BS 2505 .R63 1889 
 Rogers, James E. Thorold 
 
 1823-1890. 
 Paul of Tarsus 
 

H\f 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS 
 

 PAUL OF TARSUS 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF 
 
 "RABBI JESHUA" 
 
 LONDON 
 GEORGE RED WAY 
 
 YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN 
 l88q 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Not to trouble their hearts whose faith is 
 firmly fixed in the lessons of their childhood 
 are these pages penned. Not to anger pious 
 souls or to seek effect by denying what so 
 many men and women, good, honest, and 
 convinced, hold to be true and sacred. To 
 such, these words of preface are a warning to 
 close the book. But to the many to whom 
 such thoughts as it may contain are familiar 
 already as the honest results of knowledge 
 painfully gathered by generations of thinkers 
 and workers, it may perhaps be not un- 
 welcome — to those who fearlessly accept 
 facts even when they bring the downfall of 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 cherished ideas, who love freedom and reaHty 
 more than the fancies and errors of the past, 
 who have broken the bonds of tradition and 
 dared to think. Their number grows yearly, 
 and their influence becomes slowly but surely 
 stronger and more widely felt, and to them 
 this sketch, based upon many years of study 
 and on scores of famous books, is dedicated 
 with diffidence. 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS, 
 
 C<. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 In a low dark room, the walls brown with 
 smoke, the floor of shining stone, dark and 
 comfortless save where the sun strikes the 
 wall, sits the thin small form of the Jewish 
 Elder. He bends over the scroll of crabbed 
 Greek characters hurriedly formed. His 
 hairs are already thinned from the forehead, 
 his black beard is streaked with grey. His 
 dress is poor and mean ; there is nothing 
 to suggest that he is more than the strug- 
 gling huxter or the small merchant, of 
 whom so many live around, save perhaps 
 
 A 
 
2 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 in the delicacy of the worn features. No- 
 thing until the face is lifted, and the dark 
 eyes gaze from beneath the thick dark eye- 
 brows. Then indeed we see something else. 
 The poor gaberdine, the slight and withered 
 form, the thin locks, are but the earthly 
 shell of a burning soul which looks out 
 at those windows as though about to burst 
 its chains. A stormy restless soul, impatient 
 of its home, unquenched by age, by toil, by 
 suffering, by neglect, and by disappointment. 
 It is a low mean chamber in a poor and 
 narrow lane — a Ghetto where evil odours 
 of tanned hides, of entrails sold as food, of 
 rags and rubbish, poison the air. Here by 
 the river-side the wretched pedlars are 
 crowded, waiting to buy cheaply the small 
 wares of sailors ; some living by their wits 
 as fortune-tellers or masters of the black art, 
 astrologers and impostors. It is the lurking- 
 place of dangerous men and broken gladia- 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 3 
 
 tors. The man before us is himself a 
 suspect, brought a prisoner from his own 
 country as the cause of a dangerous riot, 
 and hidden away where he can do no 
 harm to law and order. 
 
 Can you believe that it is in Imperial 
 Rome that we stand, the capital of the 
 world, the centre of law and civilization ? 
 In this mean quarter no freeman of Italy 
 enters : the temples and palaces are unseen, 
 the light of philosophy never shines in the 
 squalid lanes, whose denizens are objects of 
 the satire of Juvenal and of Horace. Not 
 that all is evil and foul, for pious souls may 
 be found in the shabby little synagogues, 
 and touching lines, speaking of hope and 
 peace and love, are scrawled on the walls 
 of dim catacombs, where the unremembered 
 dead are laid — words written in their own 
 Hebrew tongue beneath the rude sketch of 
 the seven branched lamp, which has not yet 
 
4 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 been carved as a spoil on the arch of Titus. 
 Not that the Jew has no power in Rome, 
 for already he has pushed his way into the 
 imperial palace, and in a few years Jew and 
 Jewess will sway the fate of the Empire. 
 But between such success and the misery 
 of the Ghetto in the quarter of the Porta 
 Portese beyond the Tiber there is a great 
 gulf fixed. Tiberius Alexander, a Jew with 
 a Roman name, may have his statue in the 
 Forum, but who will ever raise a statue 
 to the poor carpet-maker in the Ripa 
 quarter ? 
 
 So judges the world. Yet a time is to 
 come when the idealized portrait of this thin 
 crooked form, robed in the toga, crowned 
 with the oriole, is to be painted by the hand 
 of genius on the walls of splendid cathedrals. 
 On that crabbed scroll libraries are to be 
 written ; nay, men who say they fear God 
 will burn each other's bodies because of 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 5 
 
 its words. As yet there is little outside 
 but disappointment and disapproval. The 
 Roman Rabbis look on him with dis- 
 trust. Some say he is mad, some call him 
 renegade. Already, however, a small seed 
 is sown. It will not be many years ere the 
 Christians — hardly known as other than a 
 secret sect of the "foetid Jews" — will be 
 the scapegoats of popular fury, bearing the 
 blame for the burning of Rome, themselves 
 torches in the " evil tunic " lighting the 
 gardens of Nero's palace as " foes of human 
 kind." Of all the writings which have yet 
 to be written, to be gathered in one volume, 
 to be worshipped as truth, to be questioned 
 fiercely and torn in pieces by narrow critics, 
 there will be none so genuine, so generally 
 received as bearing the stamp of the mind 
 and age of the writer, as will be those letters 
 which the carpet-maker has written and is 
 writing. Letters of argument, of exhortation. 
 
6 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 of passionate rhetoric, for the few poor friends 
 and disciples in Greece, and in rugged 
 Anatolia, which are to be cherished, re- 
 read, copied, and imitated, translated into 
 all tongues of Europe and Asia, sent to the 
 Negro and the Zulu, and the native of 
 islands beyond the utmost limits of surround- 
 ing Ocean, pondered daily by pious souls 
 for nineteen centuries and more, in the very 
 words of the barbarous Levantine Greek of 
 their author. 
 
 Wherefore it is not a small matter to know 
 the story of Paul of Tarsus from his child- 
 hood to the day when he reached the Roman 
 Ghetto. 
 
( 7 ) 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 To the home of his childhood we must 
 look first to understand among what scenes 
 and folk Paul grew, and what memories were 
 first planted in his mind. Tarsus, the Cilician 
 city on the Cydnus river, was one of those 
 Levantine ports where men of many races 
 and of many creeds gathered under the rocky 
 range which walls in the Galatian plateau. 
 It was a wooden town, with fiat-roofed houses 
 and dark cypresses — like a modern Turkish 
 city, having as )^et none of the great buildings 
 which grew up all over this region a century 
 later. A place with perhaps 30000 inhabit- 
 ants and still a port, for the river was yet deep 
 
8 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 enough for the small galleys to come up from 
 the sea. It was a town somewhat decayed 
 since the great city of Antioch had taken 
 away its trade, but with a history reaching 
 back to the days when the beetle-browed 
 Phoenicians in their "ships of Tarshish " 
 came up from the South — a thousand years 
 ago — and traded with the interior, bringing 
 glass and painted vases and curious bronze 
 work, and taking back from the yearly fairs 
 on the river beach the raw products, silver 
 and iron, tin and lead, from the Caucasus, 
 copper from the Moschians, and slaves from 
 the Armenian market. After them came the 
 Persians and Assyrians from the East, ruling 
 the land for nearly a century and stamp- 
 ing their coins with Phoenician letters and 
 figures of the gods. Long as they resisted, 
 in time they were driven away by the 
 growing power of the Greeks, and in the 
 Cydnus it is said Alexander nearly lost his 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 9 
 
 life. Here also the ill-fated Antony first met 
 the Egyptian witch-queen sailing up the 
 stream. 
 
 "The barge she sat in Hke a burnished throne 
 Burnt on the water, the poop was beaten gold, 
 Purple the sails, and so perfumed that 
 The winds were lovesick with them, the oars were silver, 
 Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made 
 The water which they beat to follow faster, 
 As amorous of their strokes." 
 
