 introduction and prologue to Paul the Dauntless. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by David Leeson. Paul the Dauntless by Basil Joseph Matthews. Introduction and Prologue. It was at night, on the deck of a ship, in the eastern Mediterranean, and watching the masts swing dizzily across the face of the moon, that I first had the feeling of really beginning to know Paul. The stars above were the same that he had watched as he sailed for Cyprus on his first adventure. There was the lift and fall of the same sea, the same splash of water from the plunging boughs, the same stir of the fresh night breeze that had cooled his temples. In a strange intimate way Paul seemed to be standing there looking westward over the rail, just as he stood with Barnabas when they headed for Cyprus. So, during the long journey in Paul's footsteps, we felt every day that we could see him more clearly, we walked in Tarsus, the city where he was born, and saw boys repeating the verses that he learned there. With him we watched the tawny river Sidonus run from the white mountains of Taurus through the great plain down to the shimmering sea. From Jerusalem, where, as an undergraduate, he sat at the feet of Gamelio, we followed him to Caesarea, where the foundations of the great Roman citadel in which Paul stood before Felix and Festus still defy the breakers of the Mediterranean, and to Damascus, where you can still walk under the Roman arch through the city wall that led him into the street called Strait, and watched the tent-maker at work in the bazaar. We walked the beach of Salamis, where he landed on the island of Cyprus, and watched the sailing boats creep out of the little old harbor at Paphos, whence he sailed to Pamphylia. We climbed the glorious gray gorges of the Taurus Mountains and shared with Paul the awful silence and solitude of the Cilician gates. To do this and to go beyond the Taurus, on to the high plateau, and all day, and day after day, to follow in his steps, side by side with the soft-footed camels, from Iconium to Lystra, and thence to Derby, westward to Antioch in Pisidia, and on and on to Ephesus, was to begin to understand a little of the matchless power and patience of this hero of the forward tread. Starting from Smyrna to Athens, the glory of a purple sunset in the Aegean Sea, as it were a glassy sea mingled with fire, the deathless beauty of the Parthenon, and all the majesty of the Acropolis, still spread themselves for us as they did long ago for him. Yet more wonderful than the Parthenon itself is the majestic temple of Paul's thought, so lofty, so spacious, so glorious in its beauty and dazzling in its daring. These swift racing, passionate letters of his seemed as though the ink on them was hardly dry, so fresh they were, as we read them on the vast plain of the Galatian cities, in the valley going down to Ephesus, on the Great Hill, over Corinth. We stood on the quay at Putaeoli, where he landed in Italy, and passing along the Appian Way, entered Rome with him, and walked the corridors of Nero's Golden House and the Forum. Nor can one tread unmoved the road where Paul strode bravely out to the block and sword of the Executioner. The frightful power of a snow-blizzard in the mountain pass over Antioch, the smiting heat of the blazing sun on the beach at Corinth where the blue water has the wiles of a beautiful witch, gave us a still deeper reverence for the sturdy, dauntless daring of this man who was tossed in tempest, drenched with rains and burned in the summer heat, smitten with fever, robbed, stoned, beaten and wrecked, and still undaunted, went on to declare, as he ran his race in the stadium of the Roman world, I press on toward the goal, unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. This life of Paul the Tarsian has been written after I had taken these journeys personally, and having read books in which the life of Paul, the truth of the Book of Acts, and the Pauline authorship of the letters is discussed, and after having studied the life of the Roman Empire round the Mediterranean in the time of Paul and Nero. Everything stated in the Book I believe to be historically true and accurate in detail. The life of Saul in Tarsus, for instance, is built up of details which must inevitably have happened to a Jewish boy living in Tarsus at that time, and from a reconstruction of Roman Tarsus itself based on reading, observation and conversations on the spot. But I should have no confidence even then in hoping for this historical accuracy had not Dr. Bartlett of Mansfield College, Oxford read the whole book and given most valuable criticism and suggestion. While Dr. Christie of Tarsus, Dr. Masterman of Jerusalem, Canon Hanauer and Dr. Frank MacKinnon of Damascus, Dr. Dodd of Conia, Iconium, and Ms. Cathapotheques of Athens have contributed priceless assistance with regard to the places where their knowledge is so intimate and authoritative. Sir William Ramsey, D.C.L., the greatest of our archaeological authorities, has given most generous guidance both in my travel in Asia Minor and in regard to difficult points in the narrative. He has added to these kindnesses by his permission to reproduce a drawing and his chronology of the life of Paul. Dr. Moffat has kindly permitted extensive quotations from his vivid and authoritative translation of the New Testament. Ms. Raul has with great kindness made the index. I wish to express gratitude to these and to others who have given notable help, particularly the reverends W. H. Findlay, M.A., and J. Shaw Griffith, M.A. Thus guided we shall in this book try to go in the footsteps of Paul. It will not be all easy traveling for any of us to journey with this daring explorer of the unseen. There is some steep hill climbing, some scrambling over boulders, long flat tramps over the plain, and dangerous sea journeys for anyone who will attempt really to follow the life of this man whose eager brain was ever voyaging on strange seas of thought alone. But if you will, as we sing at school, follow up, follow up, trudge by him till you really know him, you will have found for yourself one of the great companions of the world. Basil Matthews, Whitsun Tide, 1916. Thrice was I beaten with Roman rods, once was I stoned, Thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day have I been in the deep, in journeyings often, in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils from my race, in perils from the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in labour and travail, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. The Second Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 11, Verses 25-27 Prologue, The Path of the Storks A boy stood, one spring morning, on the quay side below the great city where he lived. His ears and eyes were full of the strange music and colour of the life of a busy harbour, the sing-song chant of the sailors as they pulled the ropes through the creaking pulleys, the swing of bales of goat's-hair cloth from the quay, and the thud as they dropped into the hold of the ship. The discontented grunt of a tawny camel as the stuffed sacks were lifted from the quay side and lashed on his back. The splash and gleam of oars in the water as a boat put across the harbour, breaking the reflections of ships and masts into a thousand ripples, all made him throb with that desire which tingles in a boy as he watches ships go down to the sea. The hunger for wider horizons, the blind craving for the sting of the salt of the sea, and the sight of land at dawn, burnt in the boy like a fever. A white, swiftly passing reflection in the water startled him out of his dream, and lifting his oval Jewish face he saw strange birds sailing across the blue sky. They flew northward from the sea over the harbour and the city of Tarsus with slow movements of their great white wings. Their long necks were stretched forward toward the snow-covered Taurus mountain range. There still longer legs trailed behind them like the wake of a ship in the sea. Ah! Now the storks have come, there will be no more rain and storm! He would hear the sailors say as they scrubbed and tarred their ships, bending new sails and reaving fresh rope in the last year's frayed rigging. For spring was in the air. The great sea which had been closed to the ships through all the stormy winter days was open again, and the busy sea life of the Mediterranean was to begin again. The storks? Where do they come from? Where are they flying to? Why do they go in the springtime? The questions which any boy as eager and keen as young Saul of Tarsus would ask filled his mind as he walked back along the riverside homeward. The river was running full, for the snows were melting in the mountains and the waters were running into the lake harbour below Tarsus, and then out between the banks down to the sparkling sea. At last he reached home, and his bearded father would have to rack his brain for everything that he could remember about the storks. So young Saul learned that the storks came from far, far away south, moved by an inner voice which called them to the mountains and seas of the north. All up the long valley of the Jordan they had flown, and on the edge of the Syrian desert they had halted to feed on the snails, the grasshoppers and the locusts. When they had rested, rising again heavily in the air, they floated over the orchards and thousand roofs of Damascus, and the white under their black wings reflected the Lebanon snows, flying on and on across the gulf and the great plain of Solicia. They were now over Saul's home in Tarsus itself. Some would stay there and would rest and lay eggs, hatching out in the early summer in their quaint, downy, long-legged young. But most of them would fly across Tarsus still northward with tireless wings, rising from the Solician plain to the hills, and then from the hills to the grim mountain ravines of Taurus, down which the tumbling cascades plunged to join the Sidnes River running through Tarsus to the sea. Over green pine and gray peak, higher and always higher, the storks rose till the narrow rock gateway, the Solician gates, took them into its shadow and they came out again in the broader valleys north of the Taurus Range. The storks would hear beneath them the sound of running water which filled all the valleys and the slow ting-ting of the bells that swayed with the camels that strode along the winding road. Sometimes the cry of a driver would shatter the quiet, the crack of his whip, and the clatter of horses' hoofs on the stones, as the Roman post rode through the pass, bearing the orders of the emperor to his proconsuls and generals. The storks could not stop, for the inner voice which drove them northward in the spring still burned in them. They passed, and still rising, launched out of the mountains on to the high windswept plateau of Anatolia. The great table-land lay in the sunshine, spread out under them from mountain to mountain, and still the great road stretched forward, league upon league, north and west, beyond the reach even of the eyes of the birds. The long, empty reaches of the road were broken here by a line of quiet pilgrim-jews on their way southeast to the hills of Jerusalem, there by a caravan of camels taking wool to Tarsus, and a medley of laden trotting asses. Under the shelter of a hill the homely sheds of a rest-house for the drivers and their beasts made the awful treeless distances less desolate. Below them the storks heard the tramp of Roman legionaries marching out to quell a wild, turbulent tribe that had hung its defiant little village among the Pasidian peaks to the south, and the ring of hammer upon stone where a gang of slaves were laying a stretch of Roman road between Iconium and Lystra. The swift flight of the birds mocked the slow crawl of oxen crossing and recrossing the plowed land. The bleat of kids and lambs to their mothers, as the flocks of sheep and herds of goats nibbled their way toward the solitary well, came up to the storks as they swept along their unseen path in the air. But the voice within that had sent them north would not let the birds pause till a broken coast dotted with gleaming cities infringed with foam lay under their spread of wing. The east was now behind them, they had reached the Aegean Sea, but they could not furl their wings and rest, unsperred by the voice, till the sea and its islands had been crossed and the winds of Macedonia stirred among their breast feathers. The voice that spurred the storks was the voice that spoken the boy on the harbour side at Tarsus, as he speaks to all boys. The