 Chapter 9 of Paul the Dauntless. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by David Leeson. Paul the Dauntless. By Basil Joseph Matthews. Chapter 9. The Two Escapes. Saul lost no time in going to the Damascus Synagogues and preaching that Jesus was the Son of God, to the amazement of his hearers. Can we believe our eyes and ears? They asked one another. Is this not the man who harried the people in Jerusalem who called on this name? The very man who came here on purpose to carry them all off in chains to Caiaphas? Argument protest threats only made Saul all the more vigorous. The disappointment and fury of the Jews living in Damascus grew ungovernable. Saul was a turncoat, a renegade, a traitor, a mad blasphemer. The word of the law that Saul had turned against Stephen they now turned on him. Your eye shall not pity him, you shall surely slay him. They planned to assassinate him. Going to the king of the city, Eritus, who was ruling Damascus for the Roman emperor, they managed to persuade him to set a guard against Saul's escaping. At every gate of the city stood figures with deadly knife concealed waiting for him. Day and night the grim, sleepless watch went on for the blood of Saul. How could he escape? All round the city stretched the high, unbroken walls. It seemed that the life of Saul, like the life of Stephen, must end under a hail of stones. But built right into and on the high, broad walls of Damascus City were houses with windows that sometimes actually hung over the edge. The owner of one of these houses was a Nazarene. So a line of escape was planned, under cover of the dark, and, shrouded in his Jewish traveling cloak, Saul climbed up and crept into the house of this disciple. He went into a room and peered out of the window. Saul was silent save for the weird howl of a distant jackal on the edge of the orchards and the grunt of a sleeping camel. Overhead the stars made tiny quivering points in the intense darkness of the sky. Looking down through the blackness, Saul tried to gauge the depth from the window to the ground. Here are the rope and the basket, said one, pointing to a deep round rush basket with a stout rope tied to the strong handles. They knelt down, and the voice of Saul rose in prayer to God for Damascus, for the men in the city who were trying to kill him and for his own safe journeying. The flickering flame of the little baked clay lamp was put out, so that no watcher should see them as they slung the basket from the window and Saul lowered himself into it. Having listened for the last time for sign or sound of enemies, slowly, foot by foot they let down the basket. Saul, whose strong hands practiced intent making knew how to grip a rope, held on tightly till he felt the ground under the basket. Stepping on to the ground and shaking the rope to give his friends a farewell signal to draw in the basket again, he turned his face southward and set out through the darkness alone. By the time the dawn came up over his left shoulder he would have crossed the plane and reached the place of shining where Jesus had come to Saul in that blaze of light on his way to Damascus. He was going back to Jerusalem along the road up which we followed him when he came as the scourge of the Nazarenes. Now he was flying as the persecuted disciple of Jesus. He was stepping out of the dangers of Damascus into the greater perils of Jerusalem. As he went down past Hermon and came at last in sight of the silent hills where the steep place of Gadara runs down into the shining busy lake, everything would seem different. Then the sea of Galilee was, to him, the haunt of the great pretender. Now it was the place where the Jesus, who was Saul's lord, had sailed and spoken. Clear silver water in a cup of gold under the sunlit steeps of Gadara. It shines, his lake, the sea of Chenereth, the waves he loved, the waves that kissed his feet, so many blessed days, oh happy waves, oh little silver happy sea, far famed under the sunlit steeps of Gadara. Passing on through Samaria and the hills of Judea, he at length came out in sight of the walls of Jerusalem, the walls under which he had watched Stephen stoned, and of the roof of the temple where Gamaliel still sat in honor among the rabbis. Saul knew that the ferocity of hate which he himself had stirred up among the strict Jews would now break out against himself. What he would hardly expect was that the Nazarene disciples themselves would give him the cold shoulder, yet so it happened. It was natural, after all, that they should be afraid of him. They knew of old the fiery Saul with his quick wit and his passion against the Nazarenes. Suddenly he was now declaring that he belonged to their sect, was asking to join them as a baptized Nazarene, declaring that he had the Holy Spirit within him. But, they asked themselves, was it not just one more crafty attempt to spy out their lives and use the evidence as a witness for destroying them? So they held aloof from Saul, they were afraid of him. He was forsaken by Pharisee and Nazarene. He stood where his master had stood, all alone. There was in Jerusalem a man from Cyprus, a Jew with a face of great power and patience, older than Saul, called Barnabas. He was so enthusiastic as a Nazarene that he had sold the land he owned, and had given it into the common fund for helping the poorer disciples. Barnabas had wider ideas than some of the other Nazarenes in Jerusalem, so he went to Saul, and after a talk with him, he was so convinced that he was a true disciple of Jesus that he took him to Peter and the other apostles, as the leaders whom Jesus had chosen were called. They all stood and sat round him, while with glowing face Saul told them that the story you have read, how on the road to Damascus Jesus had spoken to him, and he had spoken about Jesus in Damascus, and the Jews had lain in wait to take and kill him. As they listened, Peter and John and James and the others could see in every line of Saul's face, in the passion in his eyes, and could hear in the sound of his voice that he was a follower of Jesus. A slave of a great Roman, and there were many of them in such a city as Jerusalem, usually had a mark branded on his skin with a hot iron to show that he belonged to a certain master. There could be no mistake about it, Saul's whole character was now marked like that, as he said later himself, I bear branded on my body the owner's stamp of Jesus. Nor did Saul try to keep quiet for safety's sake, he went among the very people whom he had raised up against Stephen into the synagogues where he himself had argued against Stephen, and there spoke with all his power for Jesus. The effect was electrical, astonishment gave way to anger, anger deepened into hate, and in their hate the Jews, even those from foreign lands, planned secretly to capture, imprison and kill Saul. Someone, perhaps an old fellow student of Saul's who had heard them plotting against his life down in the temple, told the apostles that Saul was to be killed. What was to be done? Simon, Barnabas, Saul and the other friends got together for a talk. Damascus in the north and Jerusalem in the south, the two great cities of Syria and Palestine, were now closed to him. A highly educated graduate like Saul was not well fitted, as the fiery fisherman Peter was, to speak to the village people among the hills and in the lake country. He must go out of the land, at any rate for the present. He would go home to Tarsus. No sooner was the decision made than they prepared quietly to go part of the way with him. Filling their leather bottles and their food scripts, the little band took up their cloaks and staves. They managed to get Saul, unobserved, past the Damascus gate out onto the northern road. He had made his second escape from his enemies. Going north for some time, the road then forked to the left and carried them diagonally toward the coast. Resting at noon under the shelter of an olive tree, or at a rest-house, they tramped on for fifty miles, talking of their plans for the future. It may well be that, as they went down from the hills and came first in sight of the great sea shining away to the west, Barnabas would lay his hand on the shoulder of his younger friend and tell Saul that the time would surely come when the two would go out together on a great campaign. There ahead of them Paul and his friends would see the columns of a marble temple that Herod had built on the rising ground. It was Caesarea, the town of Caesar, the Roman capital of Palestine. Coming over the low ridge they saw the stadium, and beyond it for nearly two miles the streets of Caesarea, through which Saul made his way to the harbour side. In the harbour, protected from the gales of the sea by the great crescent-shaped breakwater, the rippling water lapped against the sides of ships from Egypt and Rome, Athens and Cyprus, Tyre and Sidon and Tarsus. Overall and in the middle of this double-curved harbour, the grim, strong Roman citadel was built. Finding in harbour a ship bound for Tarsus, Saul took his passage home in her. Around the rudder paddles were unlashed and the oar sweeps put out to row the ship from the harbour, round the tower at the breakwater end, into the open sea. The mainsail was hoisted, and Saul found himself coasting northward past Ptolemaeus Tyre and Sidon with the forests of masts in their harbours, on his way to his old home, Tarsus. The last time he had taken that journey he was a confident young student with all the world of learning at his feet a law career before him. Now he was flying from the anger of the men who had thought of him as the rising star of their party at Jerusalem. Yet we can well believe that his whole being was as buoyant as the ship on whose deck he stood watching the sunset over the sea, for no persecution nor distance could separate him from his unseen companion, whose he was and whom he now lived to serve. Flying over the bow of the ship he saw at length the long low line of the plain where he was born, with the ridge of the mountains beyond. Right ahead was the mouth of the river. As they sailed into the estuary, the galleymen were ordered to their benches, the oars were loosed, the blades dipped and flashed in the water of the Sidness, and the oars groaned as the ship slowly forged her way upstream, then the river opened out into the lake harbour which Saul knew so well. No sooner was she made fast at the harbour side than Saul would be ashore and making his way up into the city of Tarsus. We do not know whether his mother or father was alive to greet him. Certainly if his father was alive he, as a strict Pharisee, would be horrified at the new teaching that his son had accepted. There are some reasons to believe, though certainty is quite impossible, that his father was so furious that he turned Saul out of house and home into absolute poverty. If he did this it would come as a terrible, though not unexpected, blow to Saul. With all his own high temper he was as sensitive as he was passionate. He would feel the wound of his father's anger like the cut of a whip. But he would turn his hands to the labour of tent-making and his speech to the story of Jesus Christ. He was learning the secret of being content in plenty and hunger, in wealth and poverty. In him who strengthens me, he declared, I am ready for anything. CHAPTER X One day, some seven years later, a man came into the city of Tarsus with a look of inquiry in his eyes as he searched the faces of those who met him in the streets. He was a traveller, a stranger to Tarsus, but that would not seem unusual to the people in that great city where men from all parts of the world were going to and fro every day. He made inquiries among the Jews, and at last he was directed to the house where Saul was living. Saul, as his eyes turned to this strange visitor, would scan his face curiously for a moment, then, Barnabas! Saul would cry as he leapt to his feet to welcome