 Time passed and Antony failed, and Tarsus 
 received Augustus and became a " free city," 
 and flourished in trade and in letters alike. 
 Learned men were here almost as many as at 
 Athens or Alexandria : the schools of rhetoric 
 were famous : in the bazaars you met the 
 Syrian, the Greek, the Jew, and the sturdy 
 peasant from the mountains, with his heavy 
 Turkish face, coming down with his flocks 
 for sale, from the wild wolds where cave 
 villages, burrowed in the ground, were the 
 homes of the old race, which had held the 
 
lo PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 land long before Greek, Jew, or Phoenician 
 were there. 
 
 The Jew was the newest comer. The race 
 had made a place in history a century or 
 so before, when they drove back the Syrian 
 Greeks and fought for their own rites, customs, 
 and freedom. The courage of the Maccabees, 
 the policy of the Idumeans, the alliance with 
 Rome, had brought riches and prosperity to 
 Judea. The people overflowed the narrow 
 bounds of Syria. They had their quarter in 
 Alexandria and in Antioch ; they were dis- 
 persed all over Asia from Babylon to the 
 Hellespont. Their trading colonies were 
 found in Greece, in Macedon, in Cyprus, and 
 the Isles, in the commercial cities of Asia 
 Minor, even to the Black Sea shores; in 
 Italy also, and in Imperial Rome. Caesar 
 favoured them, but Tiberius and Claudius 
 found them too strong for the less pushing 
 Roman traders, and drove them out. The 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. ii 
 
 jew is always being" driven out, and conies 
 back again always. His energy cannot be 
 repressed. Whether as the rich merchant 
 bringing silks from the Chinese junks at 
 Aden, or as the poor pedlar in broken glass 
 and matches, the thin shabby gaberdine, the 
 long side-locks, the lean face and piercing 
 eyes, were found in every city of the Medi- 
 terranean : the cheap wares and humble, 
 courteous carriage of the trader commended 
 him to the thrifty housewife, and for the 
 spendthrift he had always money ready, with 
 the remote possibility of usurious recom- 
 pense. 
 
 It was a fierce and barbarous people among 
 whom the Jews were trading round Tarsus. 
 The Greek philosophers and pedants were 
 few; the statues of Phidias were not found in 
 Cilicia. To understand aright the condition 
 of Asia we must not regard the Olympian 
 CTods or the art- work of Athens only. In 
 
12 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 Phrygia, not far off, it was Atys who was 
 the greatest of gods. The wild legends of 
 his birth from the tree, of the gloomy cave 
 in which he dwelt, of his suicide, are to be 
 recalled. What more barbarian than the 
 annual orgies of Dionysus, the furious and 
 drunken bacchantes racing naked in the 
 woods, the fawns and dogs torn in pieces 
 while alive, in honour of the god who was 
 himself so torn. At Methana the east w^ind 
 withered the vines, and the remedy recalls 
 the savage rites of Thugs in India. Two 
 men were sent to the sacred orrove holding a 
 cock between them by the legs. They ran in 
 opposite directions tearing the bird asunder, 
 and buried the halves on the other side of 
 the wood — and then the west wind came 
 back. In the autumn, when the grapes were 
 ripe, the yearly orgy began. The boys were 
 flogged before the altars, the women w^ere 
 scourged in honour of Bacchus. Processions 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 13 
 
 with obscene emblems, boys and girls singing 
 obscene songs, nightly torch dances, the day 
 ot broaching the barrels, the nocturnal mys- 
 teries by streams and lakes, the general and 
 furious drunkenness of a saturnalia, when men 
 were dressed as women, and slaves insulted 
 theirmasters — these were the popular customs 
 of an age of philosophy and doubt. Every- 
 where were to be seen the rude stones 
 smeared with oil, or the yet ruder wooden 
 crosses which for centuries had been adored 
 as gods. Everywhere there were votive 
 dolls of bronze or of pottery, little vicious 
 sculptures, rude paintings so indecent that 
 we hide them now in secret parts of our 
 museums. Into the lakes and rivers the 
 people flung offerings to the demons of fever 
 and ague ; under the door-sills they buried 
 charms ; they hung amulets to their limbs ; 
 they dreaded the plague-spotted Empousa, 
 the greedy harpy, the ghosts and vampires 
 
14 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 from the tombs ; they drank bulls' blood in 
 savage ordeals. 
 
 All over Asia Minor, too, wandered the 
 begging priests of Cybele, living on alms, 
 and as enchanters exorcising disease. They 
 divined by flour and by barley, they be- 
 witched with spells the tufts of wool and 
 lumps of salt, the sticks and stones and 
 sulphur and garlic, which the pious received 
 in return for their (jifts of food and coin. 
 Innocent children especially were used by 
 these diviners, to foretell events seen in 
 mirrors of ink or of maoric water, in bowls 
 inscribed with crabbed spells. Dreams were 
 interpreted, and oracles were not yet dumb. 
 
 Everywhere also there was human sacri- 
 fice in times of trouble. At Thargelia two 
 human scapegoats were flogged to the shore 
 with figs tied to their necks, bearing the sins 
 of the people, and burned alive. The bar- 
 barous rites went on down to Hadrian's 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 15 
 
 days In honour of "Zeus the Glutton." At 
 Rhodes, Salamis, HeHopoHs, Chios, Tenedos, 
 in Lacedsemon, in Athens, to a much later 
 age the slave, the stranger, or the prisoner 
 was offered yearly. Here and there men had 
 become more merciful : they substituted a 
 bull, or they whipped the boys once offered 
 to the rude wooden Artemis of Sparta. The 
 women cut off their hair and fiuno;' it into the 
 River Cephissus, where once they flung them- 
 selves ; but the lonians w^ent on yearly 
 sacrificing a youth and a maiden to the cruel 
 Artemis, in whose honour also beasts and 
 birds were driven alive into the bonfires. 
 
 Let us not dream, therefore, that the 
 paganism of the age was either noble or 
 beautiful. Philosophy had no power to 
 touch the masses ; the calm gods of Epi- 
 curus were not the savaoe monsters whom 
 the peasants feared and bribed with blood in 
 Asia and in Italy alike. 
 
1 6 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 Amid such scenes the service of the syna- 
 gogue presented something higher and better 
 than the savage superstition of the age. 
 Wherever he went the Jew heard still ring- 
 ing in his ears the voice of old prophets 
 raised against the folly and cruelty of man. 
 " They burn their sons and their daughters 
 in the fire which I commanded them not, 
 neither came it into my heart," said Jehovah. 
 The Jew saw before him the heathen " en- 
 flaming themselves with idols under every 
 green tree, slaying the children in the valleys 
 under the clefts of the rocks." " Shall I give 
 my first-born for my transgression, the fruit 
 of my body for the sin of my soul ? He hath 
 shewed thee, O man, what is good ; and what 
 doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly 
 and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with 
 thy God ? " 
 
 " Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one 
 God." So every Sabbath the synagogue 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 17 
 
 prayers began, and after these came the 
 lessons, one from the Law, the other from 
 the prophets, with the sermon or homily to 
 follow. Wherever he went the Jew estab- 
 lished a little building where such service 
 might be held, a little ark in which to store 
 his sheep-skin sacred scrolls. Everywhere he 
 ate the Passover supper, and made booths at 
 the autumn feast, and mourned on the ereat 
 day of Atonement, and blew his lugubrious 
 cowhorns until his neighbours prevented him. 
 Not that the Jews were very far in 
 advance of the age, and not that superstition 
 and stupid fear of demons was unknown 
 among them. The old African rite of cir- 
 cumcision, which, in common with Egyptians, 
 Arabs, Idumeans, and Phoenicians, they still 
 maintained, provoked the inextinguishable 
 laughter of the Greeks. You might see the 
 respectable Jew on the Sabbath walking to 
 the synagogue in his best furred robe, 
 
1 8 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 smellingf his bunch of herbs in honour of 
 the day ; but you might also see him at the 
 full moon on his housetop, hopping and 
 singing, and praising the Maker of the sil- 
 very light. At the new year you might find 
 him by the Cydnus or other river, cast- 
 ing his sins on the runninof waters. He 
 pared his nails only on certain days, and 
 buried the parings lest demons or witches 
 should use them. He was careful not to step 
 over spilt water. He smelt of garlic, for 
 garlic was a preventive from jealousy, from 
 which he was not unlikely to suffer. As he 
 went to the synagogue he knew that a good 
 angel and a devil went with him. As he 
 passed the graveyard he feared to see the 
 souls sitting on their tombstones, and waiting, 
 with trembling ghostly forms the Angel of 
 Judgment. 
 