desire to range with the birds had broken out within him. He felt a sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go, the yearning to sail new seas and to feel the mountain road under his feet. So it was to be. The storks had followed that unseen path in the air from south to north, from Nile and Jordan to Danube, through all the ages as they follow it today. On the great road under them, the road that lies like a bridge from Europe to Asia, Alexander the Great had swept with his swarming armies, creeping over the plain and storming through the Cilician gates, to pour like a river in full flood over the Cilician plain and down through the hills of Syria. On the same road Cyrus had ridden with his ten thousand, the conquerors of the west, seeking to put their heel on the bowed neck of the east. Up the kingly road on the plateau Xerxes had cantered westward the head of the might of Persian power, the wave of Asia breaking vainly on the rocky coast of Europe. And now, in the days of the boy of Tarsus, the road echoed to the thunders of the legions of Rome. She, the mistress of the world, had planted her armies along the road, and held the plateau, the mountains, and the plains by the sea in the grip of her strong hand. The boy Saul was to feel this same road under his eager feet. The blood of the east throbbed in his Jewish veins, and the pride of birth as a Roman citizen burned in his brain, while he spoke in the swift speech of Greece. So he was the child both of the east and west. And he was to follow the great path of the Storks, the road of conquest, from Judea to Damascus, and through Antioch to Tarsus, over by the Cilician gates and all along that high table-land to the broken Aegean coast, nor was he to furl the wings of his desire, till he had swept across the Aegean to face the learning of Athens and dare the pride of Rome. It was to be a very great adventure, the life of this boy who stood at the quayside at Tarsus watching the Storks. It was to be more. For the kings of the east and the west, Alexander and Cyrus and Xerxes, who had fought and marched on that road, had passed, their victories were lost, and their empires crumbled. But Paul's adventure, stoned though he was and beaten, robbed and imprisoned, shipwrecked and slain, was to issue in a conquest that would stand when Rome had fallen, in an empire covering both east and west, whose armies would someday march beyond even the path of the Storks, at the command of a king who was crowned with a crown of thorns. End of introduction and prologue. Chapter 1 of Paul the Dauntless. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Playing by David Leeson. Paul the Dauntless by Basil Joseph Matthews. Chapter 1 The Tribe of the Youngest Son. What shall we call him? The question that all the mothers in the world have asked would leap to this mother's lips as the father stooped to take his first look at his baby son. The father was proud that he himself belonged to the tribe of the youngest son, the tribe that gave the first warrior king to his nation. All the hot passion for his country and people would burn in him as he thought of his own tribe of Benjamin. And how, out of that smallest of the tribes of Israel, and from the least of all the families of the tribe, the great soldier king Saul had been chosen to be the first monarch they ever had. A young man and a goodly, from his shoulders and upward he was higher than any of the people. If only this boy, this baby here, might grow up to stand erect like Saul, a king among the people. In any case he should bear the name of the king of the tribe of the youngest son. We will call him Saul, said the father. Saul was his first name, the name his father and mother would use at home. Saul was the name they spoke to the priest when he was buried, a baby only eight days old, to the synagogue where the priest took a knife and made that cut which all Jewish baby boys were to bear to separate them from the other nations on the earth. Through the little window, high up in the wall, which let the sunlight into the cool, quiet room where the mother and the boy lay, the sounds of the city floated in, the slow tinkle of the bells on the silent passing camels which had come down the pass through the mountains to Tarsus, and were carrying their loads down to the harbour-quay, the horse-cry of the drivers, the quick light steps of the droves of laden donkeys, the laughter of the university students as they strolled down to the gymnasium by the river, the clink of the armor of the passing Roman soldier. Saul's father did not need that last sound to remind him of something of which he was almost as proud as he was of his own sonship in the tribe of Benjamin, that he was a Roman citizen, a citizen especially of the far-spreading Roman free city of Tarsus. His young son, who, when he grew up, would be able to say, Sivis Romanus Sum must therefore have a Roman as well as a Jewish name. They gave him for his Roman name, Paul. While the baby Saul was learning to walk, another Jewish boy, far away southward and across the sea, was growing up in a village among the hills. Barefoot and bare-headed, with a linen tunic girdled at the waist, he ran in and out of the carpenter's workshop where Joseph made plows and yolks for the oxen of Nazareth, and he trotted alongside his mother as she walked through the village well, balancing the earth and where water-pot upon her head. Saul of Tarsus, the city boy, and Jesus, the peasant son of Nazareth, were as different from one another as boys could be, and, so far as we can know, they never met one another before the death of Jesus, yet even at the beginning of the life of Saul we must think of Jesus, for a day was to be when the coming of Jesus into the life of Saul was to change the whole history of the world. CHAPTER II The dark-haired boy Saul, as he grew up, took in with his swift brain and quick eyes the wonderful life of the city in which he lived. Tarsus stretched across a great plain, through which a winding river ran, from dark snow-rimmed mountains down to the shining sea. From the mountains of Taurus, and from the great high plain up behind the mountains, long caravans of dusty, stealthy-footed camels came striding down, bearing on their backs wool and lead and silver ore, and many other things from the north and west. From the lands of the rising sun other camels came, bearing silks and spices, and led by dark, swarthy Arabs. Up from the great sea, as they called the Mediterranean, the ships sailed into the Lake Harbor, bringing glass from Sidon and purple cloths from Tyre, copper from the island of Cyprus and marbles from Italy and Greece. On the ships were ruddy-faced men from the west, dark bronze-featured sailors from the Nile, and skillful seamen of Phoenician blood from the Palestine coast. Saul would see these things in company with other boys, for in him the instinct that makes boys get together in groups was stronger than usual. All through his life he was very eager for companionship. Yet sometimes the boys would quarrel we may be quite sure. Saul had a keen quick temper which caught fire swiftly and would blaze into clean anger. But we know that sullenness was a thing he did not understand, again and again when he quarreled with another he soon made it up again. He would go as a boy, then, sometimes with other boys, sometimes with his father, in and out among the streets of Tarsus, dodging out of the way of the swinging camels and of the wide horns of the black buffaloes dragging their lumbering wagons along. Each shop along the streets was just a square platform, closed on three sides and open at the front, where the cobbler sat sewing the shoes, red or black just as you wished, and the tall moccasin boots which he sold. The coppersmith hammered his pans, and the silversmith, working his tiny bellows, heated the gray silver in the forge and tapped it on his little anvil. The saddle-maker cut and sewed his leather trappings for the horses and the camels, the potter's hands molded the whirling clay, this piece to a lovely vase, that to a common household pan, but all to some use. The click and swish of the loom as the weaver threw the shuttle across and back again like lightning held Saul most of all, for this was to be part of the trade he himself was to learn. A great Jewish rabbi said, the father who does not teach his son a trade makes him a thief, and another teacher, whose words passed from mouth to mouth, declared, the father who teaches his son a trade makes him like a vineyard fenced around. Whether Saul's father was rich or poor he would, as a good Jew, teach his boy a trade. The most famous trade in all Tarsus was making the tents under which the wandering shepherd peoples on the plain and among the hills could shelter. They were long, low tents, supported by a number of poles, and with the edges of the canvas held to the ground with tent pegs. Miles away, up in the hills, near the great mountains, in the suburb of Tarsus, where Saul and his sister and mother and father went in the summer, he saw the long-haired goats of this land of Cilicia. The hair of these goats was used by the tent-makers to weave into the tent cloth, for it kept the rain off the backs of the goats, and therefore was good when made into thick canvas for keeping the rain out of the tent. Young Saul was taught how to make the tents. First he learned how the thread was spun from the goat-hair, then how these threads were strung from beam to beam on the loom, and the shuttles were shot from side to side till the threads were woven into a cloth. After that the pieces of cloth were sewn tightly together to make one great canvas, and twisted goat-hair ropes were fixed to the edges, all looped ready for the tent pegs. Faster than the swiftest weaver in all Tarsus could throw his shuttles or rattle his loom the brain of the boy Saul worked. He saw the weaver throwing the different colored threads, purple, green, and yellow, across his cloth, and Saul's own mind had three different threads to weave into the wonderful pattern of his mind, as the colored threads in the weaver's loom flashed to and fro till the eye could not follow, so the three threads of this boy's life, Jewish, Greek, and Roman, crossed and recrossed till they were all blended in one wonderful pattern in the brain of this boy, the mind that was yet to become one of the swiftest, most daring, and yet tenderest that have ever lived. 1. The Thread of the Centuries The first thread was the rich long thread of the story of his own people. It glowed through his mind like a lovely purple thread in a king's mantle woven on the loom of the centuries. Saul spun the thread as he sat in the dim light of the synagogue, and saw them take up the sacred rolls and opening them red out of the law and the prophets, and as he squatted on the sand-strewn floor of the school and shouted out the stories he had learned from memory, but most of all this thread would come from the story times at home. Saul's mother, when she had ground the corn into meal and made the dough for the thin flat loaves of bread which she baked in the mud oven, and as she sat spinning while they waited for his father to come back from the marketplace, would tell him the stories of his nation. They were tales to make a boy's eyes grow round and shining with wonder, stories to make him catch his breath with excitement as to whether the shepherd boy or the giant would win in the fight. Her tales were his picture-book, the greatest book of adventure in the world. Through her eyes Saul saw the old patriarchs riding on their camels along the horizon of the old, old times, and pitching their low black tents by the side of the springs of water. He shivered as he watched the uplifted knife of Abraham ready to slay his son Isaac, and breathed again when the ram's horns were caught in the thicket and the boy Isaac was free. He heard how Rebecca watered the thirsty camels at the fountain and rode under the blazing sky into the land to meet Isaac, and how her sons Esau and Jacob quarreled and were friends again. He could see Jacob terrified because the coat of many colors belonging to his favorite son Joseph was brought to him all dabbled with blood, when all the while young Joseph had been thrown into a pit by his brothers, for the brothers were tired of his dreams of being greater than they, and sold him to the slave-dealers who had carried him off with their camel caravan into Egypt. The most exciting part of the stories young Saul would feel began where the tale of the father of his own tribe came, when Benjamin, the