his old comrade. It was indeed that splendid Cypriot Jew who, you remember, had years before sold his land for the great cause, and had been the first to grasp Saul's hand as he came a refugee from Damascus to cold Jerusalem. When Barnabas had rested a little and washed after travel, the two comrades sat down to talk. Saul listened with growing eagerness as Barnabas told him why he had come to find him in Tarsus. "'I have come from Antioch in Syria,' Barnabas would say. "'Wonderful things are happening there. When I was at Jerusalem, men came to us from Antioch with a strange story. They said that the brethren from Cyprus and North Africa had been preaching in Antioch, not to the Jews only, but even to the Greeks, and the Greeks, many of them, have actually given up their gods of marble and ivory and silver, and have turned and become disciples. So I went up through the country all the way to Antioch, and told them to grip hold of the faith with all their power. But there are so many of them in Antioch that I am not able to give them all the teaching in the way that they need. And there are many, many more to be shown the way and the truth. So I have come for you to join me and help me. Will you come?' Saul's heart, hand, and voice must all have leapt in response. Would he go? Why this was the great call he had been listening for throughout all the seven years of waiting, the years of quiet work in and round Tarsus. Rolling up his mat and cloak, and getting his wallet and bottle and staff, he would swiftly get ready to start with Barnabas back to Antioch. We cannot tell by which route they went, for they could go by sea or by land. If they took ship in the harbor, they would be rode down on the stream. Bearing southeast, when they reached the open sea, the coasting vessel would scud across the gulf, heading for the Syrian coast. All day she would sail, and by the time the purple sunset was lighting the tapering cone of Mount Cassius till it glowed like a torch, they would run in between the towers of the Seleucia breakwaters into the outer port, and thence to the inner basin of the Calabash-shaped harbor. In the morning the two comrades would be out by dawn from the harbor city of Seleucia to start their tramp of sixteen miles up the road that led from the port to the metropolis, Antioch. On the right of this road was the river Orontes, curving like a serpent along the plain. If they went from Tarsus by land, they would trudge by the great road round the head of the gulf, the road by which Alexander the Great and Xenophon had both passed with their armies. The militeers and camel-drivers would find themselves outstripped by these two traveling Jews, who strode along with cloaks over shoulders and robes girt under their leather belts in order to give their legs freedom for walking. Saul's face would glow and his eyes gleam with sheer happiness. He was on his way to one of the three greatest cities of the world, tramping by the side of his friend Barnabas on the service of him for whom he was quite ready to die and in whom he gloried to live. And this was only to be a beginning of adventures. No wonder Saul rejoiced. As they walked on, Barnabas would tell Saul that it was not to be all plain sailing for them in their work at Antioch. These Greeks, he would say, have the spirit in them. They walk in the way, but the strict Jews among the brethren, especially down at Jerusalem, say that these newcomers must be circumcised, i.e. they must become Jews, before they can really join us. I say no. What do you think? It does not seem to us at first sight very exciting to know whether Saul said yes or no, yet if he had disagreed with Barnabas, the whole history of the world might have been different, and our own land, and therefore we ourselves, might never have heard of Jesus. For the followers of Jesus, if Saul had sided with the stricter Jew Nazarenes, might well have become a narrow little Jewish clique. What was Saul's answer? From the words that he wrote later we know he would say something like this. The good news about Jesus is the saving power both to the Jew and the Greek. The great thing is, not that men should be circumcised, but that each should dedicate his whole body to God as the temple of his spirit. In such talk about the great work in front of them, Barnabas and his younger colleague Saul would at last come out in sight of the walls of Antioch. Passing by lovely groves of myrtle and other trees, the road curved southward just where it came out on the bridge, whose four round arches spanned the greatest stream in all Syria, the Orontes River. In front of Saul, as he set foot on the bridge, was the frowning wall which the Romans had built all along the river front and round the whole city. To his left, outside the walls, lay the marble open-air hippodrome. Over the turreted walls and beyond the plain on which the city spread itself, he saw, away to the south, the high bluffs and crests of mountains, especially the stern Mount Sulpius, where the goats leapt up the ravines. Over the shoulder of this mountain the Roman wall ran, dropping into defiles and leaping again up the hillside to the square, forbidding mass of the citadel, where the soldier's bugles sounded the change of centuries. The wall ran on, past the citadel, till it dropped into the plain and swept round, completing the circle on the bank of the Orontes, at the bridge where Saul stood. Barnabas and Saul walked across the bridge, which was the first of five bridges that crossed the river Orontes at Antioch. They joined the city to the Royal Island suburb, where the palace and buildings of the Roman nobles glittered in the sunshine. Passing through the gateway in the city wall, the travelers came at once on all the hum and bustle of Antioch. In the center of the city they walked into the most wonderful street in the world of that day. For four miles it stretched east and west, one shining colonnade of white marble. It had been built by Herod, Roman ladies in swinging palanquins born by slaves shielded by dainty curtains from the sun and from the dust of the streets, and droves of mules bearing figs from cypress, splendid carvings from grease, books from the learned cities of North Africa, or purple cloth from the world-vained dyers of tire, met caravans of dromedaries tired from their long march over the sands from beyond the Euphrates and grunting under their loads of Persian silks and of dates. At the very center of the city, where the great street from the palace crossed Herod's street of marble, Saul came on the city square where a noble statue of Apollo stood for the worship of the Romans. Here is Saul the Tarzian, Barnabas would tell the other brothers when at last Saul reached Barnabas's home. The leaders would gather to meet this new young colleague, men like Black Simeon, Lucius from Cyrene in North Africa, and Manayan who was related to Herod. They all greeted the new comrade, and would soon find that Saul, though he was not a big, tall man nor very striking to look at, was a far abler speaker than their old friend Barnabas. But Saul, with his dashing temper, had not yet grown so steady and wise as his comrade. One wonderful thing they noticed was the strange intense power of his look when he fixed his eyes on you and spoke. As Saul went along Herod's marble street, he would notice many of the most richly dressed people going through the west gate of the city. That is the Daphne gate, they told him. As he went through the gate he came out on a broad road lined with splendid Roman villas with mosaic courtyards in which fountains were throwing water from the heads of carved dolphins into marble basins. Paths led out among shaded woods, which spread over ten miles of country where running waters tinkled down the glens past a marble temple whose pillars could be seen through the trees in a green open space. In the temple was a mighty statue of Apollo, the God of Light, pouring wine from a golden goblet. The white bodies of bathers were splashing in the water, breaking into shining ripples the dappled surface of sunshine and green shadow. It all looked beautiful, and yet, when Saul saw the worshippers round the marble statue, he could see from their loose lips and the flabby faces of many of them, and from their leering looks and foul actions that the whole worship was, like the life at Antioch, the glittering surface of a poisonous pool. The languorous coarseness of the east had mixed with the physical beauty of the Greek and the brute strength of the Roman to make the temple festival's scenes of beastliness. As Saul walked back through the groves and into Antioch, he would see that in all this wide-spreading city of the plain of sunshine everyone seemed to be set on making all the money that he could and then spending it on pleasures. She was rightly called the heathen queen, Antioch the beautiful, with her head on the mountain crowned with the citadel and with the river running at her feet. The Antiochians liked to see sport, but were too slack and flabby to go in for athletic games themselves. They paid gladiators, great prize-fighting giants, to kill each other and to fight with lions for their amusement. Slaves carried the rich citizens down to the hippodrome and fanned them while they watched the shouting charioteers cracking their whips as they urged the straining and steaming horses white with foam round the oval track. As Saul passed along the street he saw a boy with a flask of oil and a measure of wheat going toward a little temple making his offering to the idle Apollo. And he would hardly know how to hold himself. There was the statue of Apollo whom the Antiochians specially worshipped, exquisitely graceful, icely faultless, idly null, a God whose story was interesting but could help no boy to keep his life clean. Saul wanted to tell that boy of his own living hero, strong and resolute, who alone could lead that boy into the full stature of manhood. Saul looked out over the people there before him, going up and down in the street. He saw some curious, some hard and sneering, some thirsty in spirit. They faced black-haired Jewish lads straight from the synagogue school, black Negroes and bronze Egyptians from up the valley of the Nile, sturdy Romans with the pride of the all-conquering eagle of the empire in every gesture and in the lines of their arrogant faces. Greek merchants swift to drive a bargain, yet often outwitted by those slow, silent Arabs whose faces fringed the crowd, sunscorched and mysterious as the tawny desert from which they came. Once he looked over the sea of faces, Saul would see that with all their differences of color of skin, of language and country, these people all had a great dumb need, groping after God if happily they might find him. He would feel, with a thrill the intolerable craving shiver throughout him like a trumpet call, O, to save these, to perish for their saving, die for their life, be offered for them all. People knew by this time that the good news of Jesus Christ was not only for his own people, the Jews. There in Antioch was young Titus, the Greek, and many others who worshipped Christ. Indeed, the people of Antioch began to see that these strange new people had only one common bond. They were not of one race or class, but they all worshipped a new God, an unseen person who, they declared, dwelt in them named Jesus Christ. They are Christians, said one man to another in the crowd, as they saw Saul and Barnabas pass along the street, so the Nazarenes were first called Christians in Antioch. End of Chapter 10 Chapter 11 of Paul the Dauntless. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by David Leeson. Paul the Dauntless by Basil Joseph Matthews. Chapter 11. The Call Abroad. In the cool dark room of a house in Antioch, after the work of the day, Barnabas and Saul and some friends gathered for their evening meal. Tired as they were, they felt the glow that comes at the end of a day filled in each strenuous minute with work on a task for which they greatly care. But one thing was lacking, if only Jesus could be there to say of the day's work, well done, comrades. Peter and the others had told Barnabas at Jerusalem that, on the very last day before Jesus was crucified, he had supper with his friends. At the supper he broke bread and poured out wine from the cup and said, Do this in remembrance of me. And then, as he saw their crestfallen looks at the thought of his leaving them, he tried to cheer them. The world will see me no more, but you will see me, he said. So in Antioch at their supper, Barnabas and Saul and the others broke the thin loaves, handed the pieces of bread to one another, and passed the cup from hand to hand round the table in remembrance of Jesus Christ. As they did this and spoke of him, they knew that he was really there in the fellowship with him, nearer to them than breathing, closer than hands and feet. If any one of them broke out into anger with another one in the heat and rush of the day's work, he made it up at the supper, and they were friends again. They remembered, too, that many others of their friends in distant places were, at that same hour, breaking the bread and drinking the cup at the common table. Some of their comrades were at Jerusalem, and many in the little white villages in the country. Some sat down to supper after washing the stain of the fishing nets from their hands at the side of the Lake of Galilee, while others had gone home from working on ships in the thronged harbor of Sidon, or from the purple dyeing sheds at Tyre. There were more fellow Christians across the sea, trudging home from the fig orchards on the lovely island of Cyprus, and others from tending the goats on the hills behind Tarsus. So Saul and Barnabas and the others at their supper in Antioch asked God for good to come to all these brethren wherever they were. The words in which they prayed were something like this. As this broken bread was scattered as corn upon the mountains and gathered together became one, so let thy church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into thy religion, for thine is the glory and power through Jesus Christ for ever. One day a number of the brethren came to Antioch all tired and dusty. They had traveled all the way up through Palestine and Syria to Antioch. Among them was a man named Agabus, who had the gift of telling the future. There is going to be a great famine, he said to the others. Our brothers in Judea will be starving. What was to be done, they could not stand by in Antioch and see their friends die of hunger. We must save up a fund of money so that we can buy food for them when the famine comes. So the disciples put aside money from their income, each giving as he was able to afford. The money was to go to Jews, but the Greek disciples in Antioch as well as the Jews would give their money, for since they became disciples of Christ the great barrier was broken down between Jew and Greek. When enough money had been collected it was handed over to Barnabas and Saul. The young Greek Titus was also sent to help them. A Greek Christian going along with the two Jews would help to show the Jewish disciples at Jerusalem what they had not yet realized, that it was not necessary to be a Jew in order to become a Christian. They spent the money in corn, and perhaps figs from cypress and dates, and then started out with their precious burden. They might row down the Orontes or ride along the road as far as Salusia Harbor, and then, taking ship, sail down the coast to the harbor at Caesarea. As Saul came at last in sight of Jerusalem it must have seemed strange to be coming back after nine years into the city from which he had been obliged to flee for his life. Nine years ago he remembered even the disciples at Jerusalem had shunned him because they thought that their old persecutor was only pretending to be a friend. Now he was coming again to these very people who had been afraid of him, and was bringing with him food that meant life to them and their boys and girls. It sickened Saul, however, in Jerusalem to find that with all his training as a Jewish scholar under that great master Gamaliel he could not get his brother Jews who were not Christians even to listen to him. Indeed, the fact that he had been the rising hope of the Pharisees only made them more furious. Listen to a turncoat traitor with his pretended visions, talking his everlasting blasphemies about Jesus, hear him declaring that he gloried in the accursed cross, no, they spat with disgust and anger. It was in the lovely courts of the temple itself that Saul would feel most of all that he was against a stone wall, to walk where he had once studied and to see their groups of young students whispering to one another as they glanced at him with sneering looks, to be an outsider in the cloisters of his own old college that cut to his heart indeed. In the temple court Saul looked up to the sky above and prayed. In that hour there came to him as clearly as that other vision of Jesus had come years before, a vision and a voice, and the voice said, I have called you to leave the Jews and go as my missionary to the peoples. In Jerusalem Saul may well have stayed at the house of a relative of Barnabas named Mark whose son John was eager to go out from Jerusalem into the wider world. So when they had finished their work of taking food to the famine stricken people, young John started out with Barnabas and Saul on the journey back north to Antioch. John Mark was, in all likelihood, like his uncle Barnabas, a native of Cyprus. As they tramped their way northward, Saul and Barnabas would talk over that transvision which Saul had had in the temple. The voice had said, I have called you to go as my missionary to the peoples. To leave his own people, to go to others, where would it all lead? Saul and Barnabas would dream great dreams together as they talked, but none of their visions of the future was to be so wonderful as the great adventures they were really to meet. At last they were back once more within the walls of the heathen queen city, and were soon telling Simeon, Menean, Lucius and the others in Antioch all the news of Jerusalem. Saul told them of the voice that said he was to go to the other nations. As they talked together and then waited in silence, the spirit within led them all to see that they must send some of their number right away to the far off countries to spread the good news. They were not to keep their best men at home. They, the brethren of the despised sect of the Nazarenes, were sending out the first missionaries to face the two greatest and most wonderful things the world had ever seen, the religion of the Hebrew people and the power and organization of the Roman Empire. The work abroad called for the finest brain, the best scholarship, the ripest experience. Barnabas, the trusted leader, and Saul, the fiery, swift-tongued university graduate, must go from them. They all met together and prayed, and then the Christian folk laid their hands on Barnabas and Saul. This showed that the missionaries were going out as their men. Saul, as he lay down on his bed on the floor that night, knew that he was in the morning to start on a new adventure. He did not know that the next day's tramp would be the beginning of long marches in which he would hunger and thirst, and would be stripped and buffeted and have no certain dwelling place, and labor working with his own hands. He was at the beginning of many journeys over seas and mountains, wide weary plains and crowded cities, wanderings that would never cease until they ended forever. END OF CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII THE ISLAND ADVENTURE The keenness of early spring was in the breeze and sparkled on the great sea as the ship nosed her way westward out of the harbor of Salusia, and it was spring in the heart of Saul as he sailed out on his new great sea of adventure. From the stern of the ship he waved to the swiftly lessening figures on the end of the stone breakwater. Then he turned and walked to the bow of the boat, where, in the clear march morning, Cyprus lay like a cloud on the horizon. The ship slid from the bright crest of a rolling wave down into the darker trough, but always her bows lifted and she came to the summit again and shook the spray from her sides. Saul's spirit too would rise and fall between the joy of the new quest on which he was starting, the rapture of the forward view, and a shrinking doubt of the darker unknown to be explored. As they ran westward the ship would meet others, swift, high-peaked ships carrying fruits from Cyprus to Antioch, south of them heavy tramp ships slowly crept east, carrying copper from Cyprus to the Phoenician coast. Barnabas, however, eager to show Saul the place of his birth, drew him from these things to catch the first glimpse of the city of Solemus. So the comrades stood at the bow, steadying themselves against the ship's bulwarks, their eyes gazing over the sea. They would talk over plans while their young attendant, John Mark, stood quietly behind them. First they saw, thrust out into the sea, like the snout of a giant swordfish, the long peninsula of the Carpaths. Soon they came under the lee of its rocks. Moving away on the north side of Solemus, this ridge of mountain tops in the sea protected both the harbour and the city from the boisterous winds from Asia Minor. Ahead of them Barnabas and Saul could now see, above the long line of white-edged waves and the grayish-yellow sand, silhouetted against the setting sun, the walls of the city, and the roof of a great temple. Then the ship was steered into the large harbour. She threaded her way through the crowded shipping, vessels from the coast of Africa, from Greece and Rome, as well as from Tyre and Seleucia. An order was shouted, followed by the creaking of cordage through the pulleys and the rattle of rings on the mast. The sail was furled and the ship brought up at her berth on a taut cable. Barnabas leapt ashore to be greeted by his own people, his relatives, and men of Solemus whom he had known as a boy. He introduced his comrade Paul to these. The Christians among them, for the faith had already spread to Cyprus, would look with curiosity at this man who, from being a stormy persecutor of the followers of Jesus, had become a fighting leader in his new kingdom. Threading their way through the sailors of all nations and the harbour loungers, past the groups of fruit-packers and the brawny porters, Barnabas would lead Saul to the house of one of his relatives to plan the things they were to do in Cyprus. As Saul went about the Roman city, going from synagogue to synagogue with Barnabas, speaking to the people of the coming at last of the long-expected Messiah, he would see many things that were familiar to him. For Solemus was a Roman city, and like Tarsus and Antioch, it was spread over a plain with mountains in sight. In Solemus, as in Antioch and Tarsus, Saul saw the marble temples lifting the perfect beauty of Greek craftsmanship before him. Standing on the city wall, he could see the long, sturdy Roman aqueduct spanning the plain with its arches. Here, as in many other cities where he had worked and was to work, for instance Lystra and Iconium, Ephesus and Athens and Corinth, he heard the clanking footstep of the Roman soldier on Sentrygo, all armed with broadsword and shield and brazen-crested helmet. Yet in Solemus, and indeed in all the cities, he saw a strange something that he could not describe which neither belonged to Greece nor to Rome. He saw it in the long line of camels slowly crossing the plain led by a hooded, silent figure. It came to him as he noticed the patient oxen pulling the wooden plough through the soil between the olive trees, or as he watched a quiet figure seated cross-legged on the ground, motionless, meditating. It