 The fear of demons oppressed the lower 
 classes of the Jews as much as it did any of 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 19 
 
 the heathen. You could never be safe from 
 them. They crowded even into the syna- 
 gogue ; they made your clothes wear out 
 too soon. There were an hundred species 
 of male demon, but no one knew what the 
 female was like. However, it was certain 
 that they all had wings and birds' feet, and 
 that they listened behind the veil of the 
 Temple to the secrets which the angels told 
 each other. It was known that they lived in 
 ruins and tombs, and on the north side of the 
 house. The Rabbis were able to manage 
 them : they knew the language of beasts, 
 birds, angels, and devils. They had words 
 of power, spells written in earthen bowls or 
 dissolved in magic water, whereby to drive 
 them out of the sick. However great the 
 errors of the heathen, Jew and pagan were at 
 least in agreement as to the universal power 
 of these demons, and as to the value of spells 
 written in Hebrew. 
 
20 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 And besides demons, there were witches 
 and the evil eye and ghosts. There were 
 Agrath and Asia to be feared, and Lihth, 
 who stole the little babies when they were 
 born. A Rabbi of great power changed one 
 witch into an ass and rode on her to market ; 
 but for the ordinary man great caution w^as 
 necessary. You must not pass between two 
 palm-trees, nor between two women sitting at 
 a cross-road, for they would most likely be 
 witches. As to the evil eye, ninety-nine 
 deaths out of every hundred were due to 
 this only. 
 
 Then there was another cause of fear in 
 the somewhat capricious temper of Elijah, 
 who usually sat under the tree of life count- 
 ing up your sins. When the dogs capered 
 you knew Elijah was near. If he caught 
 you behind the synagogue he was likely — 
 though unseen — to give you a very severe 
 beating. At w^edding feasts you must 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 21 
 
 always leave an empty chair for him to 
 occupy. Of countless angels and countless 
 demons ever present the immortal prophet 
 was the central figure, and in Paradise 
 under the tree of life he sits on the Sab- 
 bath and records the piety of those who 
 keep it. 
 
 This is no fancy picture of the ancient 
 world. You may satisfy yourself that each 
 touch is founded on fact. It shows us the 
 society amid which Paul grew to manhood, 
 and in his thirteenth year assumed the 
 Talith, and entered the synagogue as a " son 
 of the Covenant." No doubt his family was 
 respectable, and fairly able to give him that 
 education which a local teacher could impart. 
 No doubt, too, he showed zeal and intelligence 
 and knowledge of the Law, and a quickness 
 which marked him out as something above 
 the common run of petty traders among 
 whom he lived, or it would hardly have been 
 
22 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 likely that he would be sent to Jerusalem as 
 a disciple of Gamaliel. That he should pick 
 up In his childhood the barbarous Greek 
 jargon used in trade, as a second language, 
 was inevitable in a foreign country ; nor 
 could his eyes be shut to the manners of 
 the heathen ; but no contact with the higher 
 society of the town was possible, or indeed 
 desired. The rhetoricians and the philo- 
 sophers never influenced the Jewish youth. 
 The learned squabbles of the pedants over 
 the words of Homer and Hesiod went on 
 as they have done ever since, but Paul 
 never learned to weieh the lines of Greek 
 hexameter, never perhaps heard even of 
 Plato and Aristotle. The Jew held himself 
 superior to the idolater and the philosopher 
 alike ; the Tarsus Rabbis told their disciple 
 that only as bondsmen to Israel could the 
 Gentiles trust to be allowed in the future to 
 share in the glorious kingdom of Messiah, 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 23 
 
 before whom Greek and Roman alike must 
 ^y when the tune should come — and that 
 not long — for the final catastrophe, whence 
 Israel was to come forth as master of the 
 world. 
 
( 24 ) 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The scene changes to Jerusalem, whither the 
 young student was sent by his father to learn 
 at the feet of Gamaliel. He was to be 
 allowed the privilege of worshipping in that 
 Temple wdiere the presence of Jehovah ever 
 abode within the veil, in the darkness, never 
 seen by any save the High Priest himself. 
 He was to see the reeking sacrifices on the 
 tables by the great altar with its undying fire ; 
 he was to be purified by the ashes of the red 
 heifer burned on Olivet, to witness the strange 
 torchlight dance and the water pourings — 
 not unlike the feasts of Dionysus witnessed 
 at Tarsus. He was to sit in the cool stone 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 25 
 
 chamber under the pillars of the eternal house, 
 and to listen there, or on the sunny steps 
 of the Court of Israel, to the wisdom of the 
 greatest scholar of the age among his people. 
 Jerusalem was then a Roman town. In 
 the summer the procurator lived there, going 
 down to Cscsarea in the flowery plain by the 
 sea in the winter. In its narrow streets you 
 might see the leather cuirasses and shining 
 helmets of the legionaries from the fortress 
 which threatened on its rock the Temple 
 courts. Here also you jostled against the 
 fierce, swarthy Arabs of Idumea, and found 
 Greeks walking in the cloisters outside the 
 rampart, where Greek inscriptions warned 
 them not to profane the inner court. The 
 Canaanite peasant, the Jew trader, the fanatic 
 who hated Caesar, the prosperous Sadducean 
 magnate whose servants beat the crowd 
 aside before him, the venerable but poor 
 Rabbi from the squalid lower town, mingled 
 
26 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 in its markets, while here and there the 
 white robe of the Essene hermit singled out 
 the recluse, on his rare visits to the town, as 
 a figure of respected holiness. 
 
 Things were going very well for a time. 
 The government was apparently strong, the 
 placeman Pilate, sent from Rome to rule 
 Judea — a creature of Sejanus, rewarded by 
 a colonial appointment — had not yet found 
 himself in presence of any great crisis, and 
 had at his command the prestige of the 
 Roman name. The Sadducean high priest 
 Caiaphas was on excellent terms with the 
 2:Overnor. Thus Church and State were 
 leagued together, and the new coinage 
 was carefully stamped with due regard to 
 local prejudice. The name of Csesar was 
 on it, but there was no Jupiter, no image 
 or form of living thing, only a few leaves 
 and letters — a coin which no sensible Jew^ 
 micrht hesitate to use. 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 27 
 
 There was of course a good deal of poli- 
 tical intrigue simmering, but hardly danger- 
 ous. There was the Herodian party, which 
 thought the Emperor should restore Agrippa 
 to the position of his ancestors as governor 
 or kine : there were the Boethusian Sad- 
 ducees, who supported this party ; there were 
 also the Zealots, who held that neither 
 Idumeans nor Romans should be there, 
 and that no king but Jehovah should rule 
 over Israel. But respectable functionaries 
 could not of course countenance these fana- 
 tical views. There had no doubt been an 
 unfortunate incident about the standards, 
 from which shrewd observers might have 
 judged that Pilate was not the man for a 
 crisis. He had his orders from Rome to 
 set up Caesar's ensigns in the city, and he 
 had also the warning from his ally, Caiaphas, 
 as to the certain result. So he tried a 
 compromise — the sure expedient of the re- 
 
28 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 spectable official — and it failed, and he had 
 to withdraw. He brought in the ensigns by 
 night, and smuggled them into Antonia. A 
 fierce riot ensued. The Jews who pro- 
 tested against this innovation were not 
 frightened even when the legion was called 
 out. They laid their necks bare to the 
 sword rather than allow the Law to be 
 broken. So Pilate took his ensigns back to 
 Csesarea, and was but the weaker for his 
 frustrated show of authority. 
 
