The life and work of St. Paul

THE CONVERSION OP SAtTL. 107
up his sonl, 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 Galileo 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 desiro 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
Kankab, 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 roofa 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. 1 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.2 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 liis 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
1 See Porter's Syria, p. 435.
* See Adolphe Monoa s sermon, Les Lannes fa St.