was the spirit of the East. The East would never make great roads like Rome, nor plan her noble aqueducts, and did not dream of creating such dramas as Sophocles wrote to be played in splendid marble theaters open to the blue sky. Nor did it weave spells of glorious oratory such as had drilled the Roman senate from the lips of Cicero. The East gazed in puzzled wonder at the wild energy of the chariot races and of the wrestling and fighting gladiators. She saw the legions thunder past and plunged in thought again. Rome scorned the East for her slackness, and Greece proudly looked at her own Parthenon and her poets, and thought that the Oriental had nothing that compared with these. Yet, when the last column of the Greek temple in Roman Solemus had tumbled in ruin and was covered with sand, and the greatest theater of Greece had become a terrace of wild flowers, the camel would still go across the Cyprus plain led by a hooded figure. The East would remain. It was a part of the greatness of Saul that, while his conquering mind leapt to the power of the Roman rule, and his quick wit and brilliant speech excelled even that of the Greek, his heart was the patient, brooding heart of the East, searching the deep things. So Barnabas and he, speaking in Greek to the people, for the Hellenized Jews who were spread all over the Roman Empire spoke Greek in most of the cities, went from Solemus out across the plain. The corn was, by this time, covering all the brown earth with green. They walked westward from end to end of the island, climbing gray hills where the wild goats leaped, and dropping down long winding valleys to fishing towns on the seashore. They would see men mining in the red hillsides for the copper for which the island was famous all the world over, and would pass through groves of fig and olive trees. On their right rose a mighty peak from which the snows were now melting fast, the peak of Mount Olympus, where, they said, the gods held counsel together. In the clear blue of a sultry noon, when they rested and took their food on a hill-crest, they could see the great sea gleaming in the distance, and right beyond, on the very edge of the world, away to the north, the white rim of the torus mountains. Perhaps Barnabas would tell Saul a story which all the people in Cyprus knew and which most of them believed. Down there, out of the foam of the waves, they said, a lovely goddess was born named Aphrodite. She came ashore in a shell and has lived in Cyprus ever since. She is the goddess of love and beauty. As they talked, looking out over the sea, where men said the goddess was born, the sun slipped lower and the light paled, changing from the deep full blue of the Mediterranean through shades of light blue to blue-gray, and then to a glimmering pearl. Over a hill-crest there swept in threatening circles a pair of royal eagles, while across a valley a hunting-party of vultures floated to and fro in search of prey. So Saul and Barnabas walked across the hills and down a great valley that looked like a theatre of the gods, where the silence was only broken by the sound of running water and the cry of a herd-boy to his goats. At last they came out on the low plateau that leads to Paphos. Here they might well see the people coming out along the road to worship at the temple of Aphrodite. Saul would remember how at Antioch, Apollo, the god of light was worshipped, and here in Cyprus Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. And he burned to tell these people of the only true god, who was truly the god of light and love, and also, unlike the Apollo and Aphrodite, whose legends tell of impurity and treachery, a god who was holy and utterly true to his word. As we shall see plainly later, Saul never attacked other religions that were reaching, however blindly, after the unseen god, but he did attack the worship of idols that limited the omnipotent god to cold marble or to wood or metal, and he loathed all religious trickery. All unknown to himself, he was now on the eve of an adventure where he was to smite a great blow against a religious charlatan. Barnabas and he, as they walked on to the city ahead of them, saw along the road people coming and going to and from the Roman capital of the island, the center of the government. The soldiers, the proud Roman dames born in Palanquins on the shoulders of slaves, the straight paved road leading down to the city where the Citadel and the Proconsul's Palace were already in sight, showed them that they were nearing Paphos. They went in through the city gates to the streets within the walls, where they found more Romans than in any other part of the island, for this was the capital where the Roman Proconsul, Sergius Paulus, lived. Barnabas and Saul passed, as they had done at each town throughout the whole island, under the portico of the doorway that bore a carving of grapes and vine leaves, the Hebrew synagogue. Barnabas, who would be known to the Jews as one of their own race and a native of Cyprus, introduced his younger comrade, Saul, who would then speak out the great news that they were travelling to give, that the Messiah had come, that God had really now spoken in a son named Jesus. When Saul stood up and began to pour out in speech that marvelous blend of flaming passion and closely knit argument based on the history of the people, of which he was the master, it was though some brilliant general had hurled a regiment of charging cavalry into the lines of the enemy. You might fight against Saul or be convinced by his argument, the one thing you could not do was to ignore him. When the people went out, therefore, from the cool shadows of the synagogue into the hot glare of the streets, they talked to one another of this strange doctrine. Teachers had often come to Paphos speaking of strange ideas from the east and deep philosophy from Greece. They were interesting, but this was something more, for if what Saul said was true, that God had now shown for the first time completely the way to himself, then all their lives were changed. From lip to lip the story of these strange teachers passed. The attendants at the palace of Sergius Paulus, the proconsul, began to hear of it. They knew that their master enjoyed listening to new teachings, for he was quite above the ordinary level of Roman proconsuls in his keen interest in thought. Send to the men and ask them to come and speak to me of these things, he ordered. The invitation was in itself a royal command. Barnabas and Saul were led into the presence of the proconsul through the courtyards, where fountains played in the sunshine and kept the air cool. Round him were his courtiers and personal guards. Among them was a dark-haired Jew named Bar-Jesus, a name which means son of a savior. He was a wizard of the east, who knew mysterious incantations and professed to read the future by means of the stars. He could perform marvels and bend the wills of men to his own by hypnotic powers. All round the great sea and all the cities of the Roman Empire were men like this sorcerer, who put manacles on the minds of men by their great powers of magic. One great Roman general, for instance, fell so low as to conduct all his campaigns on the advice of an oriental fortune-telling woman. This wizard, Bar-Jesus, was in the court of Sergius Paulus because he was trying to get power over the man who was supreme in all Cyprus. As he saw these two fellow Jews walking up the marble floor of the hall to face Sergius Paulus, Bar-Jesus looked at them closely, but he hardly imagined that these mere traveling talkers could have any effect on his own power at the Roman court. Sergius Paulus told Barnabas and Saul that he had heard of their teaching from others, but wished to know more about it from themselves. Then Saul stood forward. This was something that had never come to him before. He had been a Jew speaking to Jews. Barnabas had been the leader through Cyprus. It was he who introduced Saul to the Jews as they came to each new town by the seashore or among the folds of the hills. Today all that was changed. Saul was a Roman speaking in the presence of the man who stood in all Cyprus for the mighty power of that empire of which Saul was a citizen. Saul, no, not Saul the Jew now, but Paul the Roman. He himself was called by the same name as this Roman proconsul, Sergius Paulus, to whom he was now telling the new knowledge of the nature of God as shown in Jesus Christ with all the learning of the Jewish graduate and talking in Greek the language of cultivated men throughout the imperial cities of the Great Sea. What did Paul say? We cannot know exactly. But as Sergius Paulus had heard of him as one who told of the character of God and the way he dealt with men, we can well believe that Paul would follow something like the argument that he used later in a letter. All things that have been made in the sky and on the earth, the things that we can see and cannot see, all the rule of kings and the unseen powers have been created by God. And he has poured all that he is into the life of one Jesus Christ who rescues us from the power of darkness and carries us into the realm of light. He is the head of every unseen power supreme over even those dark powers that the magician exercises. All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in him. Beware of anyone getting hold of you by means of a make-believe spiritualism. It is in Christ alone that all God's fullness is. Living in him we put to death impurity, low appetites, evil desires, the things which bring down the anger of God on disobedient sons. Off with them all now, anger, rage, malice, slander, foul talk. We aim at what is above, for our life is hidden with Christ in God. Eagerly Sergius Paulus leaned forward to hear the fascinating speech of this new teacher. The proconsul was a man of brain and judgment, and he could see that facing him was one who had a spacious, daring mind. It was like glorious sunlight after the choking smoke of the midnight incantations of that sorcerer, Bar-Jesus, who stood listening to Paul. Elimus, the wise, as Bar-Jesus arrogantly called himself, looked at Sergius Paulus and saw how pleased he was with Paul's teaching. The sorcerer's brow lowered, his face glowed with anger. His power was in peril, all his influence was at stake. If Paul won the Roman ruler, then Elimus' career was at an end. Impulsively he stepped forward and began to try to draw the mind of Sergius Paulus away. Paul's hot blood was up immediately. He turned his eyes on Elimus and said, You son of the devil, though called Bar-Jesus son of a savior, you enemy of all good, full of craftiness and cunning, will you never stop twisting the straight paths of the Lord? See here, the Lord's hand will fall on you, and you will be blind, unable to see the sun for a time. The figures of Paul and Barnabas, the proconsul, the marble columns, the shining light, all faded. Elimus the sorcerer was blind. They saw his hands group, his sightless eyes turning vainly round. Someone took him by the hand and led him away. Paul had won his spurs in a new field. He saw the deadly influence of this magician trying to drug the brain and spirit of Sergius Paulus. In his first battle, Paul had routed magic and won the Roman ruler to the strong and nightly vision that belongs to a good soldier of Christ. CHAPTER XIII One morning Paul and Barnabas, with John Mark, walked down to the snug harbor that laid below the city of Paphos, in the circle made by the embracing arms of the stone breakwaters some little ships rocked on the water. The deck of one of them was busy with preparations for sailing. The three travelers went aboard, the crew weighed anchor, and the boat slipped out through the harbor mouth into the open sea. Skirting the treacherous ledge of rock which, as the sailors knew, lay just under the shining surface of the sea outside the harbor, they laid a course to the northwest. The boat