e Greek
language gave all peoples a common tongue, in which already the Hebrew
Scriptures had been familiarized among scholars; the life and teachings
of Jesus entered with vital power into the heart and brain of those
devoted followers who recognized him as the Christ,--the revelator of
the universal fatherhood of the One true God; and thenceforward
Christianity becomes the great spiritual power of the world.

SAINT PAUL.

DIED, ABOUT 67 A.D.

THE SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY.

The Scriptures say but little of the life of Saul from the time he was
a student, at the age of fifteen, at the feet of Gamaliel, one of the
most learned rabbis of the Jewish Sanhedrim at Jerusalem, until he
appeared at the martyrdom of Stephen, when about thirty years of age.

Saul, as he was originally named, was born at Tarsus, a city of Cilicia,
about the fourth year of our era. His father was a Jew, a pharisee, and
a man of respectable social position. In some way not explained, he was
able to transmit to his son the rights of Roman citizenship,--a valuable
inheritance, as it proved. He took great pains in the education of his
gifted son, who early gave promise of great talents and attainments in
rabbinical lore, and who gained also some knowledge, although probably
not a very deep one, of the Greek language and literature. Saul's great
peculiarity as a young man was his extreme pharisaism,--devotion to the
Jewish Law in all its minuteness of ceremonial rites. We gather from his
own confessions that at that period, when he was engrossed in the study
of the Jewish scriptures and religious institutions, he was narrow and
intolerant, and zealous almost to fanaticism to perpetuate ritualistic
conventionalities and the exclusiveness of his sect. He was austere and
conscientious, but his conscience was unenlightened. He exhibited
nothing of that large-hearted charity and breadth of mind for which he
was afterward distinguished; he was in fact a bitter persecutor of those
who professed the religion of Jesus, which he detested as an innovation.
His morality being always irreproachable, and his character and zeal
giving him great influence, he was sent to Damascus, with authority to
bring to Jerusalem for trial or punishment those who had embraced the
new faith. He is supposed to have been absent from Jerusalem during the
ministry of our Lord, and probably never saw him who was despised and
rejected of men. We are told that Saul, in the vir