youngest son of Jacob, went down as a boy to Egypt. There all the brothers saw Joseph but did not know him, for he had become the greatest man next to Pharaoh in all the land, until unable to hold himself in any longer Joseph told them who he was. Saul's hot temper would flame up in him, and his heart would go throbbing with anger when he heard how the Israelites, after Joseph died, were lashed with long-thonged whips by the cruel Egyptian taskmasters under a new Pharaoh. But his eyes sparkled again as he saw the little Moses, first hidden as a baby in the bullrushes, and then growing up to lead his own people out of Egypt away across the Red Sea, with the chariots of Pharaoh galloping in vain behind them. The story of those days in the desert was told him and the long weary wanderings of the people in their tents till, on the great hills over Jordan, they looked across and saw the new land in which they were to live, the land from which young Saul's own father and mother had come. What was the law that Moses left for us to obey, the mother would ask, and the boy would repeat the words that every Jewish boy learns as soon as he can speak. Here, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. Saul came to know by heart also how Joshua led them all across Jordan and conquered the land, how Samson carried off the gates of Gaza and smoothed the Philistines, and how at last, blinded and chained, he thrust out the giant pillars and hurled the great house and its three thousand insolent feasters into ruin. The boy Saul would enjoy those fierce stories, but his mother would rather tell about the boy in the temple who waited on Eli, and would very much wish that her boy might come to be like young Samuel. We can well believe that Saul himself would prefer those about his own namesake, whom Samuel had anointed king. Would he ever grow as tall as that great warrior king Saul, who stood head and shoulders above the others and led all the people in the great fights in the valleys and on the hills against the Philistines? We can imagine him measuring himself against the wall to see whether he was growing tall, and then running back to hear how David killed the lion and the bear and the giant Goliath, and after Saul died, became king in Jerusalem. Even now, young Saul's father told him, Jerusalem and all the land was under the hand of the Romans. Their old country did not belong to them. But one was coming, and their eyes burned like gleaming coals with a fire of hate and of hope as they said it, a king, sent by God, who would roll back all the enemies of the Jews, a leader who would save them. They must wait and be ready when the hour came, when he, the Messiah Prince that was to be, would call them out to fight. In all the stories and every day, whether walking with his father or sitting on the housetop with his mother or listening in the synagogue, he would hear these words, to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul. They were written on parchment and put in little leather cases strapped on the foreheads of the men and on the arms of the growing boys and were written on the doorposts. On the fringe of Saul's coat was a court of blue. If any Greek boy in Tarsus had asked him why it was there, Saul would have answered at once from memory. Put upon the fringe of each border a court of blue, and it shall be unto you for a fringe that he may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them. This great invisible God could not be shown in the likeness of an image, a statue of marble like those in the Greek temple which Saul passed on his way to school. Once every year he would see the streets of Tarsus all alive with crowds waiting for a great procession to pass. If he was allowed to watch he would see a great canopy over the image of a God who was being taken to be burned, for the God of the Tarsians was burned each year in the belief that he would come into immortal life again through the fire. Saul had been taught to scorn such a superstition about an idol. When he ran home to tell his father about the gorgeous procession, his father would surely frown and remind Saul to repeat his, Hero Israel, the Lord thy God is one God. So Saul learned that all the great kings and leaders, the warriors and the prophets, Moses and Joshua, Samuel and Saul, David and Solomon, had been great and powerful only when they obeyed the commandments of God, and when the story of the downfall of his own namesake King Saul was told to him, they would say simply, he disobeyed God and God rejected him. So the boy thought of God as one and eternal and all-powerful, very just and stern with those who disobeyed him, yet merciful to those who were sorry for their disobedience, and he waited for the new king who was to come to free his people, and he grew to be very keen about all the thousand and one special religious observances that made the Jews feel themselves to be the people of God. This was the first and longest and richest thread that flashed to and fro in the loom of Saul's life, and was woven into the wolf of his very being, but it was only the first. 2. The Thread of Beauty As Saul went down to the water's edge with his companions he would see young men in white tunics and sandals mooring their boats and then running up wide marble steps. At the top they joined other youths who were chatting among the great gleaming pillars, some of them rubbing oil into their glistening bare bodies. From within came the sound of cheering, the panting of wrestlers straining to throw one another, the ring of the thrown javelin on the pavement, then a team of students would run down the steps and diving into the water, race one another in a swim upstream and back again. In a quieter place among the further pillars in the side a group had settled round an older man. Some stood, leaning against the white pillars, others sat on the pavement, nearly all had tablets of wax in the left hand and an ivory style in the right, ready to put down some witty saying or wise idea of the Greek tutor. Then they would argue, and questions and answers would fly to and fro more swiftly than arrows in a battle. If Saul were near enough to hear what the tutor was saying he would be almost sure to hear the words Athenodorus said, followed by some great maxim which the students would quickly scribble down on their tablets. Athenodorus had died at Tarsus just about the time when Saul was born, and he was the most wonderful teacher in the world in his day. Indeed, some of the things Saul wrote when he was a man are so similar to the sayings of Athenodorus that the boy Saul may have learned them first from some pupil of Athenodorus himself in Tarsus. Only because of Athenodorus the fame of this Tarsus University was spreading through all the Mediterranean, and Saul would be able to talk to the students of the university because, although he spoke the Aramaic language of the Hebrews to his father and mother at home, and his strict father would not like him to mix too much with people who were not Jews, yet he talked Greek, and indeed even read the law and the prophets in a Greek translation. Greek was the language in which men of different races talked to one another in Tarsus. This seems strange to us because Tarsus is a thousand miles from Greece, but as many as two thousand years before Saul was born, Greek sailors coming along the coast all the way from the Aegean Sea had sailed up the Sidnes River and settled at Tarsus and had traded in the silver and lead which men mined in the mountains. Assyrian armies and Persian had swept across the plain from the east and had conquered Tarsus, but still the Greeks remained there. When Saul went with his father to buy a new pair of sandals the money which he gave to the cobbler had Greek letters all around it. Saul would be told as a boy by the Tarsians who were very proud of the history of their city that over three hundred years before young Alexander the Great, the Greek Emperor, had covered the plain and filled the city with his great armies. He had nearly killed himself in this very river by leaping in all hot when the water was bitterly cold with the melted snow from the white Taurus Mountains. The Greeks carved beautiful statues which Saul's father would hate because a good Jew would think of them as idols. They also went into training for sports while, at the same time, training their brains to be swift and agile. The Jews trained their boys to glory in the past rather than think out new ideas and to think more of the life of the spirit than of the body and mind. The Greeks taught their boys to think new thoughts and they liked quickness of mind and witty speaking better than a wonderful memory or deep, wise old proverbs. The wonder of Saul was that he remembered the old like a Jew but created new and adventurous thoughts more swiftly than even the Greek. Sitting there at the water's edge Saul would spy, among the boats sailing up and down the broad river, some with strange figures painted on them, sometimes a ram or a pair of scales or the sun god Apollo. These he knew were Greek boats painted with signs to bring the sailors good luck. His brooding eyes would follow the boat as it sailed down under the evening breeze. His adventurous mind would sail leagues beyond the boat to the islands and mountains from which the Greeks came, where temples were reflected in the sea. But the boys Saul on the river bank would not imagine that just because he knew the Greek language he would someday be able to make wonderful journeys such as no man of his race had ever taken before, and not only to speak so that the people of that day and scores of cities from Jerusalem to Rome might hear him, but to write so that we and millions of others today and in all the days to come can share his wonderful story and listen to his great secret. The lovely Greek thread was woven to and fro in the pattern of Saul's mind. It gleamed like gold as it lay intertwined with the rich thread of the story of his own Jewish people. There was a third thread, not so beautiful as these, but very strong. The Imperial Thread of Rome. Three. The Thread of Empire. When I was a boy, one of the oldest sailors on the quay at Tarsus would begin, and we can imagine the boy Saul with others standing round waiting for the yarn. When I was a boy and Mark Antony, the Roman ruler, lived up yonder at the palace. The Queen of Egypt came to Tarsus through the harbor here. Never was such a ship in all the world. The bard she sat in seemed to burn on the water. The poop was covered with beaten gold, and the oars were shining silver that flashed as they dipped and rose in the river, keeping time to the playing of flutes. The sails were purple, and on the deck on a couch lay Cleopatra the Queen, with boys standing by fanning her and with maids in attendance. You could not see the harbor here for people. Everyone in Tarsus came out. The house tops, the quays, and the boats all were covered with them. We can imagine that one of the boys, fresh from school, would ask, Do the Romans rule in Egypt where Cleopatra came from as they do here? And many a sailor in Tarsus Harbor would be able to say, Yes, I have sailed for many a year up and down the great sea and never have I dropped anchor where the Romans do not rule. I have sailed from here down the Syrian coast to Tyre and Sidon and Caesarea, and across there to Cyprus, right away down to Alexandria in Egypt, where the great corn ships anchor, and across from the Nile to Syracuse in Sicily. I have sailed from Brondysium up the Gulf of Corinth and seen my ship dragged across the rollers to drop again into the Gulf that leads to Athens. From Athens I have sailed to Ephesus and round the coast to Rhodes and back to Tarsus, and everywhere, everywhere you see the power of Rome ruling. And then the old sailor would not have told all, for he would not know that when the great general Julius Caesar sailed for Tarsus nearly half a century before Paul was born, he had already begun the conquest of a savage island called Britain in the North Sea far beyond the Alps. Saul, as he went back home, would pass the many-pillared porticoes of stately Roman temples. As he got into the heart of the city again, he might see the road swiftly cleared at the sound of the wild clatter of horses' hoofs on the paved way. As the panting beasts, flecked with white sweat, swept by on the last mile of their long gallop down from the mountains, he would know that this was the Roman post that had sped by relay after relay of horses right across Asia Minor bearing the emperor's commands. Three