slipped westward at first, bearing north round the curve of the coast as the sun lifted a stern above Mount Olympus. When they sailed months before to Cyprus from Seleucia, they saw away to the north the white ridge of the Taurus range behind the Seleucian plain on which Paul was born, for at that time the snows were not melted and the air was clear. But now full summer had come, the snows above were melted and the air had the haze of heat in it. All day long the ship sailed and through the night she was bound for Perga on the coast of Pamphylia, farther westward than Seleucia. If the breeze was with her she would at dawn make the gulf of Atalia, which swept out to sea in two great arms of hills protecting a plain. As the mists of morning lifted Paul would see, far ahead beyond the plain, the gray heights of the Taurus. In the center of the bay the sea was colored with the running waters of a river, the Cestrus. The river, carefully banked with stone and with wood-bulks, would remind Paul of his well-beloved Sidness, for Perga was like Tarsus, in that it lay some miles up from the actual mouth of the river. The ship's oars were swung out and dipped and flashed as the crew pulled the vessel upstream. It took over an hour's rowing to bring them up to the harbor of Perga, where the city lay in the blazing sun sheltered between the forest-covered hills, with the damp air rising from her river. Even the stadium and the theater would be deserted, for Paul and his companions had come at the time of year when the people of Perga moved out from the city up into their suburb among the hills. He remembered how in the blazing summer time they used to do the same when he was a boy at Tarsus. The Pergans loved their wooded hills, and out behind the city they had built a lovely temple to Diana, the hundreds of the gods, with her bow and quiver of arrows. Paul came fresh from the open sea into the moist heat of the Pamphylian coast. As day wore on to evening a dank mist rose, a dull purple poisonous haze spread stealthily over the low coastland as the horizon cut the sun's rim. The air was filled with the wearisome singing of mosquitoes and the hum of flies. Frogs kept up an unceasing chorus in the marshes. The sultry heat gave place to a miasma, which sent its damp chill even through Paul's cloak. The towering torus mountains above the plain kept away, like a rampart, the fresh clean invading breezes of the north. The foul malaria of the marshes creeping along the coastline like unclean ghosts struck Paul. Nowhere on the Mediterranean coast is the pestilence of fever so dreaded as on this spot, and Paul was, it seems, smitten with fever here at Perga. What was he to do? To stay there on that stricken Pamphylian plain was to leave his body apprayed to the shivering agonies of fever without any advantage, for he could do no work there. Should he go back? The thought would find no anchorage in the minds of men of the temper of Paul and Barnabas. But ahead of them lay the steep mountain ascents, and beyond their ridge the high dry bracing air of the great plateau with its Roman cities and the great Roman highway that ran from east to west. Paul, in Cyprus, had begun to win the Roman power when he convinced Sergius Paulus. Why not go further with the campaign? They held a consultation and decided to press forward, though John Mark shrank from the adventure, for he turned back and sailed home again to Syria. Turning their backs on the sea Paul and Barnabas rested the foothills where the almond trees had already dropped their blossom in a snowstorm of white petals. Paul would ride on an ass, and from time to time try to walk feebly at first, and often needing to rest on a boulder by a mountain pool where the gentle brown water waited to refresh him. But as he felt the rock under his feet and drew the keener air of the hills among the pines, new life came with each deep breath. His step was more certain and firm, his eye quickened. They climbed by the sides of ravines, where tumbling waters splashed down in torrents toward the great sea, whose blue grew dimmer in the distance each time they rested to look back. They had left the peril of fever, but a new danger was all about them, the peril of robbers. Many fierce brigands hid among the grim gray fastnesses of these Pasidian highlands in the rocky caverns under the ruins. These bronzed robbers ambushed themselves, and then leapt down the sides of the ravine like wild goats. They sprang out and held up the caravans of merchandise that toiled up this path to the cities on the upper plains. Once out among the upper Pasidian hills, with the ridge of the tourists behind them, all would be well with Paul and Barnabas, for the Romans had just made a new road of which they were so proud that they called it the Royal Road. Its freshly paved length ran from Pasidian Antioch eastward and southward, joining up with the Roman colony of Lystra, on purpose to make it easy to send soldiers along to put down these robbers. The two travelers were, however, not yet out upon this open land, and the steep defiles of the Taurus, where only a mule track ran, were still the happy hunting-ground of the brigands. Paul himself tells us, just in a sentence, how he was in peril of robbers. This journey from Perga up the mountainside through the Pasidian country to Antioch is one where Paul may well have been seized and robbed by brigands, springing out from behind the boulders of a hillside or out from the cleft of a tiny stream. At last Paul and Barnabas crested the Taurus ridge itself and looked down on the rolling plains spread before them. Even then the steep mountains ran down southward five thousand feet to the ocean from which they had climbed, but in front the hills only dropped less than a thousand feet to the wonderful shining table-land. Paul and Barnabas worked northward, and crossed the purple and brown foothills of the Taurus. At last they came in sight of a great aqueduct, whose arches ran across the plain like a string of giant camels turned to stone by magic as they carried water across the land. The aqueduct ran to a beautiful city set on the sides of a rocky hill. On the shoulder of the hill was a temple cut in the living rock, and before it a portico of marble with carvings of bull's heads hung with garlands. But away from the temple there was a smaller planar building with no carving on it yet strong in its simplicity. It was here and not to the temple that Paul and Barnabas went. It was the meeting-house of the Jews of Antioch. Having entered Paul and Barnabas sat down quietly to join in the Sabbath worship. The lessons were read from the Law of Moses and from one of the prophets. The chief men in the synagogue saw, from the dress and the ways of the two strangers, that these travelers were Hebrews like themselves. They would, for instance, have over their heads the wrap which all the Jews put on when entering the synagogue. So they said to them, You men, and, as we see, brother Jews, if you have any word to encourage the people here, say on, Barnabas was not so good a speaker as Paul, so Paul stood up and said, with a sweep of his arm, Men of Israel, and you who fear God, give ear. He used this double form of address on purpose, because, beside the real Jews, the men of Israel, there were many Greeks who found in the worship of Jehovah something great and real, a dignity and clean strength that gripped them more than the temple worship of gods of marble. So these Greeks he spoke to as those who fear God. The boys in the synagogue would look at Paul at first, because he was something new and strange. But soon their eyes were glued to him, partly by that strange fascination which a man always exercises, who is ready to meet any adventure or peril to reach a high end, and partly because he began to tell again the heroic story that these Jewish boys knew so well. He pictured the great trek from Egypt across the desolate wilderness over Jordan to the freedom of the plain of Jericho and of the hills about Jerusalem. They saw again, through Paul's eyes, the boy Samuel growing up to be their wise old ruler, and then the coming of the giant king Saul and the shepherd David on the throne. He showed how all this was leading up to something, from the tents in the desert to the city in the hills, from the simple rule of Samuel to the greater rule needed by a nation among nations, the rule of kings. It was leading to what? The coming, how all of them were waiting for the greatest king to come. Then suddenly Paul sprang it upon them, the good news that would take away their breath. God had actually already sent his forerunner, the blazing fourth teller, John the Baptist, and now the Messiah of God himself, Jesus the Christ, had come. The Jews in Jerusalem, Paul went on, though they could not find him guilty of any crime, begged Pilate to have him put to death. They hanged him on the gibbet cross and buried him. But God raised him from the dead, and many of his companions, who had walked up to Jerusalem with him from Galilee, saw him alive and our witnesses to the people that this is true. So now we have come here to tell you the glad news that the promise God made to our fathers he has carried out for us, their children. Some of the Jews, probably the officials of the synagogue sitting just in front of where Paul was speaking, evidently wagged their heads and glowered at him, murmuring to one another that nobody who hung on the accursed death tree could be a son of God. For turning swiftly to them at the end of his speech, Paul said, Take care, then, for fear that the old saying may be true of you. Look you contemptuous folk, wonder at this and perish! For in your days I do a deed, a deed you will never believe, not though one were to explain it to you. There was a bustle of excitement when Paul had finished. The people were all a gog, some thinking what Paul said might really be true, others practically convinced that he and Barnabas were nothing but a pair of traveling imposters. As the two went out of the door, a number of people who thought the story of Jesus was true came clustering round them, asking a great many questions. Some of these people were Jews, others were Greeks and Romans, on whose pagan life, disgust and secret loathing fell, deep weariness and sated lust made human life a hell. These Greeks and Romans had heard the Jews talking of the one holy unseen eternal God, the Spirit who created all things, and they felt that they could worship him as they never could really bow down to their ill-tempered, evil living gods. So they had attached themselves to the worship of the Jews and had accepted circumcision. Repeated all next Sabbath, said the people, and Paul promised that he would do so. As the elder boys went home from the synagogue, and sat down to food at home, they would hear their fathers discussing this astonishing new teaching. On the next day, in the market place among the groups chattering in the bazaar, the one center of conversation was the words of these strange new visitors. So that on the following Sabbath, when Paul and Barnabas went to synagogue, they found themselves faced by a sea of men, Jews, Greeks and Romans, and at the doorway a mass of the people who did not belong to their worship, but had come together out of curiosity to hear this new strange story. Meanwhile the Jews, who had shown on the previous Sabbath that they did not believe what Paul said, were getting angry with these vagrant preachers who had set all the people by the ears. They were jealous, too, that so many people had come together to hear Paul. When he began to speak they interrupted, contradicting him and calling him names there in the synagogue. But the more they attacked him, the more fearlessly did Paul and Barnabas argue and maintain with all their power that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, the Christ of God. At last the two comrades saw that the narrower Jews