d, which
has not been forced to look on books as mere recitals of exciting
adventures, the Acts of the Apostles are full of entrancing episodes. It
is very easy for a receptive youth to acquire a taste for St. Paul, and
I soon learned that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of letter
writers, but as a figure of history more interesting than Julius Caesar,
and certainly more modern. Young people delight in human documents. They
may not know why they delight in these documents, but it is because of
their humanity. Now who can be more human than St. Paul? And the more
you read his epistles, and the more you know of his life, the more human
he becomes. He knew how to be angry and sin not, and the way he "takes
it out" of those unreasonable people who would not accept his mission
has always been a great delight to me!

Under the spell of his writing, it was a pleasure to pick out the phases
of his history--a history that even then seemed to be so very modern,
and to a boy, with an unspoiled imagination, so very real. It seemed
only natural that he should be converted by a blast of illumination from
God. It is not hard for young people to accept miracles. All life is a
miracle, and the rising and setting of the sun was to me no more of a
miracle than the conversion of this fierce Jew, who was a Roman citizen.
He seemed so very noble and yet so very humble. He could command and
plead and weep and denounce; and he made you feel that he was generally
right. And then he was a tentmaker who understood Greek and who could
speak to the Greeks in their own language.

Late in the seventies when nearly every student I knew was a disciple of
Huxley and Tyndal and devoted to that higher criticism of the Bible
which was Germanizing us all, I fortified myself with St. Paul, and with
the belief that, if he could break the close exclusiveness of the Jews,
and take in the Gentiles, if he could throw off, not contemptuously,
many of the rigid ceremonies of his people, Christianity, in the modern
time, could very well afford to accept the new geological interpretation
of the story of Genesis without destroying in any way the faith which
St. Paul preached.

Somewhat later, too, when I read constantly and with increasing delight
the letters of Madame de S['e]vign['e], I put her second as a writer of
letters to the great St. Paul. The letters of Lord Chesterfield to his
sons came next, I think; long after, Andrew Lang's "Letters to Dead