shaken his reason, in the same moment an
opposite experience befell him. Not in wrath and vengeance did Jesus
of Nazareth appear to him, as He might have been expected to appear to
the deadly enemy of His cause. His first word might have been a demand
for retribution, and His first might have been His last. But, instead
of this, His face had been full of divine benignity and His words full
of considerateness for His persecutor. In the very moment when the
divine strength cast him down on the ground he felt himself encompassed
by the divine love. This was the prize he had all his lifetime been
struggling for in vain, and now he grasped it in the very moment in
which he discovered that his struggles had been fightings against God;
he was lifted up from his fall in the arms of God's love; he was
reconciled and accepted forever. As time went on, he was more and more
assured of this. In Christ he found without effort of his own the
peace and the moral strength he had striven for in vain. And this
became the other pole of his theology--that righteousness and strength
are found in Christ without man's effort by mere trust in God's grace
and acceptance of His gift. There were a hundred other things involved
in these two which it required time to work out; but within these two
poles the system of Paul's thinking ever afterward revolved.

49. Effect on his Future.--The three dark days were not done before he
knew one thing more--that his life was to be devoted to the
proclamation of these discoveries. In any case this must have been.
Paul was a born propagandist and could not have become the possessor of
such revolutionary truth without spreading it. Besides, he had a warm
heart, that could be deeply moved with gratitude; and, when Jesus, whom
he had blasphemed and tried to blot out of the memory of the world,
treated him with such divine benignity, giving him back his forfeited
life and placing him in that position which had always appeared to him
the prize of life, he could not but put himself at His service with all
his powers. He was an ardent patriot, the hope of the Messiah having
long occupied for him the whole horizon of the future; and, when he
knew that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah of his people and the
Saviour of the world, it followed as a matter of course that he must
spend his life in making this known.

50. But this destiny was also clearly announced to him from the
outside. Ananias, probab