In entering on the career of a persecutor he was going on
straight in the line of the creed in which he had been brought up; and
this was its reduction to absurdity. Besides, through the gracious
working of Him whose highest glory it is out of evil still to bring
forth good, there sprang out of these sad doings in the mind of Paul an
intensity of humility, a willingness to serve even the least of the
brethren of those whom he had abused, and a zeal to redeem lost time by
the parsimonious use of what was left, which became permanent spurs to
action in his subsequent career.

CHAPTER III

HIS CONVERSION

Paragraphs 37-50.

37, 38. Severity of the Persecution.
39-42. Kicking against the Goad.
43, 44. The Vision of Christ.
45-48. Effect of his Conversion on his Thinking.
49, 50. Its Effect on his Destiny.

37. Severity of the Persecution.--It was the persecutor's hope utterly
to exterminate Christianity. But little did he understand its genius.
It thrives on persecution. Prosperity has often been fatal to it,
persecution never. "They that were scattered abroad went everywhere
preaching the word." Hitherto the Church had been confined within the
walls of Jerusalem; but now all over Judaea and Samaria, and in distant
Phoenicia and Syria, the beacon of the gospel began in many a town and
village to twinkle through the darkness, and twos and threes met
together in upper rooms to impart to each other their joy in the Holy
Ghost.

38. We can imagine with what rage the tidings of these outbreaks of
the fanaticism which he had hoped to stamp out would fill the
persecutor. But he was not the person to be balked, and he resolved to
hunt up the objects of his hatred even in their most obscure and
distant hiding-places. In one strange city after another he
accordingly appeared, armed with the apparatus of the inquisitor, to
carry his sanguinary purpose out. Having heard that Damascus, the
capital of Syria, was one of the places where the fugitives had taken
refuge, and that they were carrying on their propaganda among the
numerous Jews of that city, he went to the high priest, who had
jurisdiction over the Jews outside as well as inside Palestine, and got
letters empowering him to seize and bind and bring to Jerusalem all of
the new way of thinking whom he might find there.

39. Kicking Against the Goad.--As we see him start on this journey,
which was to be so momentous, we naturally