gentlest, the most pure of heart. And Saul, with all his tenacity of purpose, was a man of almost emotional tenderness of character.9 Though zeal and passion might hurry him into acts of cruelty, they could not crush within him the instincts of sympathy, and the horror of suffering and blood. Can we doubt that at the sight of the lovely glittering city—like (if I may again quote the Eastern metaphor) “a handful of pearls in its goblet of emerald”— he felt one more terrible recoil from his unhallowed task, one yet fiercer thrust from the wounding goad of a reproachful conscience?
It was high noon—and in a Syrian noon the sun shines fiercely overhead in an intolerable blaze of boundless light;—the cloudless sky glows like molten brass; the white earth under the feet glares like iron in the furnace; the whole air, as we breathe it, seems to quiver as though it were pervaded with subtle flames. That Saul and his comrades should at such a moment have still been pressing forward on their journey would seem to argue a troubled impatience, an impassioned haste. Generally at that time of day the traveller will be resting in his khan, or lying under the shelter of his tent. But it was Saul who would regulate the movements of his little company; and Saul was pressing on.
Then suddenly all was ended—the eager haste, the agonising struggle, the deadly mission, the mad infatuation, the feverish desire to quench doubt in persecution. Round them suddenly from heaven there lightened a great light.10 It was not Saul alone who was conscious of it. It seemed as though the whole atmosphere had caught fire, and they were suddenly wrapped in sheets of blinding splendour. It might be imagined that nothing can outdazzle the glare of a Syrian sun at noon; but this light was more vivid than its brightness, more penetrating than its flame. And with the light came to those who journeyed with Saul an awful but unintelligible sound. As though by some universal flash from heaven, they were all struck to earth together, and when the others had arisen and had partially recovered from their terror, Saul was still prostrate there. They were conscious that something awful had happened. Had we been able to ask them what it was, it is more than doubtful whether they could have said. Had it been suggested to them that it was some overwhelmingly sudden burst of thunder, some inexpressibly vivid gleam of electric flame— some blinding, suffocating, maddening breath of the sirocco—some rare phenomenon unexperienced before or since—they might not have known. The vision was not for them. They saw the light above the noonday—they heard, and heard with terror, the unknown sound which shattered the dead hush of noon; but they were not converted by this epiphany. To the Jew the whole earth was full of God’s visible ministrants. The winds were His spirits, the flaming fires His messengers; the thunder was the voice of the Lord shaking the cedars, yea, shaking the cedars of Libanus. The bath–kolmight come to him in sounds which none but he could understand: others might say it thundered when to him an angel spake.11
But that which happened was not meant for those who journeyed with Saul:12 it was meant for him; and of that which he saw and which he heard he confessedly could be the only witness. They could only say that a light had shone from heaven, but to Saul it was a light from Him who is the light of the City of God—a ray from the light which no man can approach unto.13
And about that which he saw and heard he never wavered. It was the secret of his inmost being; it was the most unalterable conviction of his soul; it was the very crisis and most intense moment of his life. Others might hint at explanations or whisper doubt:14 Saul knew. At that instant God had shown him His secret and His covenant. God had found him; had flung him to the ground in the career of victorious outrage, to lead him henceforth in triumph, a willing spectacle to angels and to men.15 God had spoken to him, had struck him into darkness out of the noonday, only that He might kindle a noon in the midnight of his heart. From that moment Saul was converted. A change total, utter, final had passed over him, had transformed him. God had called him, had revealed His Son in him,16 had given him grace and power to become an Apostle to the Gentiles, had sent him forth to preach the faith which he had once destroyed, had shone in his heart to give “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”17
And the means of this mighty change all lay in this one fact:—at that awful moment he had seen the Lord Jesus Christ.18 To him the persecutor—to him as to the abortive–born of the Apostolic family19—the risen, the glorified Jesus had appeared. He had “been apprehended by Christ.” On that appearance all his faith was founded; on that pledge of resurrection—of immortality to himself, and to the dead who die in Christ,—all his hopes were anchored.20 If that belief were unsubstantial, then all his life and all his labours were a delusion and a snare—he was a wretch more to be pitied than the wretchedest of the children of the world. But if an angel from heaven preached a different doctrine it was false, for he had been taught by the revelation of Jesus Christ, and if this hope were vain, then to him
“The pillared firmament was rottenness,
And earth’s base built on stubble.”