words would spring to his lips. Sivis Romanus Sum, I am a Roman citizen, freeborn. And with that thought, though he knew how many of his fellow Jews loathed the Roman rule, there would come the broadening feeling of possession in that empire which had made the great sea its lake. It was the third thread in Saul's life, the strong rough thread of the Roman Imperium. So the three threads were woven into the pattern of a boy's mind, the boy Saul who could say, speaking in the language of Greece, I am a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, a native of Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city, I am a Roman born. He was a citizen of the world. One day, as he stood on the rooftop at home in Tarsus, Saul would hear the quick steps of asses coming along the street, the sound suddenly ceased in front of the house. Leaning over the parapet, he could see, in the swiftly fading evening light, tired travelers alighting. His father was eagerly welcoming them to enter the house. The foot-weary, dusty asses were being led away to the stable. Saul knew what it meant the days of the seeking of a new life were upon him, the hour when any boy is very glad and more than a little afraid. Year after year pilgrims from the cities of the high plateau beyond the mountains, as surely as the sun would set behind Tarsus, claimed the hospitality of a Jew so full of zeal for the nation as Saul's father. They were on their way south through Tarsus, seeking the feast at Jerusalem. Over supper, while the student Saul nodded and roused himself between sleepiness and eager inquisitiveness, they would tell of the Roman cities up beyond the mountains, Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch, and of wild life among the hills on the way to Tarsus. He would hear tell of robbers, who lurked among the gray crags and sprang out on the traveller as he passed through the ravine, and how the Roman soldiers were trying to dislodge them from their fastnesses among the rocks. Saul had, in the years that had gone, often said good-bye to his father, who would sometimes go with these pilgrims down to the feast at Jerusalem. The father would come back to Tarsus weeks later with wonderful stories of the people gathered from all over the world in the crowded temple courts at Jerusalem, of the flowing robes of the barefooted priests, the bleeding of the thousands of lambs brought for sacrifice, the smoke curling up from the altars, the harsh clash of cymbals, the sounding of the brass trumpets. Saul would ask many questions about the great public school among the cloisters and courts of the temple, where the masters sat, with their students in a circle round them, teaching and discussing the law of Moses, for Saul already was an ambitious, swift-minded spirit, his brain absorbed everything that was about him. At school in Tarsus he was a keen boy, who leapt ahead of his many classmates. When he was old, indeed, the thing he remembered most clearly about his youth was, I advanced in the Jews' religion beyond many of mine own age among my race, being exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers. His father would then have to tell the boy all about the incidents that happened in the temple. It may well be that one day, when Saul's father was at the temple after Passover, his eyes fell upon another boy, a little older he would note than his own Saul, a Jewish twelve-year-old peasant from Nazareth. This young peasant was sitting in one of those circles of students in front of the rabbis, the teachers, after the feast days, both hearing them and asking them questions, and all that heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. It is quite possible that, if Saul's father noticed this boy asking questions, he would think how clever he was, but he would not be likely to admit that this Jesus was a finer son than his own Saul at home in Tarsus. It is quite certain, however, that the father would listen very carefully to the greatest of these temple teachers, the headmaster whose name was Gamaliel, Gamaliel, the learned and grave, the gentle and firm, the grandson of old Hillel the kind. And when he reached Tarsus again, he would tell them all about this wonderful headmaster till Saul, the student, now grown up into his teens, would feel that the greatest thing in the world would be to go from Tarsus to Jerusalem to Gamaliel and powder himself in the dust of his feet and drink in his words with thirstiness. Like a young bird just feeling the strength of its newly fledged wings, Saul longed for a wider flight for his mind, some task greater, more difficult than the Jewish school at Tarsus could give to him. Now, as the pilgrims visited his house, the hour had really come when Saul was to go up to the feast at Jerusalem. His dark face would flush with eagerness as he stood on the rooftop at Tarsus that evening and looked away south and east toward the land of his fathers and toward Jerusalem, away to the great sea, ten miles away, where it caught the glow of the sunset. The curious aching desire, half joy and half pain, that comes to us when at last we are to range in the wider world would grip him now. For in a few hours he was to start out with his father and the other pilgrims to leave home and see that wonderful temple which Herod had built at Jerusalem with its gleaming marble and gold that glittered in the sun, a mountain of snow they called it. And as Saul, after making his evening prayer toward Jerusalem, took his last look across the plain before going down into the house, he would see the lengthening purple shadows of the mountains stretching across the Solician plain, and the last rays of the sun lighting up with gold the mountain of snow of the Taurus, a temple not made with hands. In doors his mother would be very busy folding the clothes which she had been making through the past weeks, the tunics and girdles and especially the warm cloaks. Jerusalem was high up on the hills and her son would need warmer clothes there in the winter than he did at home on the plain in Tarsus. Her son was going to the great public school of his nation in Jerusalem, and he must have the clothes suitable, so she would count them and fold them, and although she would be very proud and glad that her Saul was going out to take his place in the larger world, we can believe that sometimes she would hardly be able to tell a tunic from a cloak for the dimness of her eyes. Saul's father would be made of harder stuff. He belonged to the strictest of the strict Jews, the sect called the Pharisees, the separatists, who held themselves quite aloof from those who did not keep the law very carefully. It would make the father very proud and happy that his son was so clever in learning this law and in discussing it, and so eager to keep it. The leave taking over, the pilgrim's student would quickly forget the wrench of going from home in his eager enjoyment of his first journey. We cannot tell which way they traveled. They might go eastward by land to Syria, walking round the end of the gulf, but far more probably they would take the quicker sea route from the Lake Harbor below Tarsus to Caesarea on the coast of Palestine. Whether they went by sea or by land, they would at last come out on to the long winding Caravan Road, climbing among the hills on the way to Jerusalem. It was spring time, and the fields were all dancing with nodding anemones from flaming red to delicate heliotrope. Up the long road could be seen the dusty pilgrims from many countries, all with their faces turned toward Jerusalem. Some rode on stately camels and others on ambling asses, like dignity traveling with impudence. There the old, old rabbi with dreamy face, who had traveled the road fifty times nodding asleep, insecurely astride his overloaded donkey. Running alongside him were dark-haired, eager-eyed, Jewish boys coming up for the first time, full of mischief. A young mother sitting behind all the family belongings balanced across the donkey's back carried her baby up to Jerusalem while the father walked beside them. Men from Cyprus and from Antioch, from far off Greece and even from Rome, were all on the road looking forward to the vision of the city set on the hill. As the sun dropped near to the horizon everyone would be walking more slowly for they were all very tired. At last the well where they could water the beasts and by which they could camp came in sight, and the camels and donkeys sniffing the water quickened their pace. Some slept in the inn by the well, but most of them would sleep out. Rough huts were swiftly made with branches for the women, while the boys searched round for twigs and roots, broken olive branches, and quickly burning shrubs to start the campfire. Saul would almost fall asleep as he ate his crushed dates and raisins by the flickering fire. His evening prayer was soon made, then he lay on the ground under the open sky. Nor would the melancholy howling of jackals echoing among the hills keep his tired eyes open. The first glimmer of sunshine saw them on the road again in the cool of the morning. All day they trudged along, till at last coming round the shoulder of a hill they stopped to gaze. Saul's mind would fill with wonder. There, across the valley, more beautiful than an earthly palace, as it seemed to his excited mind, blazed the roof and walls of the temple itself. All round was the majesty of Roman strength, the garrison citadel with Antony's tower, the wonderful palace of Herod and its lovely gardens kept green with water brought on the long aqueduct from a spring near Bethlehem, the great circle of the Roman theatre, the gymnasium astride the Tyropian valley. Not these but the temple, the goal and center of the life of the whole Jewish race held Saul's eyes. Tired though they were they would press patiently on, going down across the glen of the brook, up again and under the gateway through the wall into Jerusalem. The next morning would find them going through the streets down past the Roman garrison tower. There they found themselves jostled and elbowed by the many-colored, ever-moving crowds of people from all the lands of the Mediterranean, from the banks of the Nile and the Tiber, the Orontes and the Euphrates, from the cities and the islands of the Aegean Sea, the mountain valleys of Greece and the deserts and plateaus of Persia. Turning to the right under the great gateway of the temple they took off their sandals from their feet, for it was holy ground, and gave their free will offering into the treasury. They waited while the spotless lamb of sacrifice was slain for them by the priest. Then Saul and his father and the others in their party went away, and in the evening they would go to an upper room to the supper, perhaps in the house of Saul's elder sister and her husband. At supper the lamb was eaten as a sign that life is saved at the cost of life. They also ate bitter herbs to bring back to their minds how bitter their forefathers' slavery in Egypt had been in the days of old, and took a paste made of crushed fruit and vinegar to recall the clay with which their fathers had made bricks under Pharaoh. So they celebrated the supper of the Passover in Jerusalem. When they had ended that supper, which is itself, as we have seen, a story of God leading his people out of slavery over sea and desert into a new land, the boy Saul, lonely, far away from home, and at the beginning of his life in this new great school, wood in the moments between lying down and falling asleep, reach out a hand into the darkness feeling after the hand of God, if happily he might find it, and indeed he had great need of that hand, for the casement of his life was opening on the foam of perilous seas. End of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 of Paul the Dauntless. