The life and work of St. Paul

BATJL THE PERSECUTOR. 89
the tease he uses implies effort, but not necessarily success. Pliny,
passage of his famous letter to Trajan from Bithyuia, 1
hi a
says that, in question-
ing those who, hi anonymous letters, were accused of being " Christians,"
he thought it sufficient to test them by making them offer wine and incense
to the statues of the gods and the bust of the emperor, and to blaspheme
the name of Christ-; and, if they were willing to do this, he dismissed them
without further inquiry, because he had been informed that to no one of these
things could a genuine Christian ever be impelled.
"We do not know that in all the sufferings of the Apostle any attempt was
ever made to compel him to blaspheme. With all the other persecutions
which he made the Christian suffer he became in his future life too sadly
familiar. To the last dregs of lonely and unpitied martyrdom he drank the
bitter cup of merciless persecution. Five times in days when he was no
longer the haughty Rabbi, the self-righteous Pharisee, the fierce legate of the
Sauhedrin armed with unlimited authority for the suppression of heresy, but
was himself the scorned, hunted, hated, half-starved missionary cf that which
was branded as an apostate sect five times, from the authority of some ruler
of the synagogue, did he receive forty stripes save one. He, too, was stoned,
and betrayed, and many times imprisoned, and had the vote of death recorded
against him ; and in all this ho recognised the just and merciful flame that
purged away the dross of a once misguided soul the light affliction which ha
had deserved, but which was not comparable to the far more eternal weight of
glory. In all this he may have even rejoiced that he was bearing for Christ's
sake that which he had made others bear, and passing through the same
furnace which he had once heated sevenfold for them. But I doubt whether
any one of these sufferings, or all of them put together, ever wrung his soul
with the same degree of anguish as that which lay in the thought that he had
used all the force of his character and all the tyranny of his intolerance to
break the bruised reed and to quench the smoking flax that he had endea-
voured, by the infamous power of terror and anguish, to compel some gentle
heart to blaspheme its Lord.
The great persecution with which St. Paul was thus identified and which,
from these frequent allusions, as well as from the intensity of the language
employed, seems to me to have been more terrible than is usually admitted
did not spend its fury for some months. In Jerusalem it was entirely successfal.
There wore no more preachings or wonders in Solomon's Porch ; no more
throngs that gathered in the streets to wait the passing shadow of Peter and
John no more assembled multitudes in the house of ;
ilary, the mother of St.
Mark. If the Christians met, they met in mournful secrecy and diminished
numbers, and the Love-feasts, if held at all, must have been held as in the
own endeavour (cf. Gal. vi. 12) to Lave them capitally punished, without implying that
the vote was carried. I have translated the ivaipoviievtav so as to admit of this meaning,
which, perhaps, acquires a shade of additional probability from Hcb. xii. 4, "Ye have not
yet resisted unto blood," if that Epistle was specially addressed to Palestinian Jews.
1 Plin. Ep, x. 97 . ..." praeterea maledicere Christo ; quorum nikil coyi pozse