 Then there was that other difficulty about 
 the aqueduct. Certainly he meant well. 
 What could be more popular than to supply 
 the city with water ? Surely no prejudices 
 could be hurt. Local labour was employed. 
 It was very expensive, and, indeed, the chan- 
 nel altogether was nearly forty miles long. 
 But even this went wrong. They said he 
 used the Temple money for the w^ork, and the 
 crowds mobbed the palace and abused him 
 
PAXTI. OF TARSUS. 29 
 
 aloud. A certain number of soldiers with 
 daggers were sent to disperse them, while 
 Pilate himself told them to go quietly away. 
 But the soldiers did more than he meant. 
 They stabbed a great many persons in the 
 crowd, and the bad blood bred by this affair 
 was not forgotten. 
 
 It is so before every crisis. Authority 
 appears to be all powerful. Placemen and 
 officials have it all their own way. But the 
 end is always the same when the centre of 
 government is weak and dishonest, and fears 
 to use the services of strong and able men. 
 
 The Sadducees were in powder. The old 
 sect wdiich stuck to the Law and the Law^ 
 alone, without the traditions and the specula- 
 tions of the Pharisees ; which believed only 
 in a Hades like that of the Roman religion, 
 and expected no Messiah, no millennium, and 
 no resurrection ; which included in its ranks 
 the rich and contented, the men Avho had 
 
so PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 everything to lose, and the men whose creed 
 was broad and moderate — this was clearly the 
 party with which a Roman diplomatist might 
 most easily deal. So Caiaphas was set up, 
 and the Pharisees were out of favour. The 
 Sadducees were fatalists, and accepted Roman 
 rule as such. Besides, they were much occu- 
 pied with important questions apart from 
 politics. Thus the Pharisees had said that 
 to touch a scroll of the Law made the hands 
 unclean, but that the books of Homer did 
 not. They also had said that a stream of 
 water from a clean vessel poured into one 
 unclean was unclean even when passing 
 from one to the other. Again, the Pharisees 
 had said that an owner was not to pay 
 damages for any liarm done by his slave — the 
 slave must pay. This was very mischievous, 
 because the Sadducees would certainly lose 
 money by such a view. 
 
 Of course the Sadducees had their answers 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 31 
 
 ready in these controversies. They said that 
 the bones of an ass are clean, the bones of 
 a high priest unclean ; from the first ycu 
 may make spoons, but not from the bones of 
 your father and mother ; and they said that 
 slaves might set even their masters' cornstacks 
 aliorht. The Pharisees further attacked the 
 
 o 
 
 Sadducees for writing a royal name on the 
 same page with that of Jehovah ; but this was 
 easily proved permissible, since Pharaoh's 
 name occurs with that of Jehovah imme- 
 diately following in the Pentateuch. 
 
 These were the controversies ; nor were 
 they much more important in Pilate's eyes 
 than those of the grammarians over a 
 Homeric particle. They kept the Jews 
 quiet and diverted their minds from affairs 
 of State, and as such they had their value. 
 
 But though the Sadducees held the office 
 of high priest and filled the Temple with 
 his friends and relatives, the Pharisees owned 
 
3?. PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 the most distinguished scholar in the town. 
 His name, indeed, was known far beyond 
 Jerusalem ; his opinion was carried by letter 
 to the Jews of Galilee and of Daroma, nay, 
 even to the dispersed in Babylon, in Media, 
 and in Greece, in the matter of the tithe on 
 first-fruits of olives and corn. He was not 
 one of the narrow and now rather antiquated 
 party of Shammai — of those who made the 
 Law heavy — but a grandson of the loved 
 and venerated Hillel, the man who made the 
 yoke of Moses light. He held very liberal 
 views as to the heathen. He condescended 
 to return their salutations ; he even said that 
 a Jew might help them in trouble, their 
 women in childbirth, their sick when dying. 
 Nay, more, he could read Greek, and was 
 even suspected to have studied in his 
 younger days the works of Plato. The 
 more straight-laced, who cursed the transla- 
 tion of the Law, bewailing it as a national 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 33 
 
 backsliding looked rather coldly on Gama- 
 liel, but Pilate thought that, if there were to 
 be any Pharisees at all, it was well to have 
 Gamaliel as their leader. 
 
 This was the new world to which Paul 
 came from the provincial synagogue to learn 
 to be a Rabbi. There was a great deal 
 new and strange to be learned after he had 
 become accustomed to the city itself, to the 
 services of the Temple, to the mighty ram- 
 parts raised by Solomon and Nehemiah, to 
 the gigantic pillars of Herod's cloisters, to 
 the wicked statues and fountains in Herod's 
 palace. Gamaliel himself and his teaching 
 were very different from what his Cilician 
 tutor had supposed. There was a width of 
 view, a tolerance of things Greek, a philo- 
 sophic explaining away of things held by the 
 more conservative to have a purely literal 
 meanino^. There was less about that orlorious 
 political earthquake which was to overthrow 
 
 c 
 
34 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 the kings of the nations, and more about the 
 "powers" and the "aeons" and the "demi- 
 urge," words and ideas concerning which the 
 youthful Hght of the Tarsus synagogue felt 
 himself wofully ignorant. 
 
 It was under Gamaliel that he learned the 
 strange philosophic idea that the holy narra- 
 tives of the history of his forefathers had an 
 inner and secret sense. We shall see later 
 that this kind of philosophy remained with 
 him as a conviction long- after his views on 
 other matters were changed. Abraham and 
 Sarah and Hagar were, he learned, no doubt 
 real people, but their adventures had also 
 a meaning and an allegorical sense. He 
 learned also that heathen philosophy was 
 not really wicked, but only a blind groping 
 after truth ; that Plato had had some idea 
 of Jehovah, and that his doctrines as to the 
 future — the scientific tenets of the majority 
 of civilized men — could be shown to square 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 35 
 
 with the Law of Moses. Thus Plato 
 believed in one God, father and creator of 
 man, and in his Word sent forth to create 
 the world. The Phcenician philosophers had 
 said the same. Evidently they got their views 
 from the first words of Genesis, and, so far 
 as they agreed with this sacred cosmogony, 
 their views were right. Then, too, Plato held 
 that the soul was immortal, and so was nearer 
 the truth than the Sadducees. Altosfether, 
 said Gamaliel, there was so much that was 
 true in Plato that he wondered he had never 
 become circumcised. Nothing could be 
 better than his views as to piety, the recom- 
 pense of evil life, the need of enlightenment 
 from God. Even his ideas of transmigration 
 were true, such as the conversion of gluttons 
 into apes and of bees and ants into philo- 
 sophers, for had not the soul of Ishmael 
 migrated into the ass of Balaam and Adam's 
 soul into David ? Altogether it was only to 
 
36 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 be regretted that Plato lived four centuries 
 too early, and was thus unable to sit at 
 Gamaliel's feet. 
 
 Such were the new influences brought to 
 bear on the young man of twenty, whose edu- 
 cation went on in the schools, the synagogues, 
 and on the Temple steps at Jerusalem. Year 
 by year the sacrifices were offered, the Pass- 
 over feast crowded the city, the Romans 
 maintained the shadow of authority. Under 
 Gamaliel, Paul felt that he was not only pious 
 and orthodox, but learned and scientific as 
 well. The consciousness of something better 
 than this cloudy speculation and narrow con- 
 troversial rhetoric had not touched his heart. 
 Pilate had been able for more than five years 
 to report to the Emperor that all was well. 
 Jerusalem appeared to be at peace ; the Holy 
 House was deemed to be eternal. 
 
