Lecture XII.

PAUL.

ACTS 26: 19, 20.-Whereupon, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision, but showed first unto them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance.

THERE is scarcely a person in all antiquity of whom we can form a clearer idea than the Apostle Paul. Of all the Apostles, he was the only scholar and literary man, and nearly a third part of the New Testament comes from his pen. Of all the Apostles, he was the most gifted and enterprising; and as he was delegated to an especial mission to the Gentiles, and carried the Gospel far into Europe, then the abode of our ancestors, there are strong reasons why we should feel in him a peculiar interest. The writings which we have of his, are letters to his converts, his acquaintances and friends. There is therefore room for the play of the personal feelings, and as these in him were always unaffected, warm and generous, they produce in us a personal sympathy which ardor and sincerity never fail to excite.

We have a narrative of a considerable part of his life, written by a companion, Luke, the author of the Gospel, one of the most exquisite pieces of biography, that is contained in all literature. More than half of the book of Acts is devoted to his ministry. Of his journeys, Luke gives us, for the most part, a clear and circumstantial account, and so exact is the correspondence between these independent writings, the Acts and the Epistles, so many and so apparently undesigned the coincidences between them, that a great and acute mind has drawn from them a chain of proof of the absolute historical truth of both, which is more conclusive, perhaps, than can be adduced for any fact whatever of ancient history. So striking and demonstrative is the reasoning, that one of the most determined infidels of the present age has confessed, that it has put the question of historical fact beyond dispute.

Robert Taylor, an English deist, near the close of a book which he wrote to disprove the Christian religion, has made the following remarkable admission: "Paley, in his Hora Paulinæ, has contrived to substitute a very plausible and indeed convincing evidence of the existence and character of Paul of Tarsus, for a presumptive evidence of the truth of Christianity. The instances of evidently undesigned coincidence between the Epistles of Paul and the history of him contained in the Acts of the Apostles,

are indeed irrefragable, and make out the conclusion to the satisfaction of every fair enquirer, that neither those Epistles nor that part of the Acts are supposititious. The hero of the one, is unquestionably the epistoler of the other; both writings, therefore, are genuine to the full extent of every thing they purport to be; neither are the Epistles forged, nor is the history, so far as it relates to St. Paul, other than a faithful and a fair account of a person who really existed and acted the part therein ascribed to him."

This important admission establishes the fact, that, the history and writings of Paul are one of the strongest branches of the evidences of Christianity, and, perhaps, more difficult than any other to explain away. Indeed, once admit them, and it seems impossible to say where the enquirer can stop, short of an acknowledgment of the main facts of the New Tesment. These writings prove Paul to have been a competent witness, they show him to have been a man of strong and cultivated mind, to have been first a persecutor of the Christians, to have had all his worldly hopes, feelings, and ambition, identified with opposition to Jesus and his cause. They prove him on a sudden to have abandoned his worldly hopes and prospects, and embraced the cause he formerly persecuted, alleging as the reason, a miraculous interposition addressed to his senses, in the light of noonday, confirmed by frequent interviews with Jesus

from the spiritual world. This testimony he sealed by the consistent conduct of a whole life, by labors, and sacrifices, and dangers, and finally by death itself. These historical facts demand of every reasonable mind a satisfactory explanation. They drive every candid enquirer into one of these conclusions; that Christianity is true; or Paul was deceived by an overheated imagination; or that he was an impostor, pretending to have been witness to miraculous events which never occurred. The absence of all motives to fraud, a character otherwise unblemished, the evidence of an abiding sense of moral obligation, and of deep religious feeling, and more than all, the devotion of a life to the moral and spiritual improvement of mankind, seem to be altogether inconsistent with the supposition that he was a deceiver. That he was himself deceived, and under a hallucination all that time, seems to be equally impossible. It continued for nearly thirty years, during which time he exhibited the clearest indications of a sound mind on other subjects. And what is still more improbable, his hallucination must have precisely coincided with that of twelve other men. Such a coincidence is altogether improbable upon the known principles of the doctrine of chances, and would itself be as much out of the order of nature, and of course, as miraculous, as those events which Paul professed to have witnessed. In all the history of lunacy, no two cases

have ever been found precisely alike. Twelve cases of a nature precisely similar, become altogether improbable. Abandoning then these two suppositions as improbable, one only remains as a satisfactory explanation of the history of Paul, that his witness is true, and Christianity a reality.

It was the intention of the Almighty that the religion of Christ should be an universal religion. Jesus understood it so from the commencement of his mission. Not so with his disciples. During his whole ministry, notwithstanding his repeated assurances to the contrary, they retained the Jewish idea that the Messiah was to be strictly national; and although almost his last words to them were, "Go teach all nations," for some years after his ascension, they confined their preaching to the Jews alone. Their education had been obscure, their intercourse with the world limited, and their ideas limited in proportion. Their minds do not seem to have conceived so vast an idea as an universal religion. This misapprehension of the Apostles, Divine Providence did not see fit to correct for several years, until the Gospel had been preached throughout Judea and the neighboring cities, and a numerous church gathered and established in that country. Then that Holy Spirit, which was promised to guide them into all the truth, to take of the things of Jesus, and show to his disciples, signified to Peter by a vision, that his