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by David Leeson. Paul the Dauntless by Basil Joseph Matthews. Chapter 4 The Golden Age. As he walked down to the temple in the cool of the morning, Saul passed along streets lined with shops. Dates and figs, oranges and olives were there, colored cloths and silks, sandals and shoes. The letter-writer sat in his shaded corner, donkeys tripped by, bearing skins full of water. These things would not hold Saul, nor make him loiter. They were not so strange to a boy from Roman Tarsus, with its busy market, as they were to the peasant boys from villages like Nazareth, or even to the fisher-yudes from Bethsaida and Capernaum on the shores of the Lake of Galilee. Nor would the dark green of the olives on the gray mount across the brook Kidron and the light green of the new shoots of the vines that made such a bright freshness on the old earth draw him out into the country round about Jerusalem, for he was a city boy. Saul's heart and soul and all his senses were fascinated by the life of that wonderful building which was the center of the world to him, his school and college and cathedral, his rugby, his Oxford, his Westminster Abbey in one, the Temple. Out of the stored-up words that he had learned by heart, whole songs would come rushing in on his memory, like the one beginning, I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go unto the house of the Lord, our feet are standing within thy gates, O Jerusalem. As he threaded his way through the crowds, jostled by togad Romans and sandled Greeks, scanned by copper-featured men from Egypt and bronzed travelers from the island of Crete, passing mysterious silent Arabs and slow-paced travelers from across the Euphrates, meeting men from Asia Minor, from the Pamphylian coast and the high-table land of Phrygia, he would remember the great preacher who foretold, Many nations shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Israel, and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths, for out of Zion shall go forth instruction and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. Many nations, here they were threading their way to and fro in these very streets, but suddenly, when he had crossed the outer pavement and gone toward the marble steps, he saw before him a slab of stone, and in it were cut in bold Greek letters which he could read, Let no foreigner enter within the screen and enclosure surrounding the sanctuary, Whosoever is taken so doing will himself be the cause that death overtaketh him. Many nations shall go to the house of the God of Israel, the word had said, but here was a notice forbidding the nations to enter, threatening death to any foreigner who did so. Saul would remember that only the Jews, or the men of other nations who had become what are called proselyte Jews by being circumcised, might come in here. All other men were exiles for ever from the central place where the Jews believed God was dwelling. So Saul, the young Pharisee, proudly passed the stone of forbidding, and went up the steps into the outer court. He crossed the cool pavement which the sun had not yet warmed, passed between the pillars under a gateway with gates of gold and silver into the inner court of the men. A wavering column of smoke lifted slowly from the fire that burned perpetually on the altar of unhewn stone, and behind and beyond the smoke up more steps was the holy place, behind which was hidden the holy of holies. A shining golden roof was there, born on pure marble pillars, and the sacred curtain over the golden door hid the holy place itself from his wandering, awestruck gaze. Turning to the side, Saul would see, under the cool blue shadows of the cloisters, groups gathered round teachers, some arguing, others listening, while a white-bearded sage with dreaming eyes expounded the law and the prophets. Finding the place where Gamaliel sat, he would naturally go there, leaning against one of the pillars he could rest his hot cheek against the cool marble, and listen to the teaching of the finest Pharisee of his day. "'The mind of the student must be like a cistern lined with cement. It must hold every drop of knowledge that enters in, losing nothing,' said Gamaliel. Saul already knew that the water in Jerusalem was stored in enormous cisterns when the rains fell, and that the people would die of thirst if the cisterns were to break or leak. The ideal of the student,' said his teacher, was to hold the pure water of the wisdom of the past. That was the strength and the weakness of the teaching of the Jewish schooling. The Jew could hold ideas like a cistern. He was able to remember the old, but rarely to make new ideas. When he argued it was usually by hurling quotations at his opponent, and not, as a Greek would argue, by a closely reasoned line of fresh thought. The great teachers of the Jews were men like Gamaliel who said, thus spoke Moses, not original thinkers like Plato and Aristotle. But if they could not reason wonderful philosophies, they could see marvelous visions of the future, more beautiful than anything we have ever yet reached in practice. Of a time when men would beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. The Pharisees' great aim was to know and obey all the law, for they believed that if one man obeyed the whole law for a whole day, the Messiah who was to bring in the golden age of freedom and peace would arrive. So they laid down all sorts of astonishing details as to exactly how the Jews should wash and keep the Sabbath with endless arguments as to what was work and what was not. This was called the Spoken Law, or Torah, to distinguish it from the Written Law of Moses. Just as he had seen students writing with an ivory style on a wax tablet, so Saul wrote on his memory the weary details of the law. You may lean a ladder from one window of a dove-coat to another on the Sabbath, Saul would hear, but you may not move the foot of it. You may tap the ground with your foot, but not rub your sandal along the earth, for that would be plowing. You must not pluck an ear of corn or rub the corn out of it with your hands, for you would be guilty of reaping and threshing, nor must you light a fire on the Sabbath. He learned how to stand and how to bow when praying, how to wash his hands, how many steps he might walk on the Sabbath, and a thousand other things. Yet Gamaliel, his master, was a man who loved the richer thoughts from the great teachers of the past. Sometimes like a great light in a dark place, one of these beautiful words would come out, and Saul's whole spirit would leap up when he heard Gamaliel say, That says, Hillel, what is hateful to yourself, do not to your fellow men. This is the whole law. The rest is only explanation. Go, study. Starting out from the temple in the evening, Saul would pass by the Roman citadel. Quo Vadis, the challenge from the man on the sentry go, to a skulking figure at the garrison gate, the clank of sword and buckler, the rattle of chains of the cavalry horses and the stamp of their restless hoofs in the stables, the flair of a torch, all would startle the brooding student out of his thoughts of the law. The Roman citadel loomed above him, silhouetted against the sky was the high watchtower, Antony's tower they called it, he would remember, after Mark Antony, the Roman ruler, who entertained Cleopatra years ago at Tarsus. Rome, the word would send a strangely mingled feeling through him. Saul was a Roman citizen, but his swift arteries pulsed with the passionate blood of a Jew. Rome had made the throne of this young student's great forefather and namesake, Saul, an empty thing. Here in Jerusalem, where David once led his soldiers out over the hills to destroy the enemies of his people, Rome now ruled with sword and lash and cross. The judgment seat, where Solomon once sat to give his decrees, was now filled by a proud Roman, who cared mainly for his chances of promotion from Rome and his bribes from the rich in Jerusalem. If they dared to lift a hand to strike for freedom, the Jews were crucified, so Saul had learned in the evenings when the students got together and talked the gossip of the city. Saul's heart thumped with anger within him as he went through the streets in the evening. Yet Saul the Jew was also, Paul, the Roman citizen. In the morning, as he went down again to the temple, he would feel that he would give his very life to bring in the new age when the Messiah would rule in the city of David again. Would there ever be a king of the Jews in Jerusalem? Then as he sat at the feet of Gamaliel for the morning lesson, he would look up with a startled joy as he heard the old man's voice shaking with the same longing that he himself felt. From the tremulous lips of the teacher would come the lava of the volcanic fires of patriotism in the words of the Song of the Golden Age and of the Coming of the New King, written over a hundred years before by a fervid Pharisee. The words focused all the burning rays of Saul's desire till they scorched the very soul of the student. O Lord, raise up for them their king, the Son of David. He shall bring glory to the Lord, in a place which all the world shall see. He shall sweep clean Jerusalem and make it holy as it was in the olden days, a just king and taught by God as he who will reign. There shall be no wrong in his days among them, for all shall be holy. Their king is the Lord Messiah. As he heard the words, Saul would see with the keen vision of his mind's eye a young valiant prince coming up over the hills at the head of a glittering army, sweeping the Romans out of the city and the land, and himself ruling not only over Jerusalem, but the whole earth. Immortal words that Saul had learned would ring in his head. There was given him power and glory and a kingdom, that all people, nations and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his kingdom shall not be destroyed. The song of the golden age had been written a hundred years before Saul was in Jerusalem, yet in all that century the fighting prince had not arrived. Would he ever come? When will he come? the young students would ask Gameliel. What will he be like? He may come at any day, at any hour. He will come when the need is greatest, and great is the need now. He will be of the tribe of Judah, a son of David. He will be born, he may already have been born, in Bethlehem or Jerusalem. He will lead an army, be prepared, beware of the false messiahs who are leading the people astray, watch, for the conquering king will certainly come. In such words as these, Gameliel would tell his students of the golden age that was to be, and the prince who even then might be preparing his army. What a harsh, contemptuous laugh would have broken out in that group of law students in the temple if someone could have told them the truth which no one then knew, that the conquering prince was already in their country, that in a village among the hills, three days' journey northward, he was in a carpenter's shop making yolks for oxen. Yet, even as Saul and his fellow students walked from the temple in the afternoon talking of the coming king, the young village carpenter, Jesus, shook the sweet-sinted shavings and sawdust from his tunic, and, pulling his girdle tighter as he gave a smiling word to his mother, walked out of the shade of the cool workshop into the sunny street, and climbed the glorious hills that girdle quiet Nazareth. CHAPTER V THROUGH SPRING AFTER SPRING THE STORKS TRAILLED NORTHWORD BY JORDAN AND DESERT, SEA AND PLANE, WHILE SAW THE STUDENT OF THE LAW WAS LEARNING. Like the wrestlers whom he watched at Tarsus at the Greek games when he went home, he grew quicker and more confident as, year after year, he tussled in swift argument with his fellow students or even tried about of words with Gamelio. So eager was he for the triumph of the true worship, so passionate was his reverence for the one holy god that he was ready to kill, he even believed that God would want him to kill his own brother if that brother were to ask him to worship any of these other gods. The words that he knew so well would ring through his head, words from the law of Moses, you shall not consent unto him nor listen to him, neither shall your eye pity him, neither shall you spare, neither shall you conceal him, but you shall surely kill him, you shall stone him with stones that he die, because he has tried to draw you away from the Lord your God. Yet, even as Saul repeated the awful words of the law, Jesus, who had now left his Nazareth home, was walking with those young Galilee fishermen whom he had called from their boats by the lake to follow him, and was saying to them, Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you. To him who smites you on the one cheek offer also the other. Love your enemies and do them good, and you shall be sons of the most high, for he is kind toward the unthankful and evil. Andrew and Simon, John, James, and Philip and the others, as they sat round him on the grass of the mountainside, heard the words, Happy are you poor, for the kingdom of God is yours. Happy are you who hunger now, for you shall be fed. Happy are you who weep, for you shall laugh. Be happy when men hate you and insult you. Dance for joy, for just so did they treat the prophets. Love your enemies, and forgive those who have done evil to you. Their spirits leapt out in