down the ages to the democracies
of the twentieth century.

And even Paul, though not consciously inconsistent, could not rid himself
completely of that ancient, automatic, conception of religion which the
Master condemned, but had on occasions attempted fruitlessly to unite the
new with the old. And thus, for a long time, Christianity had been
wrongly conceived as history, beginning with what to Paul and the Jews
was an historical event, the allegory of the Garden of Eden, the fall of
Adam, and ending with the Jewish conception of the Atonement. This was a
rationalistic and not a spiritual religion.

The miracle was not the vision, whatever its nature, which Saul beheld on
the road to Damascus. The miracle was the result of that vision, the man
reborn. Saul, the persecutor of Christians, become Paul, who spent the
rest of his days, in spite of persecution and bodily infirmities,
journeying tirelessly up and down the Roman Empire, preaching the risen
Christ, and labouring more abundantly than they all! There was no
miracle in the New Testament more wonderful than this.

The risen Christ! Let us not trouble ourselves about the psychological
problems involved, problems which the first century interpreted in its
own simple way. Modern, science has taught us this much, at least,
that we have by no means fathomed the limits even of a transcendent
personality. If proofs of the Resurrection and Ascension were demanded,
let them be spiritual proofs, and there could be none more convincing
than the life of the transformed Saul, who had given to the modern,
western world the message of salvation . . . .

That afternoon, as Alison sat motionless on a distant hillside of the
Park, gazing across the tree-dotted, rolling country to the westward, she
recalled the breathless silence in the church when he had reached this
point and paused, looking down at the congregation. By the subtle
transmission of thought, of feeling which is characteristic at dramatic
moments of bodies of people, she knew that he had already contrived to
stir them to the quick. It was not so much that these opening words
might have been startling to the strictly orthodox, but the added fact
that Hodder had uttered them. The sensation in the pews, as Alison
interpreted it and exulted over it, was one of bewildered amazement that
this was their rector, the same man who had preached to them in June.
Like Paul, of whom he spoke, he too was transformed, had come to