on His servant so long a time of waiting.

69. There may have been personal reasons for it connected with Paul's
own spiritual history; because waiting is a common instrument of
providential discipline for those to whom exceptional work has been
appointed. A public reason may have been that he was too obnoxious to
the Jewish authorities to be tolerated yet in those scenes where
Christian activity commanded any notice. He had attempted to preach in
Damascus, where his conversion had taken place, but was immediately
forced to flee from the fury of the Jews; and, going thence to
Jerusalem and beginning to testify as a Christian, he found the place
in two or three weeks too hot to hold him. No wonder; how could the
Jews be expected to allow the man who had so lately been the chief
champion of their religion to preach the faith which they had employed
him to destroy? When he fled from Jerusalem, he bent his steps to his
native Tarsus, where for years he remained in obscurity. No doubt he
testified for Christ there to his own family, and there are some
indications that he carried on evangelistic operations in his native
province of Cilicia: but, if he did so, his work may be said to have
been that of a man in hiding, for it was not in the central or even in
a visible stream of the new religious movement.

70. These are but conjectural reasons for the obscurity of those
years. But there was one undoubted reason for the delay of Paul's
career of the greatest possible importance. In this interval took
place that revolution--one of the most momentous in the history of
mankind--by which the Gentiles were admitted to equal privileges with
the Jews in the Church of Christ. This change proceeded from the
original circle of apostles, in Jerusalem, and Peter, the chief of the
apostles, was the instrument of it. By the vision of the sheet of
clean and unclean beasts, which he saw at Joppa, he was prepared for
the part he was to play in this transaction, and he admitted the
Gentile Cornelius, of Caesarea, and his family to the Church by baptism
without circumcision. This was an innovation involving boundless
consequences. It was a necessary preliminary to Paul's mission-work,
and subsequent events were to show how wise was the divine arrangement
that the first Gentile entrants into the Church should be admitted by
the hands of Peter rather than by those of Paul.

71. As soon as this event had taken place, the arena