answer to the glorious height and might of his appeal. A thought took shape in their minds. Could it really be that this was he, the Prince Messiah, for whom they and all their fellow countrymen looked to save their people? Yes, but if he is the Messiah, they would ask one another. Will he lead us and all the people from the villages and towns against the Romans? Shall we make him king of the Jews? What about getting swords and spears for fighting? He gathered them round him, and with gentle simplicity and dignity told them of a kingdom that was not of force but of love, a kingdom where the tired, starving prodigal son and the loathed tax collector, the poor woman and the strong young men would all come in the spirit of children, in happy comradeship and holy worship. Then one day, in answer to a question from Jesus, whom do ye say that I am? The impetuous Simon blurted it out, you are the Christ! He took a baby on his knee, and his arm was round a boy who stood by his side. The kingdom, he said, is of such as these, whoever does not accept the kingdom like one of these will never enter it. And a great sternness came over his face as he declared, whoever makes one of these least stumble, it would be better that a millstone were hung round his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. Then he walked on southward, walked apart from them, his face set and stern, on through the gathering night, to face all the tense hate that he knew had gathered against him at Jerusalem. The Jerusalem which Saul, now a graduate, had probably left to return to his home at Tarsus. The snarling priests of the Jews and the cruel soldiers of Rome were at one for once in their hate of Jesus. For his kingdom was to be higher and stronger than either the thousand rules of the priests or the sword and the fortress of them, and they knew it and hated him. At last he stood in the temple court in all the might of his own simple majesty, there, where Saul had been learning the whole duty of the Pharisee, he stood and raised his voice as he pointed to priests and Pharisees, scribes and Sadducees. Alas for you, cried Jesus, teachers and Pharisees, play-actors, humbugs, you will not go into the kingdom and you will not let anyone else go in. You white-washed graves, outwardly clean, you are inwardly rotten. You slaughterers of the prophets whom you flog and kill. How can you, Alas, how can you escape condemnation? He turned his back on them, left them for his last supper and the agony in the garden. After supper, when he had gone into the garden across the brook, there came the flickering glow of torches whose light danced and wavered as the soldiers stumbled down the dark ravine and crossed in to Gethsemane. They took him to the Hall of Hewnstone, where the hastily gathered Council of Priests heard him say what was to them the last blasphemy, I am the Christ. They called him liar, and those who wore the robes of servants of God spat in his face blindfolded him, let the soldiers beat him, jeering at him, and saying, now, prophet, guess who smote thee? To the sound of the voice of cursing Peter, saying, I never knew the man, he crossed from the Hall of the Jewish Council to the Roman Judgment Hall to look in the face of careless pilot, and to enter into the crafty, coarse, shifty presence of Herod. They lashed him with a many-thonged whip, they crushed a cruel crown of thorns on his head, put on him a mock royal robe and a scepter reed, and the cry went up to the brazen sky, crucify him, crucify him! For six hours, nailed to the Roman gibbet cross, he hung till his cry came, it is finished! They buried him in a stone-cut sepulcher. As the dawn came up over Galilee one morning, and men who had fished all night without catching anything drew near to the shore, a voice came over the water, Comrades, have you any fish? Oh! they answered, throw out the net on the other side! And it was full of fish. Christ had risen. He was there again as in the great days. Once more and for the last time the Comrades sat to breakfast on the beach. The last words that he said that morning were the first that he had spoken on the same pebble beach three years before. Follow me! And somewhere Saul, the young law graduate, was rising that same morning, putting on the spotless white robe of the Pharisee, washing his hands and face in running water, and making his morning prayer toward the temple. He was trying to do the will of God in every detail. To him came the story that was gathering the people in gossip in the bazaars of Jerusalem, that the followers of the crucified rebel Nazarene, Jesus, declared that he had risen again and were actually worshipping in his name. Saul's soul shuddered at the blasphemy. Cursed is he who hangs on the tree, said the law. These blasphemous ignorant Galilean peasants were worshipping the cursed. The refrain of the law would hammer again at the brain of Saul as he thought of these men. Neither shall your eye pity him, neither shall you spare, but you shall surely kill him, you shall stone him with stones that he die. CHAPTER VI Whether Saul was at home in Tarsus when Jesus was crucified and rose again, we cannot truly know. But now, when all Jerusalem was full of the story of the Nazarene movement, he was certainly back walking in the temple courts and greeting with reverence his old master Gamaliel. In the shadow of the cloisters, behind the marble pillars, he would gather with young men of his own stamp, hot-blooded, keen-witted young zealous Pharisees, and go over the whole maddening story. As it sunk into his mind his anger grew hot beyond measure. Yes, they would say we thought that when this pretender, Jesus of Nazareth, was taken up the hill there and nailed to the cross between two other miscreants, that would be the end, and that these Galilean fellows would go quietly back to their fishing. But now they actually come into these very courts and blaspheme this holy place by declaring that Jesus has risen from the dead, Jesus, who must be cursed, as the law says, for he has hung upon the tree. And they say, May the Holy One of Israel forgive me for repeating it, that the most high has poured out his spirit on the followers of Jesus. What is worse still, the people are beginning to believe them. There are thousands of these Nazarenes in Jerusalem now, even some of the priests have gone over to them. They go down there in Solomon's porch and speak to one another and to the people. But last night they were locked up by the high priest, and they are to be tried today. See, here they come. There in the temple court stood the Nazarene leaders, and prominent among them a dark-haired, radiant, courageous looking man. The captain of the temple guard came up to Peter, as he was speaking to the people, and led him and his friends away to the assembly of priests, while the people round about murmured to one another, saying that these interfering officials ought to be stoned. Saul was probably there, and if so, he would see the high priest look straight at Peter and say, we ordered you not to teach in this name of Jesus, yet you have filled Jerusalem with it. Now, forsooth, you want to bring this man's blood on us. We must obey God rather than men, Peter said boldly, and God raised up Jesus whom you and his arm swung round over the company of priests killed, hanging him on a tree. God lifted him up to be a prince and to save us, we, and Peter would turn to point to his friends, have seen these things, and the Holy Spirit also, whom God has given to those who obey him, is witness that this is true. The eyes in front of Peter gleamed with anger. The mouths grew stern. Let us kill them, was the word that went from priest to priest as they listened with startled faces to Peter accusing them of killing God's Messiah. Then a sudden silence fell as all eyes turned toward a commanding figure who stood up. It is Gamaliel, the word went round. Saul would crane his neck and listen intently for what his old teacher might say. In Saul's own heart the word of the law for such blasphemous idolaters as these Nazarenes throbbed the answer, you shall stone him with stones that he'd die. But Gamaliel said, Take the men away for a time. At a signal from the high priest the captain of the temple had Peter and his friends led away. Take care, said Gamaliel when the Nazarenes were out of earshot. Take care what you decide to do about these men. My advice is, let them alone. If this work is simply of men it will come to nothing. If it is of God you cannot overthrow it. And you may discover, after all, that you have been fighting against God. Saul, in spite of his youth, would hardly be able to keep silence at such advice, he disagreed violently with every word his old master had said. Tear out this blasphemous clique, root and branch would have been his advice if he had been asked. He felt thus not because he disliked the men themselves, but because he really believed that they had put a pretending messiah on a level with the holy God. They were making a parody of all the things Saul held to be most sacred. To preserve the holy religion of Jehovah these men must be killed as the law commanded. But the wise speech of Gamaliel carried the day. The priests decided not to kill Peter and John and the other leaders, though they would not let them off without some punishment. So the Nazarenes were brought to the priests again and their backs were bared to the pitiless rods of the temple guard who reigned strokes upon them. Now, said Caiaphas, do not ever again speak in the name of Jesus. But on the following morning, if he went to the marble steps of the temple, he would have seen these incorrigible Galilean peasants already speaking. And there were the crowds who listened eagerly to the good news of the love and power of God the Father, who had raised Jesus, the true messiah. Those who joined the Nazarenes learned, beside the love of the Father, to obey Jesus one great commandment that they should love one another. And when they met in one another's houses for supper and broke the little loaves of bread and drank their cup of wine together, they did it in remembrance of him. Saul walked along the streets of Jerusalem, brooding over the growth of this new party of Nazarenes. He nursed his anger till his hot young blood boiled within him in hate of them. He must have been perplexed sometimes, for he would see in their faces and bearing a blithe courage, a cheerful boldness that neither swaggered nor cringed. They glowed with some inner secret light. They seemed always lively in spirit, like flowers kept fresh by a hidden spring of living water. If asked for their secret, they said that the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, who Jesus had promised should come, was in them. Saul's anger would break out again at this parody, as it seemed to him, of sacred things. He had argued with the Nazarenes, especially had he and others of the Cilician synagogue where he worshipped in Jerusalem discussed with a young Jew, like himself a Jew from a foreign land, named Stephen. But neither he nor the other learned men from Tarsus and Rome and Egypt could break down Stephen's assurance of the risen Jesus. Unable to overcome Stephen in discussion, they got some men to go down to the temple to the priests to witness against him. When these men came in front of the members of the great council called the Sanhedrin, they said, There is a man named Stephen, one of these Nazarenes who says that Jesus will come and destroy all this place, and they pointed to the glorious temple of shining marble with its roof of gold, and to the sacred portico hiding the Holy of Holies, and he dares to say that this Jesus will change all the customs that Moses gave us. This was rebellion and blasphemy in one, so the council gave orders for Stephen's arrest and trial. The men went and took hold of Stephen and led him down to the Hall of Hewnstone, while outside the people flocked together to talk about the trial. The president of the council took his seat. Round him in a great semi-circle were the other 69 judges. In front of them stood the accused Stephen. The witnesses told their story again. Are these things so? asked the president. They all fastened their eyes on Stephen, and they saw not a cringing frightened prisoner, but a man whose glowing face shone like the face of an angel. There was the dead and chilling silence of watchful enemies, as Stephen's voice rang out clearly in the hall. Brothers and fathers, listen! And he told them the great story which they knew so well, but of which they never saw the true meaning, the