were hopelessly bigoted against them, so they stood up and said, The word of God had to be spoken to you Jews in the first instance, but as you push it aside and judge that you yourselves are not worthy of eternal life, well, and they pointed to the crowd of faces at the back and in the doorway, here we turn to the nations. The outside people were delighted to hear this. When the synagogue service broke up they crowded round to hear more. And in the marketplace, when the people came in from the country round, they were told of the wonderful news that the creator of all the world had come into human life and shown his love in Jesus to Christ. When they went back home to their country villages among the hills they talked about the new doctrine. The next market day they would ask more about it and maybe gather round Paul and Barnabas to hear what they had to say. Many of them learned to believe and in many places round about little bands of Christian people began to grow into being. All the while, however, the angry Jews were working secretly. They went to the women who worshipped in their synagogue who were married to Roman officials of high rank, and they got them to urge their husbands to turn these tramp fellows out of the city, where they were upsetting everybody. So one day they began to hustle Paul and Barnabas out of the city. Down the street and out through the gate they rushed the two. When they were out in the open Paul and Barnabas stopped and undid their sandals, took them off and shook out the dust. It was their declaration of protest as every Jew who watched them doing it knew quite well against the treatment of the Antiochians. They were out on the open road again with the white stones of the Roman road under their feet and the blue sky overhead. John Mark, they remembered, had gone back in safety to his quiet home in Palestine. Saul and Barnabas, despised and rejected, amid contumely and derision, went hooded and homeless out on to the road of adventure for the king. CHAPTER XIV A splendid road was under their feet as they left Antioch. It was an imperial road, one more in the many lengths of the chain that bound the nations around the great sea to the throne of the mistress of the world. Slaves and convicts, nearly half a century before Paul and Barnabas passed, had dug out the earth through the whole length of this road. They had quarried, carted, smashed, thrown in, and hammered down three layers of stone. Then with ring of chisel and thud of mallet they had paved the surface with closely fitting stone, the whole road being curved to throw off water into side trenches. This road on which Paul and Barnabas strode southeastwards gleamed there in the spring sunshine. The robbers in the hills saw the road and trembled. Down that road the Roman legionaries swiftly marched, sword at hip and shield on arm. The brazen eagle on the Roman standard soared from the road up among the fastnesses of the robbers in the almost trackless mountain range on their left defying even the crags where the vultures swooped for their prey. The road was the mark of Rome. It was the line along which she hurled the legions that kept over all the world at that day, from Britain to the Euphrates, the greatest quiet that the world has ever known, the Pax Romana. It was along the road that Rome, the Queen of the Seven Hills, sent her messages to her people. Inside of them on the road they could see a small city, Neapolis. On reaching this place Paul and Barnabas found that at the chief caravansery not only could such travellers as themselves get food and lodging, but men could shelter their beasts in the spacious stables or hire relays of horses for swift long distance travel. A wild clatter of hoofs and a shout was heard, then sweating horses were rained up and bags taken from their backs. The Roman post that linked all the world up with the imperial government had ridden in from the cities of the eastern plain. All was bustle as the Oslers led fresh horses out. The leather bags were strapped across their backs with another bag, into which bread and olives and a score of dried figs were stuffed. The fresh horses pawed the paved way in their eagerness to start, which was satisfied to the full as the men of the Roman post, with their armed guard, mounted, and with cracking whips thundered on westward through Antioch down the Lycus Valley to Ephesus, where they shipped across the Aegean and the Adriatic to Brondisium, and so galloped up the Appian Way into Rome itself. Paul, as he saw the dauntless road bridging from east to west, and heard the departing clatter of the horses hoofs, felt growing in him a boundless ambition for his good news that it too should bridge from east to west should be spread from end to end of that road, that he himself, Paul, should be God's imperial post who would ride the road from end to end delivering the word. So Paul and Barnabas pressed on eastward, passing caravans of laden camels coming up from the distant sea of the Greek islands and cities, and meeting others coming down from the far off sea of the desert, from Persia and even Paul's own old birthplace Tarsus. At last they came to a fork where the great road went on eastward, but a branch ran north over the shoulder of two twin peaks that stood out against the skyline. Turning up this branch road they climbed to the side of the hill, and at a curve in the road came out in sight of a great plain. In the midst of it, still far away was a walled city. It was Iconium, though Paul, as he stood on the height and looked at the city, must have thought of the day when, from another ridge, he looked down on Damascus. For Iconium, like Damascus, lay in a plain of lovely orchards, flanked by mountains on the west, watered by a river running out from mountains, and, in each case, the river then lost itself in the earth. Iconium and Damascus share the honor of being the oldest cities in the world that are still standing. They will always live, for they are the first places where men find water after long distances of arid country. They are ports of the desert. Down the hill and across the flat, by the streams and canals that carried the melted snow-water and the spring rains in among the orchards, the road brought them at length into Iconium. Though the two comrades had traveled some ninety miles from Antioch in Pisidia, they were still in the great region over which Antioch ruled. As they walked through the streets of Iconium, they noticed that there were not so many Roman officials and soldiers as in Antioch. Both Antioch and Iconium were Roman cities, where Greek was spoken except by the poorer and the country people, but Antioch was a great governing city, while Iconium was a place of commerce where many traders came and went from all over the east and west to do business. Not among the hills, where the men dug in the copper and the quick silver mines, was the temple of the earth-mother, whom all the people in the plain worshipped. She dwelt in the earth, they thought, and sent them the precious metals, the river that sprang from the hills, and the harvest out of the ground. The Greeks taught the people of Iconium to worship her as Athene, the conquering goddess, but they still worshipped her really as the earth-mother with her companion, Snake, who came out of the earth to do her bidding. Paul and Barnabas went into the synagogue on the Sabbath just as they had done at Antioch to speak about Jesus. So powerfully did they both speak that a great number of people, both the Jews and the Greeks, believed that what they said was true, but some of the Jews utterly refused to accept the story. These traveling fellows, we can almost hear them saying, are just lying for their own ends, with their wild legend about this Christ who died on a Roman cross, like those wretched robbers nailed up at the crossroads over the plain there, the blasphemy of saying such a one could rise again. There was a great deal of communication between Antioch and Iconium, so it would be very likely that some trader or official who had come to Iconium from Antioch would say, what, are those wretches here? We chased them out of Antioch for a disturbing couple of meddlers. Why don't you do the same? Those Jews, who loathed Paul and Barnabas and all their words and works, exasperated the people in the marketplace and all over the city against the two comrades. The whole place began to be in a fever of excitement, some crying, stoned them, though not quite sure for what reason, except that they were two outsiders. But others said, why? What harm have they done? But the fever of hate grew hotter, the people began to come on with menaces and mutterings against them. So Paul and Barnabas quickly escaped and started out across the plain. All day they walked, the road gradually rising till they found themselves on a long ridge of rock, looking down on a broad valley through which a beautiful stream ran. On the horizon, southeastward, they saw the line of the Taurus Mountains. Going down the road from the ridge to the valley, they saw a compact city built around and on a little hill. The stream ran past two sides of the city, which was called Lystra. They were back again now on the road from which, you remember, they had branched off to go to Iconium. And Lystra was, like Antioch, a Roman colony, a center of government from which the orders of Rome were issued and her authority exercised. It was, however, smaller, more remote and newer than Antioch. In front of the main gate of the city, near which the river flowed, was a fine temple to Zeus, the chief of the gods, where bulls were sacrificed by white-robed priests. There was a prophetic legend in Lystra that some day Zeus himself, with his messenger Hermes, would come and visit the city. Paul and Barnabas went in through the gate into the streets of the city, where they stayed for some time. One day Paul was speaking out in the open air. Crowds of people had gathered to listen to him. There happened to be sitting there a man powerless in his feet, a lame man who had been unable to walk since he was born. This man heard Paul speaking and was listening to him with rapt attention. Paul looked at the lame man and could see, from the utter confidence in his eyes, that the man had faith enough to make him better. Paul therefore stopped his speech, turned to the man, looked at him with that eager, compelling gaze of his and said, in a loud voice, Stand erect on your feet! He jumped up and began to walk. The crowd of Listerins could not for the moment believe their eyes. This was no wandering beggar who had pretended to be lame. He was one of their own people whom they knew to be a cripple. They began to shout out in a strange language that Paul did not understand, the speech of their country, the Lycaonian language, The gods have come down to us as men! Zeus was the greatest of the gods, and the eastern people think of the silent, immovable man as the potentate. Hermes was his spokesman, his swift-flying, ready-tongued messenger. So they named the quiet, gracious Barnabas Zeus, and Paul, the orator, they called Hermes. Paul and Barnabas saw a great stir going on, and put it down simply to the natural effect of the wonder of healing the cripple. But soon they heard the lowing of oxen, and saw them all garlanded being led along toward the great temple of Zeus in front of the gate. The truth flashed on them, the people thought they were gods, mistook them for the very gods whose worship Paul's preaching would sweep away. In the eastern, wishes to show his utter grief, he will tear his robe. At the sight of the priests and the oxen, Paul and Barnabas seized their robes and rent them from neck to him, and sprang out among the people shouting at the top of their voices, Men, what is this you are doing? We are men with natures like your own. The good news we have come to tell you is that you should turn from such futile ways to the living