The life and work of St. Paul

110 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL.
vision means " a waking vision," and in what conceivable respect could St.
Paul have been more overpoweringly convinced that ho 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 blind-
ing 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 indu-
bitable 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 con-
sequences have affected every subsequent age of the history of mankind.1
For though there may bo trivial variations, obviously reconcilable, and ab-
solutely unimportant, in the thrice-repeated accounts of this event, yet in the
narration of the main fact there is no shadow of variation, and no possibility of
doubt. 2 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 passage of the Corinthians just quoted, and the oirraata there leaves him no certainty
as to whether it was corporeal or The LXX. use it
spiritual.
(Dan. ix. 23, &c.) to render
n^no, which is used of a night vision in Gen. xlvi. 2. Phavorinus distinctly says that
opa/xa, whether by day or by night, is distinct from tmhrvtov "dream," and it seems as if
St. Luke, at any rate, meant by onreuria something more objective than he meant by
8po/ia (Acts ix. 10 12 ; xi. 5 ; xii. 9 ; xvi. 9 ; xviii. 9) or CKOTOO-I? (Acts xi. 5 ; xxii. 17).
'Opumt, in the N. T., only occurs in Eev. iv. 3; ix. 17: and in a quotation, Acts
ii. 17.
1 At Buch moments the spirit only lives, and the ^vxi, the animal life, is hardly
adequate as an opyavov topmKw to apprehend such revelations. See Augustine, De Gentsi
ad Litt. xii. 3. "La chose essentielle est que nous ne perdions pas de rue le grand principe
6vangelique d'un contact direct de 1'esprit de Dieu avec celm de 1'homme, contact qui
echappe a 1'analyse du raisonnement . . . . Le mysticisme evangelique en reVelant au
sens chre'tien un monde de miracles incessants, lui eparjne la peine do so pr6occuper du
petit nombre de ceux qu' analysent contradictoirement le rationalisme critique et le
rationalisme orthodoxe" (Reuss, Hist. Apostolique, p. 114). "Christ stood before me,"
said St. Teresa. "I taw Him with the eyes of the soul more distinctly than I could have
teen Him with the eyes of the body " (Vida, vii. 11).
2 It is superfluous to repeat the reconciliation of these small apparent contradictions,
because they are all reconciled and accounted for in the narrative of the text. Had they
been of the smallest importance, had they been such as one moment of common sense
could fail to solve, a writer so careful as St. Luke would not have left them side by Bide.