story of how the God of Glory had appeared to their father Abraham and led him from one land to another, and then had carried Joseph to Egypt. Leading again the people under Moses back from Egypt across the desert to the promised land where Solomon built the temple for the house of God. At this point they would all lean forward to listen intently to what was to follow, for the accusation against Stephen was that he had scorned this temple, declared that it would be destroyed. Swiftly he went on with a quotation from a prophet in whom they all professed to believe, showing that the most high does not live in a temple made with hands, or as the prophet put it, the sky is my throne and the earth the footstool of my feet. What kind of house will you build me? asks the Lord. Does not my hand make all these things? Stephen's argument was that they and not he were the real blasphemers, they who put the marble and gold temple above the great spirit, the God of Glory who made everything, who sent Jesus whom the priests had destroyed, though he was greater than the temple. So he turned on them with sudden passion and flung out his scathing denunciation. Startled, they saw the accused suddenly become the terrible accuser. You stiff-necked men, you always set yourself against that holy spirit. Your fathers did, and so do you. They killed the prophets long ago, killed the men who told that the just one was coming, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. Yes, you who have the law and do not keep it. All pretense of judicial trial was swept aside, with frenzied faces they ground and gnashed their teeth with anger on him. But even as their fury rose, Stephen's stern anger fell from him. He looked up above the heads of his accusers, up and away to a vision that held his eyes. I see the heavens opened, he declared, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God. Blasphemy, blasphemy! Rose in a yell of horror and rage, they shouted to drown the voice of Stephen and put their hands over their ears so that they should not hear a word more. The court rose as one man and rushed on him. They dragged him up the streets out to the city wall, under the dark shadows of the gateway. Stone him, stone him! came the horse and hideous cry, though out of windows peered the heads of temerous, weeping women, and under the shadow of doorway's boys, who had learned to think what a splendid hero Stephen was, shivered with a nameless dread as he passed. In the crowd was a young, hot-blooded Pharisee whose heart thumped, stone him, stone him! Saul, whose natural tenderness was all burned up in a great hate of these maddening Nazarenes and their risen Jesus. Out from the shadow of the northern gateway they came on to the edge of a ravine beyond the city wall, the place of stoning. The witnesses threw off their robes in a heap at the feet of the young Pharisees, Saul. Then, stooping, they lifted the gray, jagged stones that lay on the ground, pushing with frenzied hands others thrust Stephen out over the edge of the ridge. Lord Jesus! he called, lifting his face to the skies, receive my spirit! The stones beat upon him, falling to his knees, and he called out again, in the very spirit of his master, who had said, Father, forgive them! Lord, lay not this sin to their charge! And when he had said this, he fell asleep. The stoners wiped the grit from their hands and stooped to pick up their cloaks from the feet of Saul. They had drawn first blood. Did any pity move in Saul himself at the sight of the bruised body lying there? He must have winced, for all through his life he showed a strong tenderness. But he believed that God called him to scourge these Nazarenes, and the words of the law would come back to him. Neither shall your eye pity him, neither shall you spare. Back to the city, then, beating down the pity that he felt, Saul, at the head of a body of temple guards, scoured the streets, broke into the houses of those who professed faith in Jesus and binding them, men and women alike, he had them driven like cattle down to the prison. Men and women fled from Jerusalem by hundreds. They hurried away among the hills of Judea and northward into Samaria. And everywhere, when they settled down into their village or passed from place to place, they told the story of Jesus. Saul, being exceedingly mad against the Nazarenes and striving in a frenzied campaign to quiet the qualms of remorse that he felt, had stamped his foot into the fire of the faith that Jerusalem to put it out. The blazing embers flew out and kindled new flame in all the land. He breathed out threatening and murder, and his fury fed itself on the stories that came in from pilgrims to Jerusalem of the way the Nazarene faith was spreading. Saul brooded over it. One day, having come to a decision, he went down to the temple court and sought the high priest. The eyes of the old man would light up with approval as he heard Saul pouring out his desire to go north and stamp out the Nazarenes. His plan was to go straight to the great capital of the North Country, Damascus. If Jerusalem and Damascus were once scoured and all the disciples of Jesus there hailed to prison, the movement would die out in the isolated villages. Calling his letter writer, Caiaphas dictated letters to the chief Jews in the synagogues of Damascus, saying that, if any of the Nazarenes were there, Saul had authority to take them prisoner and lead them as captives to Jerusalem. Saul swiftly prepared himself for the great journey. With his young face turned northward, he passed out of Jerusalem under the arch of the great gateway in the city wall into the open country. CHAPTER 7 THE GREAT ADVENTURE The lengths of the Roman roads stretched ahead of Saul and his companions as they rode out in the sunshine. He climbed till he could look back on the city of Jerusalem and all its buildings ringed round with the grim walls. The line of the wall was broken with many towers. On one of these the armor of some Roman sentry would catch the glint of the morning light. But Saul would barely turn his head to look back, for he was on urgent business, and it was outside that wall that he had stood consenting to the death of Stephen. Would the memory of that face never leave him? The road ran close by the hill Gibeah, on whose fortified crest his great ancestor and namesake had lived before the days when he was called to be the first of all the kings of Israel. King Saul had slain his thousands with sword and javelin in his battles against the enemies of Israel, but even he had never seemed more sure that he was fighting in the cause of God than was this young namesake who was now dashing northward to make havoc among the disciples. Yet, even as Saul hurried on, the questions would rise in his mind. What was the secret of the calm, cheerful boldness of these strange people? They must be wrong about Jesus, and yet was it possible that, after all, Gamaliel might be right when he said, Beware lest you find yourselves fighting against God. Beyond Gibeah Saul rode northward till the great mass of Mount Ephraim bent the road to the right. Saul would see laden camels coming up a road that ran in from the left carrying goods from the Roman port of Caesarea, but he himself would keep the direct road by the hills of Samaria. He stopped to drink at the well of Jacob, and perhaps to sleep at a wayside rest-house there, whence he would see the sun set between the mount of the curse and the mount of the blessing, Gerizim and Ebal. But nothing except the need for food and drink and sleep would make him pause. The road was a busy one. A Roman colonial would pass, riding to his new station, with his retinue of horses and mules, the shaded palanquin for his wife swung on the shoulders of slave-bearers, the clattering guard of soldiers, horse and foot, behind, a caravan of men of the desert walking beside their camels wound southward, bringing bales of Damascus cloth for selling in the bazaars of Jerusalem. Then Saul came over the hills down into the broad hot valley of Jordan, with Mount Gilboa lifting itself on his left, and crossing the stream that runs from the valley of Jezreel on his left, Saul and his friends marched straight on, till at last he could look up the lake of Galilee, with its busy encircling road joining up the fishing towns under the quiet hills dappled with flocks of roaming sheep and goats. If he had stopped here to linger on the lakeside and to ask the men who sat mending their nets about the Jezus who had sailed across its shining blue waters and preached from a fishing boat to the people gathered on the white beach, Saul would have heard such stories of love and healing as would have deepened his questions whether, after all, Jesus was the great pretender. The lake, however, with its quiet industry, its brown fishermen, and its brooding hills reflected in the bright water, could not hold him. To him, hunger and fatigue, the lake and the hills, stream and bridge and road, were just obstacles between him and his goal, Damascus. Skirting the west bank of the lake past Magdala, and riding across the Ganesaret plain, he climbed the northward hills thrust out like gnarled roots of Mount Lebanon. Then turning east, he dropped again to the valley of the River Jordan, which he crossed by a Roman bridge. He would see the oxen dragging wagons up the hills, with the heavy solid wheels creaking and the driver shouting as he prodded the slow beasts with his goat. Then one ill-tempered ox, Saul might notice, kicked against the goat, only to drive the iron point further into his own skin. Day after day Saul pressed on, higher and higher loomed the great ridge of Anti-Levanon, where the oaks clothed the high range and flecked the rock clefts with green. In the heat of the day he would look up over his left shoulder and feel glad to see the white summit of Mount Hermon. From the melting snows of Hermon the streams ran down to make all the parched land glad. For three days that strong, majestic mountain of white peacefulness was his companion, gleaming pink in the dawn as he started each day and silhouetted in royal purple as the sun set over its shoulder. The last day of his journey had at length come. In the hour before sunrise, the hour when the shepherd leads his flock from the fold onto the hills while the dew still fringes the cup of the anemone, Saul started out from the rest-house with his companions. The dawn came up out of the desert land eastward, and the Hermon height glowed as they pressed forward over the volcanic table-land which at last drops down on the plain of Damascus. The sun lifted slowly in the shadeless land. The hour of noon drew near when the power of the sun is like a burden bowing the shoulders of the traveller. The camel caravans drew out of the road under the eaves of a rest-house, and no sound of bells broke the burning silence that only seemed deepened by the hum of many insects. The travellers came over a crest of a low hill. The road stretched ahead of them across the plain of orchards beyond which the walls of Damascus rose, a dream-city, a mirage of the desert she looked as her roofs quivered, seen through the trembling air. It was the hour when all the world of the east rests, but the young campaigner was in the full flood of his boundless energy. Ahead was the city where he was to win his spurs. Feeling in his breast for the sealed and signed parchment of the high priest, he bent his head to the blazing sun and pressed on. Nothing, it seemed, could stop this scourge of the Nazarenes. But even as his next step was taken on that shoulder of the hill, at that next white corner of the road, he met his great adventure. He came to that moment that made all his life new, a moment that changed the history of the world. Suddenly, he tells us, and the experience is so sacred and wonderful that one dare not try to describe it in any except his own words. They're shown from heaven a great light round about me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goad. Who are you, Lord? I answered, and he said to me, I am Jesus the Nazarene, whom you are persecuting. I said, what shall I do, Lord? And the Lord said to me, rise and go to Damascus, and it shall be told you there the things that are appointed for you to do. So Saul stood up, opened his eyes, and could not see. Damascus, the whole plain, the white crest of Hermon, the green of the orchards, all were gone. He groped but could not find his way. As they saw his hands vainly reaching for a hold, those who were with him realized that he was blind. They put out their hands to his