( 37 ) 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Now, if you had been able in those days to 
 leave the cities and to walk in the wilder parts 
 of Galilee, you might have come to know 
 things but dimly suspected by the rich and 
 respectable in Jerusalem. Rumours only as 
 yet had reached the capital, nor was there 
 anything in these to presage disturbance. 
 
 Since the return of Judah and Benjamin 
 from Babylon t he Jews had never been more 
 than a minority of the inhabitants of Palestine. 
 Their rank, wealth, and knowledge made them 
 a ruling caste, first in Jerusalem and the towns 
 round it, afterwards in all parts of the country. 
 They were, however, townsmen, traders, and 
 
38 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 scholars, and the peasantry were neither by 
 race nor by reHgion truly Jews. The old 
 Canaanite stocks, mingled with the colonists 
 whom the Assyrians had brought from other 
 lands, were the tillers of the soil. Among 
 them the Baalim were still adored — the holy 
 stones and trees ; and old savage festivals, nay, 
 even the sacrifice of children and the orgies 
 of Ashtoreth, were yet practised. Such a 
 peasantry was not distinguished from the 
 heathen ; they were as the beasts that perish. 
 " It is impossible," said Gamaliel, "for a boor 
 to fear sin, nor can a peasant be a saint." 
 
 But while Pharisee and Sadducee alike 
 held aloof from the poor and oppressed, while 
 the Law was never taught to the ignorant nor 
 the synagogue open to the ploughman, there 
 was another sect of Jews — Jews by birth, and 
 Jews in a measure by faith and practice — 
 who held very different views as to their duty. 
 The Essenes were not often seen in cities, for 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 39 
 
 they fled from the busy and evil Hfe of towns- 
 men to the soHtude of the desert and the 
 quietness of the open field ; but among the 
 peasantry they were known as holy men, 
 whose knowledge of healing herbs and roots 
 and stones, and whose kind and silent charity, 
 made them alike the riends and physicians 
 of the poor. By all classes they were vener- 
 ated : all men held that their presages came 
 true ; all men respected the white garment, 
 the girdle, the worn clothing, the peaceful 
 and kindly life of these hermits and monks 
 of the Jewish world. 
 
 The Essenes were found in all parts of 
 Syria. They seem to have lived even at 
 Ephesus, and in the grim desert of Engedi 
 their lonely cave hermitages were found. 
 They were celibates as a rule, receiving into 
 their order children who grew up to observe 
 their precepts. Such property as they had 
 they owned in common, and stewards held 
 
40 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 the common purse. They had no abiding city, 
 and they wandered from place to place re- 
 ceived by those of their own people whose 
 homes or monasteries they visited, and often 
 depending on the alms of the pious. Their 
 clothes were worn to shreds before they were 
 renewed, and among themselves they neither 
 bought nor sold, but gave of their superfluity, 
 and .so received. Before the sun rose they 
 prayed, and bathed their bodies in cold water. 
 Before each frugal meal their priest said grace, 
 and the stranger was free to share their food. 
 Their life was spent in deeds of helpfulness 
 and mercy, in the study of holy books and 
 ancient prophecies. They swore not at all, 
 save when they took the oath of the order 
 after due probation. Justice, fidelity, the fear 
 of God, and obedience to the rulers of the 
 land, to keep the hands clean from theft and 
 the mouth silent as to their own beliefs — 
 these were the tilings they vowed. They were 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 41 
 
 more strict than other Jews in observing the 
 Sabbath, and more constant under the perse- 
 cutions which at times fell upon them. They 
 beHeved that the soul, held in bondage by the 
 Hesh, would rise up immortal at death to a 
 happy land where there was no more sorrow. 
 Men said that their knowledge of the 
 prophets, their purity and favour with God, 
 were such that they became able to foretell 
 things to come. They said that one of the 
 Essenes had hailed Herod as king when he 
 was yet a boy on his way to school. The 
 Essenes offered no sacrifices, but baptized 
 their converts ; they were excluded from the 
 Altar Court, but allowed to enter the Temple, 
 In numbers they were about four thousand, ot 
 whom the greater part tilled the soil. They 
 owned no slaves, and desired no riches. 
 They held that all things were due to the will 
 of God, and such among them as were most 
 severe lived in desert caves, clothed only with 
 
42 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 leaves and eating only roots and berries, while 
 daily bathing in the mountain brooks. They 
 hated war also, and fled from the pleasures 
 which entice the soul. Amono- their sacred 
 books were works now lost, in which the 
 names of the angels were enumerated with 
 other secret mysteries. 
 
 How came it that these pious celibates 
 had arisen as an order in Syria, in Egypt, and 
 even farther west, in Ionia, during the age 
 of the Greek domination ? In the religion of 
 the Law of Moses we find nothing to account 
 for these Quakers of the age — Quakers in 
 all save that they were venerated and loved, 
 because the Eastern mind could esteem their 
 piety, while the followers of Fox were hated 
 and despised by barbarous peasants and dis- 
 solute Cavaliers. The answer is clearly that 
 some influence outside Judaism was permeat- 
 ing the society of the age in Western Asia. 
 Nor have we far to seek to find w^hat it was. 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 43 
 
 Even four centuries before the time of 
 which we treat there were philosophers 
 known to Aristotle in Syria whom he likens 
 to those of India. Zeno himself, the first 
 Stoic, had come to Macedon from the Phoe- 
 nician coast, and the Stoic had much in com- 
 mon with the Essene. It was five hundred 
 years and more since a great thought had 
 been born in the heart of the Buddha ; and 
 with the conquest of Bactria by the Greeks, 
 and the rule of half Greek kings in India, 
 with the trampling under foot of caste, which 
 was the greatest of Buddha's departures from 
 older teaching, it became possible for the 
 missionaries of this religion, and for the 
 philosophers of a country where human 
 thought had attained to heights and depths 
 not dreamed as yet by the Pharisee, to 
 spread the knowledge of their faith in all 
 lands, and to influence the thought and life 
 even of the Jew. " Live," said the Buddha, 
 
44 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 " both in public and in private, in the practice 
 of those virtues which, when unbroken, whole, 
 and spotless, make men free, and which are 
 untarnished by belief in the value of outward 
 rites and ceremonies or by hope in any 
 future life." The rules of the order which 
 he founded were in all respects very close to 
 the practice of the Essenes, but, though he 
 denied not the possibilities of the future, he 
 taught men rather to turn their thoughts to 
 the duties of the present world. " Trouble 
 not yourselves," he said, " about the gods. 
 Seek only after the fruits of the noble path 
 of self-culture and self-control." The shadows 
 of this world, love, ambition, riches, and 
 honours, pass away, and all that is real and 
 worthy of effort is found in the pure and 
 kindly life of him who lives for others. Truly, 
 of all divine genius which had been known 
 among men, that of the Indian teacher who 
 tried and proved the vanity, not only of 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 45 
 
 earthly lusts, but also of the selfish sanctities 
 and proud philosophies of his day, who cast 
 away even his own salvation that he might 
 make were it but one other life of some poor 
 outcast happy, was the greatest and best. 
 What wonder that it shone as a light in all 
 parts of the dark and savage world, or that 
 his zealous disciples, preaching alike to Greek 
 and Jew and Egyptian, found their way to 
 all lands, being themselves no longer bound 
 by the iron chains of caste. 
 
 Here, then, we find the basis of the Essene 
 creed. Not that the Syrian hermits were 
 themselves Buddhists or foreigners in Judea. 
 They were Jews who read the Hebrew 
 prophets, and who traced their lineage to the 
 days of Ezra. But just as the Sadducee 
 preserved the old ideas of Babylonia, and 
 as the Pharisee had been influenced by the 
 Persian expectation of a future divine ruler, 
 so the Essene borrowed from Buddhist 
 
46 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 thought the simpHcity of a belief in living 
 for others. 
 
