The life and work of St. Paul

102 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL.
of the habitual leisureliuess of Eastern travelling. And thus, as they rnauo
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 tho
synagogues of Cilician Hellenists, he had been living in a whirl of business
which could havo 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 tlie
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 bo 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
He could not and would not admit the possibility
Messiah was as filthy rags.
that people like Peter and Stephen could be right, while people like himself
and the Sanhedrin could be mistaken; or that the Messiah could bo a
Nazarene who had been crucified as a malefactor; or that after looking for
Hun 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 hist 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 bo expiated by fresh zeal against tho seductive
glamour of tho 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 Ids mind and memory P Never would he
too be seduced into tho position of a mesiih/ Never would ho degrade him-
self to the ignorant level of people who knew not tho Law and were accursed !
1 See Rom. vii. 8, 9, 10. This picture of St. Paul's mental condition ia no mere imaginative
touch ; from all such, both in this work and in my Life of Christ, I have
studiously abstained. It springs as a direct and inevitable conclusion from his own
epistles and the reproof of Jesus, "It is hard for thee to kick against the goads."
These words, following the " Why persecutest thou me?" imply, with inimitable brevity,
"Seest thou not that / am the pursuer and thou the pursued?" "What were those
goads? There were no conceivable goads for him to resist, except those which were
wielded by his own conscience. The stings of conscience, the anguish of a constant misgiving,
inflicted wounds which should have told him long before that he was advancing in
a wrong path. They were analogous to the warnings, both inward and outward, which
"revelation." See Monod, Cinq Dtecowt, p. 168; Stier, Reden d. Apoit. ii, 299; D
Preusense", Trots Prem. Silckt, i. 434.)