The strength of this conviction became the leading force in Paul’s future life. He tells us that when the blaze of glory lightened round him he was struck to the earth, and there he remained till the voice bade him rise, and when he rose his eyes were blinded;—he opened them on darkness. Had he been asked about the long controversies which have arisen in modern days, as to whether the appearance of the Risen Christ to him was objective or subjective, I am far from sure that he would even have understood them.21 He uses indeed of this very event the term “vision.” “I was not disobedient,” he says to King Agrippa, “to the heavenly vision.”22 But the word used for vision means “a waking vision,” and in what conceivable respect could St. Paul have been more overpoweringly convinced that he had in very truth seen, and heard, and received a revelation and a mission from the Risen Christ? Is the essential miracle rendered less miraculous by a questioning of that objectivity to which the language seems decidedly to point? Are the eye and the ear the only organs by which definite certainties can be conveyed to the human soul? are not rather these organs the poorest, the weakest, the most likely to be deceived? To the eyes of St. Paul’s companions, God spoke by the blinding light; to their ears by the awful sound; but to the soul of His chosen servant He was visible indeed in the excellent glory, and He spoke in the Hebrew tongue; but whether the vision and the voice came through the dull organs of sense or in presentations infinitely more intense, more vivid, more real, more unutterably convincing to the spirit by which only things spiritual are discerned—this is a question to which those only will attach importance to whom the soul is nothing but the material organism—who know of no indubitable channels of intercourse between man and his Maker save those that come clogged with the imperfections of mortal sense—and who cannot imagine anything real except that which they can grasp with both hands. One fact remains upon any hypothesis—and that is, that the conversion of St. Paul was in the highest sense of the word a miracle, and one of which the spiritual consequences have affected every subsequent age of the history of mankind.23
For though there may be trivial variations, obviously reconcilable, and absolutely unimportant, in the thricerepeated accounts of this event, yet in the narration of the main fact there is no shadow of variation, and no possibility of doubt.24 And the main fact as St. Paul always related and referred to it was this—that, after several days’ journey, when they were now near Damascus, some awful incident which impressed them all alike as an infolding fire and a supernatural sound arrested their progress, and in that light, as he lay prostrate on the earth, Saul saw a mortal shape25 and heard a human voice saying to him, “Shaûl, Shaûl”—for it is remarkable how the vividness of that impression is incidentally preserved in each form of the narrative26—“why persecutest thou Me? It is hard for thee to kick against the goads.”27 But at that awful moment Saul did not recognise the speaker, whom on earth he had never seen. “Who art Thou, Lord?” he said. And He—“I am Jesus of Nazareth whom thou persecutest.”
“Jesus of Nazareth!” Why did the glorified speaker here adopt the name of his obscurity on earth? Why, as St. Chrysostom asks, did He not say, “I am the Son of God; the Word that was in the beginning; He that sitteth at the right hand of the Father; He who is in the form of God; He who stretched out the heaven; He who made the earth; He who levelled the sea; He who created the angels; He who is everywhere and filleth all things; He who was pre–existent and was begotten?” Why did He not utter those awful titles, but, “I am Jesus of Nazareth whom thou persecutest”— from the earthly city, from the earthly home? Because His persecutor knew Him not; for had he known Him he would not have persecuted Him. He knew not that He had been begotten of the Father, but that He was from Nazareth he knew. Had He then said to him, “I am the Son of God, the Word that was in the beginning, He who made the heaven,” Saul might have said, “That is not He whom I am persecuting.” Had He uttered to him those vast, and bright, and lofty titles, Saul might have said, “This is not the crucified.” But that he may know that he is persecuting Him who was made flesh,28 who took the form of a servant, who died, who was buried, naming Himself from the earthly place, He says, “I am Jesus of Nazareth whom thou persecutest.” This, then, was the Messiah whom he had hated and despised—this was He who had been the Heavenly Shepherd of his soul;—He who to guide back his wandering footsteps into the straight furrow had held in His hand that unseen goad against which, like some stubborn ox, he had struggled and kicked in vain.
And when the Voice of that speaker from out of the unapproachable brightness had, as it were, smitten him to the very earth with remorse by the sense of this awful truth,—“But rise,” it continued, “and stand upon thy feet, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.”