 Among these ascetics none had been 
 more famous than John the wild hermit of 
 the Judean deserts. Pharisee and Sadducee 
 alike had gone out to hear him preach and to 
 see him baptize ; and, when the cruel tyrant 
 took his head, all classes alike condemned 
 the evil deed, for many held John to be a 
 prophet. Paul himself may have been among 
 those who heard the voice crying in the 
 wilderness predicting the end of the present 
 age and the coming of the expected Messiah ; 
 but when that voice was silent, and the 
 Messiahs of the age had failed one after the 
 other in face of authority, the expectation of 
 the Messiah was once more reduced to a 
 pious hope of the uncertain future which 
 never inconveniently disturbed the business 
 of the present. 
 
 Then came the news of a new teacher yet 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 47 
 
 more loved by the Galilean poor. Men said 
 that he wrought wonders such as were un- 
 known since the days of Ehsha ; that he 
 cast forth devils, and walked upon the sea 
 and stilled the storm. Certain it was that 
 he went about doing good and preaching 
 to the poor. 
 
 There was nothing very strange in this. 
 Many a Rabbi could cast out devils, and all 
 men knew how many there were to be so cast 
 out. More than one Rabbi could fly through 
 the air, and still the tempest. Many another 
 Essene hermit had healed the sick and loved 
 the outcast among the people. But there 
 was more than this. Men said he was the 
 Messiah himself, raising the dead and preach- 
 ing the kingdom of God. The Sadducean 
 priests and the Pharisaic doctors, however 
 willing to tolerate an Essene teacher, had 
 little pleasure in the troubles which always 
 followed the appearance of reputed Messiahs. 
 
48 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 The Sadducees believed in no such future 
 hero ; the Pharisee, however zealously he 
 painted the joys of the future age of gold, 
 was hardly less disturbed in his inmost heart 
 by the idea that the time was come. And 
 besides, it was most improbable that in this 
 instance the claim could be good. The 
 Messiah was to be a son of David, to appear 
 in Bethlehem, whose coming should be as the 
 lightning flash shining from East to West. 
 A Galilean ! a peasant son of a carpenter ! 
 from Nazareth, the rude town where the 
 rustic dialect was hardly to be understood ! 
 What Rabbi had ever foretold such an origin 
 for Messiah ? What man of education even 
 now had declared for Jesus of Galilee ? The 
 thing was impossible. It was one of those 
 popular delusions common among the fisher- 
 folk and ploughmen of the north. There 
 had been so many of such Messiahs before, 
 it was strange that they should still be able 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 49 
 
 to persuade the people. You might calculate 
 also from Daniel that the time was not yet 
 come, and no really learned scholar would 
 allow that the foretokens of Messiah's com- 
 ing had yet been manifested. 
 
 So thought Gamaliel ; and his students 
 repeated his opinion when asked what it was 
 proper and correct for educated and respect- 
 able people to believe, " No doubt," they 
 said, "this is a good and holy man. No 
 doubt he does cast out devils, and may 
 perhaps still the storms and even raise the 
 dead, but that he is the Messiah no Rabbi 
 can allow. If Messiah had come we should 
 be the first to know. Not among peasants 
 would he first be recognized, nor would he 
 deiofn first to reveal himself to the beasts of 
 the people." 
 
 The Passover season came round. Jeru- 
 salem was full to overflowing. The Jews 
 were flocking in from every side, and sorely 
 
 D 
 
50 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 taxed the hospitality of their fellows in 
 the town. They were even sleeping in 
 the olive-yards and camped in the gardens. 
 The Temple was thronged. The dealers 
 in sacrifices had set up their booths and 
 were driving an unusual trade. Pilate, 
 who always felt more uncomfortable at 
 this time than during the rest of the 
 year, was living in Antonia and had rein- 
 forced the legion. The pilgrims from the 
 north brought the strange news that Jesus 
 himself was coming to the feast, and many of 
 his poor followers with him. Paul went out 
 from the Sheep Gate on the first day of the 
 week, and was among those who first met the 
 surging crowd which suddenly came round 
 the bend of the white road from Bethany and 
 covered the chalky slopes of Olivet, wind- 
 ing down towards the valley. It was not 
 unusual to see the wild Galilean pilgrims 
 coming in with palm branches and hymns 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 51 
 
 from Jericho at such a season, but there was 
 somethinof more on this occasion to draw 
 forth the enthusiasm of the people. What is 
 it ? The new prophet from Galilee. They 
 are shouting for him as Messiah. He is 
 coming as the prophecy describes, "riding on 
 an ass." They are casting their cloaks in 
 the dust for him to ride over. His disciples 
 say that the day of his triumph is come. 
 
 The crowd surged by. The white robe, 
 the chestnut locks, the deep dark eyes, have 
 been clearly seen by Paul as the slow beast 
 picks its way among the stones. Alone in 
 all that shouting and triumphant crowd that 
 face is still and grave. This, then, is the 
 prophet of Galilee, and these poor peasants, 
 with but a single shirt on their backs and 
 patched sandals to their feet, are the men who 
 have come to teach Caiaphas and Gamaliel 
 and to turn the world upside down. 
 
 But worse remains behind. The Galileans 
 
52 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 have gone up to the Temple. They are 
 not used to the customs of the place. 
 They find a regular trade in sacrifices going 
 on in the courtyard, and the zeal of the 
 Master has broken forth. The traders are 
 flying with their pigeon-coops and calves over 
 the Tyropoeon bridge, and the astonished Paul, 
 carried away by the crowd, hears behind him 
 the voice which cries, " My house shall be 
 called a house of prayer, but ye have made 
 it a den of thieves." 
 
 Pilate's worst apprehensions were realized. 
 A riot in the Temple, an angry conflict 
 between the people and their teachers, 
 and still worse possibilities to be feared. 
 Caiaphas was indignant, and all his rela- 
 tions and retainers were furious. A hasty 
 council was called in the Temple. The 
 proprieties had been outraged and there 
 was besides no knowing what advantage 
 the Romans mioht take of these disorders. 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 53 
 
 Caiaphas explained that no one could respect 
 zeal and orthodoxy more than himself, but, 
 if these things were allowed, it might lead 
 to Roman interference. It was "expedient," 
 he said, that one man should die rather than 
 that a whole nation should perish. Expe- 
 diency is always, as we know, the term used 
 by those in power when something doubtful 
 is to be done to save their own authority. 
 Expediency carried the day : the traitor was 
 found and bribed : the new prophet was 
 arrested, and the crisis was averted by a 
 "proper and energetic assertion of the 
 powers of law and order." 
 
 Then came the very crisis which Pilate 
 was always so anxious to avert. It had all 
 been so excellently arranged. He had his 
 prisoner — the Zealot Barabbas — ready to 
 release in honour of the national feast, as a 
 graceful concession on the part of govern- 
 ment ; and everything would have passed off 
 
54 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 SO quietly with the help of Caiaphas, but for 
 this unfortunate tumult. Now even Caiaphas 
 will not hear reason, and insists on punish- 
 ment by death. Pilate went on shuffling and 
 temporizing as long as he could. First he 
 hears that it is a Galilean, and his diplomatic 
 mind conceives a brilliant idea — to show his 
 courtesy to Herod and at the same time shift 
 the burden onto his shoulder. But Herod 
 sees through the move, and with equal 
 courtesy sends back the prisoner. He can- 
 not condemn men to death outside his own 
 province. Another expedient occurs to 
 Pilate's mind. Perhaps they may take him 
 instead of Barabbas. He brings them out of 
 the grimy prison in the narrow lane. You 
 may see the fierce fanatical features of the 
 Zealot lit up by the torches ; the pale, calm 
 figure of the poor man's Messiah standing 
 behind in the shade. But this again is a 
 failure. The crowd are mainly followers of 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 55 
 
 Caiaphas, servants of the priests, or fanatical 
 Pharisees. To them the murderer who re- 
 presents their national hatred of Rome is 
 more than the Galilean prophet. " Not this 
 man," they shout with one voice, " but 
 Barabbas." 
 
