The life and work of St. Paul

SAUL THE PHARISEE. 43
and Pilate, and many a coarse Jewish mendicant and m*"> f a brutal Roman
soldier. But to have seen Him with the eye of Faith to have spiritually
apprehended the glorified Redeemer that was indeed to be a Christian.
All the other passages which can at all be brought to bear on the question
support this view, and lead us to believe that St. Paul had either not seen at
all, or at the best barely seen, the Man Christ Jesus. Indeed, the question,
" Who art Thou, Lord ?" l
preserved in all three narratives of his conversion,
seems distinctly to imply that the appearance of the Lord was unknown to
him, and this is a view which is confirmed by the allusion to the risen Christ
in 1 Cor. xv. St. Paul there says that to him, the least of the Apostles, and
not meet to be called an Apostle, Christ had appeared last of all, as to tho
abortive-born of the Apostolic family. 2 And, indeed, it is inconceivable that
Saul could in any real sense have seen Jesus in His lifetime. That ineffaceable
impression produced by His very aspect ; that unspeakable personal ascendency,
which awed His worst enemies and troubled tho hard conscience of His
Roman judge ; the ineffable charm and power in the words of Him who spake
as never man spake, could not have appealed to him in vain. We feel an
unalterable conviction, not only that, if Saul had seen Him, Paul would again
and again have referred to Him, but also that he would in that case have been
saved from the reminiscence which most of all tortured him in after days the
undeniable reproach that he had persecuted tho Church of God. If, indeed,
we could imagine that Saul had seen Christ, and, having seen Him, had looked
on Him only with the bitter hatred and simulated scorn of a Jerusalem
Pharisee, then wo may be certain that that Holy Face which looked into the
troubled dreams of Pilate's wife that the infinite sorrow in those eyes, of
which one glance broke the repentant heart of Peter would have recurred so
often and so heartrendingly to Paul's remembrance, that his sin in persecuting
the Christians would have assumed an aspect of tenfold aggravation, from the
thought that in destroying and imprisoning them he had yet more openly been
crucifying the Son of God afresh, and putting Him to an open shame. The
intense impressibility of Paul's mind appears most remarkably in the effect
exercised upon him by the dying rapture of St. Stephen. The words of
Stephen, though listened to at the time with inward fury, not only lingered in
his memory, but produced an unmistakable influence on his writings. If this
were so with the speech of the youthful Hellenist, how infinitely more would
it have been so with the words which subdued into admiration even the alien
disposition of Pharisaic emissaries P Can we for a moment conceive that
Paul's Pharisaism would have lasted unconsumed amid the white lightnings of
that great and scathing denunciation which Christ uttered in the Temple in
the last week of His ministry, and three days before His death ? Had
St. Paul heard one of these hist discourses, had he seen one of those miracles,
had he mingled in one of those terrible and tragic scenes to which he must
1 Acts Lx. 5 (xxii. 8, xxvi. 15). There is not the shadow of probability in the notion of
Ewald, that St. Paul was the young man clad in ft sindOn, of Mark xiv, 52,
2 1 Cor. xv. 9.