The life and work of St. Paul

120 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
pray for that light from heaven no longer naming with more than noonday
fierceness, but shining quietly in dark places which shall enable him to
understand the many mysteries of life ; he may wait the healing of his deep
wounds by the same tender hand that in mercy has inflicted them ; he may
" Sit on the desert stone
Like Elijah at Horeb's cave alone ;
And a gentle voice comes through the wild,
Like a father consoling his fretful child,
That banishes bitterness, wrath, and fear,
Saying, 'MAN is DISTANT, BUT GOD IB NEAR."'
And so Saul went to Arabia a word which must, I think, bo understood in
its popular and primary sense to mean the Sinaitic peninsula. 1
He who had been a persecutor in honour of Moses, would henceforth be
himself represented as a renegade from Moses. The most zealous of the
living servants of Mosaism was to be the man who should prove most
convincingly that Mosaism was to vanish away. Was it not natural, then,
that he should long to visit the holy ground where the bush had glowed
in unconsuining fire, and the granite crags had trembled at the voice which
uttered the fiery law ? Would the shadow of good things look so much of a
shadow if he visited the very spot where the great Lawgiver and the great
Prophet had held high communings with God p Could he indeed be sure that
he had come unto the Mount Sioii, and unto the city of the living God, thej
heavenly Jerusalem, and to Jesus the Mediator of a new covenant, until hei
had visited the mount that might be touched and that burned with fire, where
amid blackness, and darkness, and tempest, and the sound of a trumpet and'
the voice of words, Moses himself had exceedingly feared and quaked ?
How long he stayed, we do not know. It has usually been assumed that
his stay was brief ;
to me it seems far more probable that it occupied no small
portion of those "three years " 2 which he tells us elapsed before he visited
Jerusalem. Few have doubted that those " three years " are to be dated from
his conversion. It seems clear that after his conversion he stayed but a few
days (fifj-epat T4s) with the disciples ; that then at the earliest practicable
moment he retired into Arabia ; that after his return he began to preach,
and that this ministry in Damascus was interrupted after a certain period
(yfufpai iKaval) by the conspiracy of the Jews. The latter expression is translated
" "
many days in the Acts but ; though the continuance of his preaching may
have occupied days which in comparison with his first brief stay might have
been called " many," the phrase itself is so vague that it might be used of
almost any period from a fortnight to three years. 3 As to the general
correctness of this conclusion I can feel no doubt ; the only point which must
always remain dubious is whether the phrase "three years" means three
complete years, or whether it means one full year, and a part, however short,
of two other years. From the chronology of St. Paul's life we can attain no
See Excursus IX., " Saul in Arabia." 2
Gal. i. 18,
* It actually is used of three years in 1 Kings ii. 88.