 Was ever a governor more to be pitied ? 
 Two factions in the city, and a holy man like 
 John, whom Herod was so much blamed for 
 beheading, the cause of their wrath. Then, 
 too, there came that message from his wife — ■ 
 the women were always so much affected by 
 the Essene life, and so much venerated the 
 teachers of purity and of love — the little note 
 sent to the tribunal, " Have thou nothing to 
 do with this just person." Pilate was gene- 
 rally accustomed to take her advice, and for 
 the moment the message decided him. " I 
 find no fault in him ; neither cloth Herod. 1 
 will chastise him, and set him free." Just 
 such a compromise as he had alwa)s trusted 
 
56 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 in, and like his former compromises this too 
 failed. The fierce shouts which shook the 
 judgment hall effaced the memory even of 
 his wife's advice. Meanly he gives up to the 
 crowd the right of punishment which had but 
 a few years since been taken by decree from 
 the Sanhedrim. " Take ye him, and crucify 
 him yourselves." 
 
 O Pilate, Pilate ! in all ages your miserable 
 cowardice and incapacity will be recorded 
 against you as the cause of the greatest in- 
 justice the world has ever seen. Judas was 
 a vulgar traitor ; Caiaphas was a narrow- 
 minded priest ; but what were you ? Were 
 you not placed on your judgment seat to rule 
 the mob to which you have yielded ? Did 
 not Rome send you forth to uphold justice 
 and mercy, and to see that no good man in 
 your province should suffer wrong ? You 
 schemed and flattered and cringed to get 
 this post, and, when the moment comes for 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 57 
 
 a little courage, you have disgraced the 
 Roman name. 
 
 But Paul was one in this fierce crowd. 
 True, his master Gamaliel had not quite 
 made up his mind, but to the student it all 
 appeared quite clear. This could not be the 
 Messiah, nor could a riot in the Temple be 
 justified even by the words of a Psalm. 
 Among the fierce voices crying- for cruci- 
 fixion his, too, was raised ; he also was one in 
 the great crowd which poured out of the city 
 gate to the hillock on the north. There on 
 the bare limestone knoll he saw the three 
 low crosses, the three white naked forms, 
 with the darkness of the April thunder-clouds 
 behind them, in the stillness which went 
 before the storm. No Messiah was this who 
 bowed his head and died with the bitter cry, 
 " My God, wliy hast thou forsaken me ?" 
 Some said he called Elias, but the mystic 
 Elijah was no doubt recording under the tree 
 
58 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 of Paradise the sin of him who made a riot 
 in the Temple. No thought of pity has yet 
 entered the mind of Paul, but rather as a 
 zealous Pharisee he rejoices to see the utter 
 failure of this io^norant Galilean faction which 
 has convulsed Jerusalem for five short days. 
 
59 ) 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Several years went by after the fatal day 
 of the Passover riots. The GaHlean faction 
 was not, after all, extinct, in spite of its 
 failure. Many people believed that their 
 Master had risen from his tomb, and few 
 were the sceptics who would deny that such 
 resurrection was possible, seeing that for 
 almost any miracle there was a precedent in 
 the history of Israel. The peasant pietists 
 had not returned to Galilee ; they were still 
 in Jerusalem, waiting, they said, till the 
 Master came back, which he had promised 
 soon to do They were even making con- 
 verts, for public opinion is given to reaction, 
 
6o PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 and there were many who had grieved to 
 see the righteous suffer. The sayings of the 
 Gahlean were becoming known in the city, 
 and the story of his Hfe in Gahlee. Gamahel 
 himself was opposed to the violence of Caia- 
 phas ; and Pilate's position had been severely 
 shaken. Of him we need speak no more ; 
 his miserable career was soon over. The 
 Samaritans being few in number, he thought 
 it safe to massacre them ; but the legate re- 
 ported him to Tiberius, and suspended him 
 from his post; disgrace and banishment 
 followed, and the placeman sinks into that 
 obscurity from which he should never have 
 risen, while his ghost, says the legend, haunts 
 the gloomy lake in which the suicide found 
 a grave. 
 
 The position of the established teachers in 
 Jerusalem was becoming more difficult than 
 they had expected. Logically, the death of 
 Jesus should have been the end of their 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 6i 
 
 troubles ; but yet the hopes of his followers 
 were not extinct : the influence of his life 
 and teaching had survived. His disciples 
 were leading the quiet Essene life, and were 
 full of confidence in his return. The Essenes 
 were known for their constant study of the 
 prophets, and they had brought forward a 
 passage which they interpreted to show that 
 Messiah must suffer, and even die, before his 
 reign began. The plant trampled under foot 
 was springing up strong and widespread ; 
 the persecution had rather invigorated than 
 repressed the sect ; the doubt and dismay 
 which followed on the death of their Master 
 were giving place to an undying hope of his 
 return. 
 
 Calaphas was doggedly set against the 
 new pietists, and saw with fear and anger 
 their numbers increase. Gamaliel's advice 
 was that of a man of calm judgment. " Let 
 them be," he said ; " the heresy will die 
 
63 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 out, as others have done, if it is let alone. 
 Persecution makes them strong, and, if there 
 were truth in their beliefs, you are fighting 
 ao^ainst God." But the Sadducees were not 
 to be persuaded ; they believed in neither 
 Messiah nor resurrection. "These pestilent 
 fellows," they said, " are worse than Pharisees ; 
 they hold to the same errors, and add others 
 yet worse." 
 
 Thus, then, Caiaphas, feeling that still 
 another example must be made from among 
 the Greeks and Hebrews who, one by one, 
 were joining the followers of Jesus, seized 
 on the new convert, Stephen, and tried him 
 as a blasphemer, one of the charges which, 
 with sorcery and idolatry, was punished by 
 stoning. 
 
 The courage of the Essenes was well 
 known and often shown. The Jewish his- 
 torian says of them that "they gave abundant 
 evidence how great they were of soul in their 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 63 
 
 trials, wherein, although they were tortured 
 and racked, yet might they not be forced to 
 blaspheme their teacher, or to eat what was 
 forbidden them : no, nor once to flatter their 
 tormentors or to shed a tear ; but they smiled 
 in their very pains, and laughed those to 
 scorn who inflicted torments on them, and 
 willingly gave up their souls as knowing they 
 should again receive them." 
 
 Once having taken his part, no doubt 
 that he was right entered the mind of Paul. 
 Again he went forth with the crowd to the 
 bare limestone knoll. On that fatal rock the 
 witnesses threw off their cloaks, and laid them 
 at his feet. The barbarous custom of the 
 Law obliged the first witness to push the 
 criminal over the edge, and, if he still lived 
 after the fall, the first stone was cast at him, 
 and all Israel — that is, every fanatic and 
 pitiless zealot present — dashed rocks and 
 stones on the mangled frame. Paul, perhaps, 
 
64 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 had never before seen the cruel and long- 
 drawn Jewish punishment. Never will he 
 forget the pale, unmoved face of the martyr, 
 and the ecstasy with which he murmurs his 
 dying words : " Lord, lay not this sin to 
 their charge." 
 
 The persecution scattered the survivors. 
 From Jerusalem they fled to their friends in 
 other cities, and the second " expedient " of 
 Caiaphas failed to stamp out — nay, helped to 
 spread — the new faith. The struggle became 
 more bitter with every unjust act of those in 
 authority, and the gentle constancy of the 
 persecuted advocated their cause. The 
 young Pharisee of twenty-five, turning a deaf 
 ear to Gamaliel's voice, w^as distinguished for 
 his zeal and energy. Who was more to be 
 trusted to eradicate the heresy ! Who more 
 active in bringing prisoner after prisoner 
 before the Sanhedrim ! Clearly he was the 
 fit emissary to whom should be entrusted 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 65 
 
 the task of following the dispersed ring- 
 leaders wherever they might go, confuting 
 their arguments, bearing witness to their 
 blasphemies, warning the country Rabbis, 
 and bringing the heretics everywhere before 
 the tribunals of relis^ion. 
 