god who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them. In bygone days he allowed all the nations to go their own ways, though as the bountiful giver he did not leave himself without witnesses, for he gave you rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, giving you food and joy to your heart's content. Try as they would, with words and gestures they could hardly stop the people from sacrificing the oxen to them. At last the oxen were turned back, the garlands taken off, the priests put aside their sacrificial robes, and all was quiet once more. Some time after this more travelling Jews came into the city of Lystra, a number from Antioch along the main road, others from Iconium. No sooner did they find that Paul and Barnabas were at Lystra than they began to work up an agitation against them. With crafty speech they went in and out among the simpler people, working on their unthinking passions, their dislike of strange teaching and new people. A man who knows how to work on the mind of a mob can always work up an oriental crowd into a frenzy to stone a stranger. Stone Paul was the cry that went from lip to lip. So as he went into the street in Lystra, threading his way among the people, the flame of hate caught fire. STONE HIM! shouted someone, and in a moment the air was thick with missiles. The recollection of his healing of a cripple was wiped out in the hail of hate. They beat him to the ground, and then, stunned by a well-aimed stone, he lay senseless on the earth. Out of the city with the body was the next cry. Gripping him under the arms they dragged Paul along and out under the city-gateway, past the very temple where they had prepared only a short while before, to worship him and Barnabas and flung him out in the sun. The disciples in Lystra, as soon as they heard the uproar, ran out, and were now gathered anxiously round the body of their leader. Was Paul dead? As they asked one another the question, dreading the expected answer, they saw to their joy the eyes of their loved chief open. Slowly he stood up, his body bruised in every limb, but alive and undaunted. With his supporters round him he walked right back into the city whence he had just been thrown as dead. Odd, perhaps by the rising of this man whom they thought to be killed, and held in unwilling admiration for courage that never faltered or quailed, not a man stooped to lift a stone against him. Paul walked back to the house in which he and Barnabas were staying in Lystra. Putting their light-traveling kit together, the staff and cloak, the water jar and wallet of bread and olives, they laid down and slept in preparation for the journey of to-morrow. At dawn the two went out from Lystra across the plain eastward along the road. Probably they would hire an ass on which Paul could ride, so that his bruised and buffeted body should be able to stand the strain of travel. All day long they marched, talking of the hate in the hearts of the Jews, on account of the good news, the hate that had driven them with stones from Antioch and Pisidia, from Iconium, and now from Lystra. Paul's memory could not but run back to the stoning of Stephen to which he himself had consented. He recalled, again and again, how he had harried the Christians in Jerusalem. There came back to him those remembered faces, dear men and women whom I sought and slew, ah, when we mingle in the heavenly places, how will I weep to Stephen and to you? Oh, for the strain that rang to our reviling, still when the bruised limbs sank upon the sod, oh, for the eyes that looked their last in smiling, last on this world here, but there first on God. Out over the brown rolling hills, where the harvests had now been reaped, the two comrades went sturdily, overhead the storks were now beginning to trail back to Jordan and the south before the winter snows came. At length Paul and Barnabas came up a long slope from which the road ran down into a broad plain. From the ridge of the hill where they stood they could see down over the vast plateau across which the Taurus Mountains were now beginning to cast the shadows of late afternoon. Out of the plain there rose the abrupt mass of a black mountain, and there on a slight hill in the midst of the plateau they saw the walls of a city, it was Derby. Paul and Barnabas, trudging and riding down the last league of the Roman road, saw that Derby was a smaller city than Iconium or Lystra or Antioch and Pisidia, but its walls were just as thick as those of the greater cities, for Derby was the eastern frontier town of the province of Galatia. Up in the mountains some of the most daring robbers in the world hid in their fortresses, from which they rushed down in bands on the rich travelers who rode up to Derby from the east. Eventually the two men settled down in this border city of Derby for the winter. The few late travelers who came over the mountain pass from the southeast would tell of new fallen snow, and soon the flow of camel caravans ceased altogether. The pass was blocked with snow, and the great black guardian mountain of the plain was all white. Paul would soon find work to do, making and mending tents for the shepherds and travelers, so that he could live without cost to anyone else. He could talk as he worked, and the people would squat round him in his booth, asking questions and discussing the strange news that he brought to them, that God had spoken to men in a sun, Jesus Christ. A number of the people of Derby were convinced that what these two traveling teachers said was true, and they gave themselves into the hands of Jesus Christ and became his disciples. The winter wore on to springtime. Avalanches of snow thundered down from the solitary mountain to the plain, leaving its stark black mass jutting into the bright sky, but the narrow pass through the torus range was still stopped by the deep snow. All the life of the plateau began to move again in the spring, and Paul and Barnabas joined the stream of caravans that began to travel up and down the road. They turned their faces to the west, and tramped up by the road along which they had come in the autumn. They came again in sight of the temple at Lystra, and went fearlessly into the city where, only a few months earlier, Paul was stoned. There they spoke to the disciples, and told them that they must grip the faith firmly and live in daily conversation with their unseen Saviour. It will not be easy, said Paul, for we have to get into the kingdom of God through many a trouble. They would listen respectfully to Paul as he said this, for they knew, by the evidence of their own eyes, that even stoning would not move him from the faith and that his courage and loyalty were not shaken by all the threats of his persecutors. Then he would go on in words like those which he repeated to these very people later on in a letter. People who quarrel and are jealous or ill-tempered or impure never come into the kingdom of God. Let us have no vanity, no provoking. Those who belong to Christ have put their flesh with its hot passion on the cross. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control. Then Paul and Barnabas chose out some of the strongest of the disciples in Lystra, and appointed them to be the leaders of this little church. Saying farewell to the disciples at Lystra, they walked back over the eighteen miles to Iconium. As they came near in the afternoon, the twin peaks with their caps of snow, shown as the sun went down. From Iconium they trudged over the ridge to the great Roman road and westward once more to Antioch in Pisidia. At each place they cheered the Christian people, telling them to stand firm, to expect rough times and to face them for the sake of the new kingdom. And over each church leaders were placed to guide them. We do not hear of Paul going to synagogues at all on this return journey, but only to the bands of Christian folk, so that he could strengthen them. The full spring had now come, the mountain passes were open, it was time to leave the plateau, to go back to the Christians of Antioch and Syria, who had sent them out two years ago, and to tell these friends how they had sped in their journeys. Among the rolling hills of Pisidia the snow left the bare rocks dully glowing in reds and browns that looked as though hidden fires burned in the mountain. Here and there the first red anemones thrust their heads out, like tiny tongues of flame. The shrill call of a boy to his plaintive bleeding kids and lambs as they leaped the bare hillside in search of new grass came to their ears, the plowman goading his lumbering oxen while they slowly crossed the field, the vine-dresser digging about the roots of his trees came to their eyes. They climbed to the crest of the range and then plunged down southward through the gray pine-covered ravines, up which they had come early in the preceding summer. During all that time they had breathed the sharp air of the plateau cities, standing between three and four thousand feet above sea level. Now they were quickly dropping down to the hot, close, damp plains between the mountains and the sea, where the snow rarely came. The spring rains and the melting snows of the mountains turned the burns into torrents, which ran in full spate down the ravine. Far, far below they came to the place where the stream was spanned by a bridge that carried Paul and Barnabas across to the great city of Perga, where he had been smitten with fever on his way up. They preached to the people in Perga, and then, instead of taking ship from the river harbour, they started over the Pamphylian plain round the curve of the bay to the sea harbour of Atalia. As they travelled they would pass droves of donkeys and caravans of camels, carrying the wool of the mountain sheep and goats, the oil of the olives, and the dried fruit from the orchards down to be shipped to the great cities like Rome, and Alexandria, and Antioch. By the quay they found a ship bound for Seleucia. Taking a passage they soon found themselves again on the great sea. The ship once loosed from her cables and rode out between the mighty stone piers of the harbour, turned eastward along the coast. Above him on the left Paul could see the snow-covered ridge of the torus mountains from which he and Barnabas had just descended. As he thought of that splendid Roman road up there on the plateau with its cities, and remembered those Christian people whom he had left there vowed to the way, he saw, as through an arch, a still untraveled world of wonderful possibility. The road ran west as well as east, and west lay Ephesus, Athens, Corinth, Rome. Paul dared to dream of a campaign that would capture those great cities and the mighty empire to which they belonged. The ship at last sighted Seleucia. Furling her brown sails and skillfully guided by the steersmen through the narrow passage between the piers, she hoeved in to the inner harbour. Paul and Barnabas landed and hastened up the riverside to Antioch. We can well imagine the excitement and joy of the brethren there at seeing their missionaries once more. They gathered together and listened to the story of their adventures. Their faces lightened with joy as they heard how Sergius Paulus, a Roman proconsul, had been convinced that Christ was the very Son of God. But their faces darkened when they heard how Paul had been stoned almost to death, and how the Jews in Antioch and Iconium and Lystra had persecuted them both. When all the story was told, however, they felt, above all, a strange gladness, because Jesus Christ, they were now quite sure, was the door through which any man, Jew or Greek, Roman or Egyptian, slave or master, could come by faith into the very presence of God. CHAPTER XVI Titus the Greek and Paul the Tarsian were at supper in Antioch, with a sturdy, bronzed and bearded man who spoke with a Galilean burr. Their guest was Peter, who had come up from Jerusalem to visit the brethren at Antioch. He found