and led him over the last league of his journey. Saul was shut in on himself. He could not look out on the sights of the roadside, nor return the glances of the curious peasants who gazed at this white-robed young rabbi being led along the road. There was only one thing that he could see, and it was burned in on his brain in that blaze that smote him to his knees. He had seen that vision after which nothing could ever be the same again, the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. His brain, the mind that had been so confident of itself, reeled at the thought of what it all meant. Jesus the Nazarene was alive, alive, and had conquered him. Saul, the brilliant law graduate, the young rabbi, the rising hope of the Pharisees. Under his mantle he felt again that crisp roll, the High Priest's letter to the synagogue priests, telling them to help Saul inhaling the Nazarenes off to prison. And now there was no mistaking it. He himself was a Nazarene, newborn. He knew that Christ had given him birth to brother all the souls on earth. In that hour, when he staggered toward Damascus with wide, unseeing eyes, did an inner picture come back on him? A furious crowd outside the walls of Jerusalem, men stooping to pick up jagged stones, the air thick with missiles, a face looking up, and a voice, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit! Not even blindness could blot out that awful picture of himself, Saul, running by and backing those who were slaying Stephen. And now he himself, like Stephen, was a Nazarene. The sound of the echo of his own footsteps told Saul that he was passing under an arch of the city gate. He heard the steps and voices of the crowds going to and fro up the footway, the grind of chariot wheels and clatter of hoofs in the road. He felt the cooler shadow of the covered way. When his companions stopped and knocked at a doorway which was opened, Saul was led into the house of a Damascan Jew, Judas. From the roof of that house a man making his evening prayer toward Jerusalem would see the sun dropping behind the purpling shoulders of Hermon. It was sunset in Damascus, but it was dawn in the life of Saul. CHAPTER VIII. The Untraveled World On a rug on the floor motionless, seeing nothing, eating and drinking nothing, Saul began to grope his way in the new life that had begun. He was in a luminous darkness, dazed with light. Men said he was blind, and truly his eyes were sightless, yet he himself knew that he really saw now for the first time. The face of Jesus of Nazareth. It was the one unfading vision before his poor sightless eyes. In that face Saul saw, in the sound of that voice in his ears he heard infinite power and triumphant love. He was dizzy with a new happiness. The consuming fire of his love and worship for the Christ burned in him. The Christ who, through the power of God, had conquered death, and had then with incredible mercy called Saul the persecutor himself to his service. Saul had harried the Nazarenes as blasphemers because they declared that the impossible had happened in the peasant Jesus, but now he knew that it was true, for wheel or woe, come prison or scourge, stoning or exile or the cross itself, he saw was Christ's man. Now he understood why those Nazarenes always glowed with an inner light. This was the secret of Stephen's radiant face, even while the stones beat him to the earth. Nothing could separate him from the love of Christ. Then his hand went to his breast where the parchment lay. What an impossible change had come. This letter rolled up in his robe, which he fingered but could not see. This authority to put the Nazarenes in Damascus in chains? It was just so much waste-parchment, must be torn up. It belonged to a dead past. Really, it had become an authority to put himself in prison. What also of his career as a rabbi at Jerusalem? That was ended for ever. What would Gamaliel think and say when he heard that his brilliant pupil, the hope of Phariseism, had turned Nazarene, and his own people at Tarsus, his stern father, the Pharisee of the Pharisees, would he ever speak to his son again? Yet Saul was, in all this turmoil of thoughts, dizzy, not with sorrow but with a new happiness. He felt as though he had been let out of a dark life-long prison and had found a glorious liberty in a new unexplored land. The great blinding vision that had come to him on the ridge was an arch where through gleamed the untraveled world. The first task then was to explore this vast new continent of thought and to do this with the greatest of all companions. Day after day he brooded there in his blindness. At last, as he sat thinking, a footstep came into the room, and the swish of a man's robe reached his quick ears. Saul sat silent. He felt mysterious hands out of the darkness laid on his head. Brother Saul, the words dropped on his ears gratefully, then followed the sudden and unexpected words, receive your sight and the gift of the Holy Spirit. In that moment scales seemed to drop from his eyes. He looked up and saw before him a Jew of Damascus, a follower of Jesus, named Ananias, who told Saul he was to be a witness to every one that Jesus was indeed sent by God. How could Saul do this? He knew, indeed it seemed to him to be the only thing that he did know, that Jesus, who spoke to him on the road, was the Son of God. But how to explain it all, to make other people understand, that was the problem. Why, he had come to Damascus to clap chains on people for saying this very thing. He must be alone to think it all out. He took some food and was strong again. After he had spent a little time with Ananias and the other disciples in Damascus, he took his traveling staff, girded up his robe, and went out. He found himself in the splendid colonnade of a great Roman street. It was called Straight Street, because it stretched like an arrow right across Damascus from east to west. Saul stood in the shadow of the covered footway and saw Roman chariots rattling over the broad, flagged central way. The chariots were held up here and there by strings of camels coming in from the east gate, the ship of the desert rolling into the port of Damascus. Donkeys passed, each laden with a rick of widths for making baskets, till Saul could see only the long ears and the head of each ass peering out from the great arch of twigs. Looking down the great avenue with its rows of marble columns, between the footpaths and the central chariot way, he saw a triumphal arch spanning the street, with triple ways passing beneath it. Saul turned eastward and passed along the footway. The plash of water in fountains sounded gratefully cool in his ears. He would look in and see the mottled moving reflection of the pool on the cloistered vaulting of the courtyard of some great Roman's house. Water. There seemed to be unlimited water in Damascus. Here, even on the very edge of the desert, while in Jerusalem they were obliged like misers to store the reins in their great underground cisterns, whence this plenty? He would learn that out from under the mountains west of the city, a sacred river ran through Cavern's measureless to man. It was the ancient Abana, which made and makes Damascus. For this river has saved all that plain from being desert, watering her lovely orchards of figs and pomegranate, her vineyards of purple grapes, her plantations of cool green melons. Olive-faced Jews, sturdy Roman soldiers, weather-beaten Arabs from the desert, brown-faced boys on their way to school, as each went about his own business, wove in and out of the moving threads of the tapestry of the street. He was to be a witness, Ananias had said, not against, but for, Jesus, to all people. To all these? The question must have framed itself in Saul's mind as he gazed at the medley of peoples. Saul went under the rounded arch of the east gate, and, without companion, walked out toward the low purple hills seven leagues away on the edge of the desert. He wanted to be entirely alone, to go out into the desert, and there discover what he was to do with his future. He could think this out, not in the rush of the Roman city of Damascus, but in the silence that is in the starry sky, the peace that is among the lonely hills, where he could hear the voice speaking within him. So he went out into the yellow sandy wastes of Arabia. There, in some oasis of the desert, maybe, under a palm-tree by a little well, he sat, and, like a great explorer, went voyaging on strange seas of thought alone. He plunged into virgin forests of thought, and cut his way through where no one had gone, throwing bridges across deep chasms that no man had ever crossed before, chasms like that bottomless ravine between law and love. The thoughts which he worked out then have guided what men have believed all through the centuries since. It was a difficult exploring for Saul, who, like a scout, went ahead of the army to spy out the new land. Some beliefs that Saul had always had from a boy he held even after his meeting with Jesus. He had always believed that God is all wise, all good, all powerful. He now held this in a deeper, truer way than before. He had always believed that he must be obedient to God absolutely and do his will. He now felt a tingling joy in disobedience because he saw that God is love. He had always believed that God had promised to send the Messiah, the saving prince, to rule the people, and that God would keep that promise. Now he knew that the promise had been kept only in a surprising and glorious way, as high above all that he had expected as the heavens were higher than the earth. Some of Saul's new thoughts came from the old root of his boy ideas, but were utterly changed, like those shining, knotting anemones he saw on the roadside which had sprung from hard, brown, unattractive roots. While his life, for instance, from the days when he sat writing with his finger on the sand-strewn floor of the school at Tarsus, he had believed that the law of Moses was to govern every hour of every day of his life, from washing his hands in the morning to taking off his sandals at night. God was like a great headmaster who made rules for his school, but the students never saw his face. Moses had received the law for the school from God, and the rabbis, like Gamaliel, as assistant masters in the school had added more laws, till now they were endless. Saul had been so mad against Jesus and his followers, just because he believed that the Nazarenes were breaking all the rules of the great school of God, the school in which Saul was training to become an assistant master. But now, Jesus was actually radiantly, gloriously alive, and had met Saul, and Saul knew that in the face of Jesus he saw the face of the head of the school himself, and the face was love. The one rule in the whole school was the commandment, love one another. That commandment, Jesus had himself said, is all the law. The other great thoughts that came to Saul, he will tell us himself later as we go over the seas and mountains with him. All we need remember now is that Jesus, the heroic, loving Son of God, fearless, pure, and strong, stern to the proud, and tender and healing to the weak and sick, was now Saul's hero and savior. Saul henceforth simply lived to fight his good fight under the stormy banner of Jesus Christ. As after his long time of thinking and prayer, Saul again pulled his leather girdle tighter and started his walk back from Arabia to Damascus. He knew quite well that he was in for a long perilous fight. The Jews would be as exceedingly mad against him as he himself had been against Stephen and the others. They would imprison, scourge, stone him. It would have been so easy to many men to slip away into some other part of the Roman Empire and keep quiet. But not for Saul. He turned his face toward Damascus and Jerusalem, the places where the hate against him would be hottest. He walked across the desert again till at last he came to the walls of Damascus and would see the soldier on sentry-go at the east gate, armed from head to foot. I too, Saul told himself, must put on the armor. Hold your ground, he would say to himself as he later said to others. Tighten the belt of truth about you. Wear straightness as your coat of mail. Have your feet shot with the strong shoes of peace. Take faith as your shield. Put the helmet of saving on your head and grasping your hand your broadsword, the word of God. So he passed in under that Damascus gate through which he was never to come out again. For men who thirsted for his blood were soon to watch at all the gates of Damascus day and night. End of chapter eight.