This is the form in which the words are, with trivial differences, given in St. Luke’s narrative, and in St. Paul’s speech from the steps of Antonia. In his speech before Agrippa, it might seem as if more had been spoken then But in this instance again it may be doubted whether, after the first appalling question, “Shaûl, Shaûl, why persecutest thou Me?” which remained branded so vividly upon his heart, Paul could himself have said how much of the revelation which henceforth transfigured his life was derived from the actual moment when he lay blinded and trembling on the ground, and how much from the subsequent hours of deep external darkness and brightening inward light. In the annals of human lives, there have been other spiritual crises analogous to this in their startling suddenness, in their absolute finality. To many the resurrection from the death of sin is a slow and lifelong process; but others pass with one thrill of conviction, with one spasm of energy, from death to life, from the power of Satan unto God. Such moments crowd eternity into an hour, and stretch an hour into eternity.
“At such high hours
Of inspiration from the Living God
Thought is not.”
When God’s awful warnings burn before the soul in letters of flame, it can read them indeed, and know their meaning to the very uttermost, but it does not know, and it does not care, whether it was Perez or Upharsin that was written on the wall. The utterances of the Eternal Sibyl are inscribed on records scattered and multitudinous as are the forest leaves. As the anatomist may dissect every joint and lay bare every nerve of the organism, yet be infinitely distant from any discovery of the principle of life, so the critic and grammarian may decipher the dim syllables and wrangle about the disputed discrepancies, but it is not theirs to interpret. If we would in truth understand such spiritual experiences, the records of them must be read by a light that never was on land or sea.
Saul rose another man: he had fallen in death, he rose in life: he had fallen in the midst of things temporal, he rose in awful consciousness of the things eternal: he had fallen a proud, intolerant, persecuting Jew; he rose a humble, broken–hearted, penitent Christian. In that moment a new element had been added to his being. Henceforth—to use his own deep and dominant expression—he was “in Christ.” God had found him; Jesus had spoken to him, and in one flash changed him from a raging Pharisee into a true disciple—from the murderer of the saints into the Apostle of the Gentiles. It was a new birth, a new creation. As we read the story of it, if we have one touch of reverence within our souls, shall we not take off our shoes from off our feet, for the place whereon we stand is holy ground?
Saul rose, and all was dark. The dazzling vision had passed away, and with it also the glittering city, the fragrant gardens, the burning noon. Amazed and startled, his attendants took him by the hand and led him to Damascus. He had meant to enter the city in all the importance of a Commissioner from the Sanhedrin, to be received with distinction, not only as himself a great “pupil of the wise,” but even as the representative of all authority which the Jews held most sacred. And he had meant to leave the city, perhaps, amid multitudes of his applauding countrymen, accompanied by a captive train of he knew not how many dejected Nazarenes. How different were his actual entrance and his actual exit! He is led through the city gate, stricken, dejected, trembling, no longer breathing threats and slaughter, but longing only to be the learner and the suppliant, and the lowest brother among those whom he had intended to destroy. He was ignominiously let out of the city, alone, in imminent peril of arrest or assassination, through a window, in a basket, down the wall.
They led him to the house of Judas, in that long street which leads through the city and is still called Straight; and there, in remorse, in blindness, in bodily suffering, in mental agitation, unable or unwilling to eat or drink, the glare of that revealing light ever before his darkened eyes, the sound of that reproachful voice ever in his ringing ears, Saul lay for three days. None can ever tell what things in those three days passed through his soul; what revelations of the past, what lessons for the present, what guidance for the future. His old life, his old self, had been torn up by the very roots, and though now he was a new creature, the crisis can never pass over any one without agonies and energies—without earthquake and eclipse. At last the tumult of his being found relief in prayer; and, in a vision full of peace, he saw one of those brethren for a visit from whom he seems hitherto to have yearned in vain, come to him and heal him. This brother was Ananias, a Christian, but a Christian held in respect by all the Jews, and therefore a fit envoy to come among the Pharisaic adherents by whom we cannot but suppose that Saul was still surrounded. It was not without shrinking that Ananias had been led to make this visit. He had heard of Saul’s ravages at Jerusalem, and his fierce designs against the brethren at Damascus; nay, even of the letters of authority from the High Priest which were still in his hand. He had heard, too, of what had befallen him on the way, but it had not wholly conquered his not unnatural distrust. A divine injunction aided the charity of one who, as a Christian, felt the duty of believing all things, and hoping all things. The Lord, appearing to him in a dream, told him that the zeal which had burned so fiercely in the cause of Sadducees should henceforth be a fiery angel of the Cross,—that this pitiless persecutor should be a chosen vessel to carry the name of Christ before Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel. “For I will show him,” said the vision, “how much he must suffer for My name.”29 The good Ananias, hesitated no longer. He entered into the house of Judas, and while his very presence seemed to breathe peace, he addressed the sufferer by the dear title of brother, and laying his hands upon the clouded eyes, bade him rise, and see, and be filled with the Holy Ghost. “Be baptised,” he added, “and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord.” The words of blessing and trust were to the troubled nerves and aching heart of the sufferer a healing in themselves. Immediately “there fell from his eyes as it had been scales.”30 He rose, and saw, and took food and was strengthened, and received from the hands of his humble brother that sacrament by which he was admitted into the full privileges of the new faith. He became a member of the Church of Christ, the extirpation of which had been for months the most passionate desire and the most active purpose of his life.