among the Christian folk at Antioch many Greeks. The church in Jerusalem, where Peter lived, was made up entirely of Jews. But Peter, we remember, had had his great vision on the rooftop at Joppa, when God had showed him that he was not to call men of any nation unclean. He therefore went in and took food at the same table with these Christian Greeks at Antioch. So Peter and Titus, Paul and Lucius, Manean and the others broke their bread and ate their cheese and olives together at Antioch, as they talked over the great plans that they had. Unknown to themselves, however, a cloud was coming upon them from beyond the south of Mount Sulpius. Men were walking over the hills from Jerusalem to Antioch. They were Christians whom Peter knew, but they thought that Jesus had come simply to the Jews alone as their own messiah. The disciples of Jesus, they felt, formed just another party among the Jews. There were the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and now the Nazarenes. We shall be swamped by foreigners, was the cry they raised when they heard Paul's story, of how a Roman ruler in Cyprus and the Greeks in Galatia had entered into the way of Christ without obeying the law of Moses. Keep out the alien, the Gentile, said these Christians who had come of Paul's old sect, the Pharisees. Jesus was a Jew and was circumcised, they argued. He preached to Jews. His disciples were all under the law of Moses. Jesus came from God to the chosen people, the Jews, and to them alone. Then they flung down their challenge to Paul and to the Greeks in the church at Antioch. As you are circumcised and so become Jews, they said, after the custom of Moses you cannot be saved. It came like the blow of an axe, cleaving the church in two. Peter, who, now as in the old days, was easily carried away, began to hold aloof from the Greek Christians. Even Barnabas showed signs of giving way and of joining the narrow party. The Jews in the church were against Paul, while the Greeks on the other side were in alarm, because their whole position as Christians was denied. Paul's blood was up. He turned on Peter before all the others and denounced him. You stand self-condemned, he said. You, Peter, have been living like a foreigner, though you are a Jew. How then dare you insist that the foreigners should become Jews when they worship in the name of Christ? If a man must have a mark cut on his body before he can be saved, why, what was the use of Jesus Christ living and dying to bring us near to God? I tell you, circumcision and uncircumcision are just nothing. What matters is the new man whom Christ makes. With the brethren divided into two parties of Jews and Greeks, it was quite clear that this question must be settled once for all, and it must be settled at Jerusalem, or it would all break out again, for Jerusalem was the center of the Jew party. Paul and Barnabas, with some of the others, were sent off by the Christians of Antioch to Jerusalem. As this little group of men with their cloaks and water-bottles and walking-staffs set out along the road, few people, except the Greek Christians who went out to cheer them, would know or care on what enterprise they were going. But to those with eyes to see, this was indeed one of the great moments in history. Paul was starting out, as surely as any knight has ever done, to fight one of the great decisive battles of the world, almost alone. For he was the only man among them all who had really cut a clear, straight way through the tangled forest of thought on this question. His banner had one phrase upon it, Freedom in Christ. He alone never wavered by a hair's breadth from declaring that Jesus Christ came into the world not to save Jews alone, but all men, whatever their color or race or country or nation, rich and poor, men and women, and that in him men were free from the ancient bondage of the Law of Moses. If Paul had surrendered with Peter or wavered with Barnabas, unless some other courageous, large-minded man like him had been raised up, Christianity would have ceased to be missionary, which means that it must have ceased to be. Britain and indeed Europe itself would never have heard of Jesus Christ. His followers would have dwindled to a miserable little Jewish sect. The church at Antioch, now that they saw through the eyes of Paul all that this meant, were intensely eager to see the question fought out, so they went out down the road quite a long way, cheering Paul and Barnabas and the rest on their journey. At last they said farewell, and the deputation traveled down by the coast to the ancient cities of Phoenicia, Tyre and Sidon. It was probably wintertime. Up in the high mountain passes, inland, the roads were blocked with deep snow drifts, where the blizzard would blind the struggling traveler. But on the lower road, between the mountains and the sea, though it was wild and stormy, the snow soon melted, so they wrapped their cloaks about them and breasted storm and wind, and walked gladly and quickly when the sun shone in the sharp clear frosty morning. Sometimes the road ran down by a river-bed, and sometimes it was cut out of the face of the rock looking over the sea. There, on the Phoenician coast they saw, cut in the rock, strange figures and curious letters which no man among them could read, letters carved by an ancient race that had conquered the North country ages before Paul came. This ancient people we call the Hittites. At last they came over a high cliff in sight of the crowded harbor city of Sidon. Here the people heard with great joy how Jesus Christ had been placarded before the eyes of the foreign peoples in the far-off cities over the sea, and how those people, without passing under the Jewish law at all, had heard and accepted the good news of the coming of Jesus. They then went on farther south along the coast to the city of Tyre. Paul saw the fishers coming up from the beach with the shellfish from which they made the purple dye which no one before or since has ever equalled for beauty. He passed by the evil-smelling vats where the wool was dipped in this imperial purple for Roman senators and knights to wear. Then they pushed inland and had little to say to the people in Judea where the news that the other nations were learning through Christ their nearness to God was not welcome to Jews. When the travelers came at length up the hill, under the city gate and into Jerusalem, it must have seemed strange to Paul that he was going to fight, because they were too narrow as Christians, the very people whom he had years ago as a Pharisee, harried because they worshipped Christ at all. The whole church in Jerusalem, with the apostles and the elders, set together to discuss with Paul and Barnabas. They sat round with James, our Lord's brother, presiding over them. Paul stood up. He just painted for them the picture of how Sergius Paulus in Cyprus, the Greeks and Romans in the great cities of the Plateau, had, through their preaching about Christ, actually and truly received the Holy Spirit. There it was, a living flaming fact that God had, through Christ, given his spirit to uncircumcised foreigners. They might argue that the whole law of Moses was against it, but there stood the fact which they could not gain, say. God was free to do what he would in his own world, and this was what he had done. Upsprang some of the members of the Pharisee party in the church. They may well have been some of Paul's own old fellow students. We insist, they said, that the foreign nations must be circumcised and must obey the law of Moses before they can join the Christian church. To which Paul would reply, if a man can be made good by just obeying the law of Moses, then Jesus Christ lived and died for nothing. The leaders in the church at Jerusalem met again, without the ordinary members being present, and began to wrangle violently about the matter. Their eyes burned as the discussion grew hot. There was danger of a quarrel that would split the whole church. By this time Peter was his old self again, completely convinced that Paul was right, and that Jesus Christ came to bring all men together into the love of God. So he stood up and said, Brothers, you know very well that from the earliest days God chose that I should be the one through whom nations should hear the word of the good news and should believe it. God, who reads the hearts of everyone, proved it by giving these foreign people the Holy Spirit exactly as he gave him to us. In making their hearts clean by faith, he did not make the slightest distinction between us and them. Why now should you try to put a yoke on the neck of these disciples which neither our fathers nor ourselves could bear? No, depend on it. It is by the grace of the Lord Jesus that we believe and are saved in the same way as they are. All the wrangling stopped and everyone listened with breathless attention as Paul and Barnabas stood up and told again the wonderful things that God had done among the nations. When they had finished, James stood to put what he felt to be the general agreement of the meeting. Brothers, he said, listen to me. Simeon has explained to us how it was God's original intention to gather a people from among the foreign nations to bear his name, and this agrees with the prophet who said of David's fallen tent, I will build it afresh that the rest of men may seek for the Lord, even all the nations that are called by my name. For that reason my opinion is that we ought not to put fresh difficulties in the way of the nations, but we should write to them, telling them to obey the law in four points, to abstain from any food that has been killed for idol worship, to live pure lives, not to eat animals that have been strangled, i.e. in whose veins the blood still remains, and not to taste blood. This was agreed to, and some of the Jerusalem men were selected to go up to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas, so they chose Judas Barcabas and Silas, who were well-known members of the Christian Brotherhood in Jerusalem. A letter was written on a fine parchment and rolled up and thrust into the tunic of one of the travelers, probably Judas Barcabas. Thus prepared they set out to tramp back northward over the long road, by hill and lake and river and plain, to Antioch. There was great eagerness at Antioch to know what was the result, and all the Christian folk gathered together to hear it. The letter was brought out and unrolled and handed over to one of the Antiochians who read it out to them. The letter said, From the apostles and elders of the Brotherhood to the brothers who belong to the nations throughout Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greeting. We hear that some of our number, quite without our authority, have upset you with their teaching, so we have made up our minds to choose some of our men and to send them along with our loved comrades, Paul and Barnabas, who have risked their lives for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ. We therefore send Judas and Silas with the following message, which they will also give to you by word of mouth. The Holy Spirit and we have decided not to place any extra burden on you apart from these four things. Then followed the four things named in James's speech. The letter ended thus, Keep clear of all this, and you will prosper. Goodbye. After all, it was not a very clear letter, because it tried to reconcile two points of view that never could agree. It tried to make some minor parts of the law binding while allowing general freedom, but the great point was gained. The Greeks were to be free from the necessity to come under the law of circumcision. The Greek Christians at Antioch made great rejoicing. Their love for and admiration of Paul, their great leader, grew deeper and stronger. The first battle in his long campaign for freedom was one against great odds at the very center of the enemy's strength in Jerusalem. End of chapter 16