Fruitful indeed must have been the conversation which he held with Ananias, and doubtless with other brethren, in the delicious calm that followed this heart–shaking moment of conviction. In those days Ananias must more and more have confirmed him in the high destiny which the voice of revelation had also marked out to himself. What became of his commission; what he did with the High Priest’s letters; how his subordinates demeaned themselves; what alarming reports they took back to Jerusalem; with what eyes he was regarded by the Judaic synagogues of Damascus,—we do not know; but we do know that in those days, whether they were few or many, it became more and more clear to him that “God had chosen him to know His will, and see that Just One, and hear the voice of His mouth, and be His witness unto all men of what he had seen and heard.”31
And here let me pause to say that it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of St. Paul’s conversion as one of the evidences of Christianity. That he should have passed, by one flash of conviction, not only from darkness to light, but from one direction of life to the very opposite, is not only characteristic of the man, but evidential of the power and significance of Christianity. That the same man who, just before, was persecuting Christianity with the most violent hatred, should come all at once to believe in Him whose followers he had been seeking to destroy, and that in this faith he should become a “new creature”—what is this but a victory which Christianity owed to nothing but the spell of its own inherent power? Of all who have been converted to the faith of Christ, there is not one in whose case the Christian principle broke so immediately through everything opposed to it, and asserted so absolutely its triumphant superiority. Henceforth to Paul Christianity was summed up in the one word Christ. And to what does he testify respecting Jesus? To almost every single primarily important fact respecting His Incarnation, Life, Sufferings, Betrayal, Last Supper, Trial, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, and Heavenly Exaltation.32 We complain that nearly two thousand years have passed away, and that the brightness of historical events is apt to fade, and even their very outline to be obliterated, as they sink into the “dark backward and abysm of time.” Well, but are we more keen–sighted, more hostile, more eager to disprove the evidence, than the consummate legalist, the admired rabbi, the commissioner of the Sanhedrin, the leading intellect in the schools—learned as Hillel, patriotic as Judas of Gaulon, burning with zeal for the Law as intense as that of Shammai? He was not separated from the events, as we are, by centuries of time. He was not liable to be blinded, as we are, by the dazzling glamour of a victorious Christendom. He had mingled daily with men who had watched from Bethlehem to Golgotha the life of the Crucified,—not only with His simple–hearted followers, but with His learned and powerful enemies. He had talked with the priests who had consigned Him to the cross; he had put to death the followers who had wept beside His tomb. He had to face the unutterable horror which, to any orthodox Jew, was involved in the thought of a Messiah who “had hung upon a tree.” He had heard again and again the proofs which satisfied an Annas and a Gamaliel that Jesus was a deceiver of the people.33 The events on which the Apostles relied, in proof of His divinity, had taken place in the full blaze of contemporary knowledge. He had not to deal with uncertainties of criticism or assaults on authenticity. He could question, not ancient documents, but living men; he could analyse, not fragmentary records, but existing evidence. He had thousands of means close at hand whereby to test the reality or unreality of the Resurrection in which, up to this time, he had so passionately and contemptuously disbelieved. In accepting this half–crushed and wholly execrated faith he had everything in the world to lose—he had nothing conceivable to gain; and yet, in spite of all—overwhelmed by a conviction which he felt to be irresistible—Saul, the Pharisee, became a witness of the Resurrection, a preacher of the Cross.