 Not unwillingly, on such an errand the 
 zealous young student of the Law set forth 
 for Damascus. 
 
( 66 ) 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Reader, like me you may have been one of 
 the many who yearly cross the stony plateau 
 west of Damascus — treeless and glaring in 
 the noonday sun, with brown desert crags 
 rising before, and castellated ridges behind. 
 On the right, Hermon rises to the peak 
 where the snow is not yet melted by the hot 
 east wind blowing from the Syrian deserts. 
 
 Over this plain journeyed a little caravan 
 of Jewish traders. Perched on their mules, 
 with their bedding for saddles, and their 
 wares in the gay saddle-bags or hung before 
 them, they slowly wound along the dusty 
 road. Above them the fierce midday sun 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 67 
 
 beat down. In their faces the parching east 
 wind, dry and unrefreshing-, blew fitfully. 
 Their eyes burnt by the glare of the white 
 chalk, their throats and lips parched with 
 heat and dust, they toiled on towards the 
 yet distant city, which was the chief market 
 of Syria under its Arab king, Aretas. 
 
 Among these dusty wayfarers was Paul. 
 From inn to inn, over mountains and plains, 
 he had for weeks been travelling from Jeru- 
 salem, and to one little accustomed to such 
 toil the journey had been hard to bear. 
 Nearly exhausted by that terrible heat, he 
 sits nodding on his tired mule, and many a 
 former scene comes back to his mind. He 
 sees again the chestnut locks, the deep dark 
 eyes, the slow beast picking its way among 
 the stones. He sees the bare limestone 
 knoll, the three low crosses, the three white 
 naked forms, with the darkness of the 
 thunder-cloud behind them. He sees aeain 
 
68 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 the wild fio-ures dashino- rocks and stones on 
 the mangled frame, the pale, unmoved face, 
 the ecstatic gaze ; and in his ears still ring 
 the dying words : " Lord, lay not this sin to 
 their charge." 
 
 A doubt crosses his mind — the first 
 doubt he has ever felt. He is far away from 
 the narrow fanatics of Jerusalem, from the 
 fierce triumphant cries of those with whom 
 he has hitherto cast in his lot. In the 
 solitudes of Galilee and Hermon he has 
 found time for thoughts which never visited 
 his mind amid the passionate excitement of 
 the city life. The sun beats down on his 
 head, the east wind smites his face, and he 
 falls on the dusty road. Then before him 
 shines a mighty light. He is caught up to 
 the third heaven, he hears the voice of the 
 thunders in Paradise uttering things unspeak- 
 able. Whether in the body or out of the body 
 he knows not, but to his ears a gentle voice 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 69 
 
 is calling : " Paul, Paul, why persecutest thou 
 
 me 
 
 ? 
 
 Ths Jew never leaves his fellow-Jew in 
 trouble. The dusty traders raise their blinded 
 companion from the ground, and lead him 
 by the hand. With long delay they reach 
 Damascus, and for full three days he neither 
 eats nor drinks. The crisis of his life has 
 come upon him while he is yet but a youth ; 
 and when to such men a conviction comes 
 which neither argument nor persuasion could 
 have brought to their minds, they hesitate 
 not a moment to seize on that which (in their 
 eyes) is the Truth not seen before. Have 
 you ever read of William Penn, son of an 
 admiral, educated at Oxford, plunged into 
 the gaieties of Paris : a young man of educa- 
 tion and refined tastes, bound fast In the 
 chains of all good social and traditional 
 ideas ; and of the text he heard from the 
 mouth of Thomas Loe : " There Is a faith 
 
70 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 that overcometh the world " ? That night 
 Penn became a Quaker. So also with Paul : 
 the shackles of education, every influence 
 of home and teacher, every prejudice and 
 conviction, were thrown suddenly from him, 
 and he rose to seek the Essene baptism, 
 and to withdraw as a hermit into the 
 wilderness. 
 
 After a time — how long- a time we do not 
 know — he came back, and, the old spirit of 
 argument mingling with his new-born convic- 
 tion, he began to dispute with the Rabbis of 
 Damascus concerning the prophecies as to 
 Messiah. The Jews were powerful in the 
 city, and well regarded by Aretas. The 
 horror and dismay of the Pharisees may be 
 imagined. The young man whose coming 
 had been anticipated with such satisfaction, 
 whose zeal was so much praised in the Jeru- 
 salem letters, who was to argue down the 
 heretics and rid the land of their mischievous 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. U 
 
 doctrines, came indeed at length, but came as 
 a convert. It was such a pity, so fine a 
 career spoiled, so excellent a young man gone 
 hopelessly wrong, such shame to Israel in the 
 sieht of the heathen. So also said the world 
 when Penn's father (the imperious old man 
 with a warm heart, much to be pitied) turned 
 him out of doors. Yet from the folly of 
 Penn rose the State of Pennsylvania, the 
 first State founded in that age where the 
 rights of humanity, the doctrines of peace 
 and just dealing and freedom, were carried 
 into practice. Nay, before his death even 
 the old seaman was obliged to confess, 
 " Son William, if you and your friends keep 
 to your plain preaching and plain living, 
 you will make an end of priests to the end 
 of the world." 
 
 Paul was only twenty-five, an age when 
 not iinfrequently men first think for them- 
 selves, and break away from the old habits 
 
72 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 and beliefs due to education ; but it is very 
 difficult for their elders and teachers to be- 
 lieve that opinions formed at such an age 
 can have any value, especially when they 
 are new and conflict with the o-eneral views 
 of society. The prudent man who has no 
 call to convert the world conceals the new 
 thoughts rising in his mind ; but of such 
 stuff Paul was not made. Henceforth it is 
 to be his fate, wherever he goes, to stir up 
 fierce controversy and passionate opposition. 
 It began at Damascus ; it went on for nearly 
 thirty years of stormy life. Without such a 
 man's aid the new faith must have died out, 
 as the Syrian sects did gradually die ; for, 
 bitter as was the contradiction his advocacy 
 aroused, there was that in his education and 
 acknowledged learning which made him 
 more formidable to the doctors of the day 
 than any poor fisher of Galilee, however 
 near he may have been to the Master. The 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 73 
 
 doctors of Damascus were roused at once 
 to fury, and the career of the great mission- 
 ary begins with a hasty departure in a basket 
 let down the wall. Many such adventures 
 are before him. The small and feeble frame 
 has many toils to undergo ; but the spirit 
 burns more keenly within after every per- 
 secution endured. 
 
 Among the many strange facts in this 
 strange life, none is stranger than the sudden- 
 ness wherewith, without instruction, without 
 any real knowledge of the teaching and life 
 of his new Master, Paul flung himself to 
 the front as a champion. Distrust and sus- 
 picion could not at once be overcome. His 
 present conduct might be only a stratagem, 
 an unscrupulous attempt to entrap his victims. 
 These doubts in time were found to be 
 unjust ; but in all his writings Paul never 
 quotes the words of Jesus, never refers to the 
 generally credited story of his life, never 
 
74 PAUL OF TARSUS. ■ 
 
 really enters into the spirit of the Master he 
 had elected to serve. His mind can only 
 receive that which it is fitted to hold. His 
 argument is always the same, and is confined 
 to a belief that Messiah had come ; that the 
 old world had passed away, with all its duties 
 and rules ; that the end was nigh — the great 
 final catastrophe at the door ; and that time 
 was scant to warn men of what had happened 
 and what was about to come, to bid them 
 live, not as they were to live for centuries to 
 come, but as those who await the immediate 
 approach of the end of the world. 
 
 Three years passed away from the day 
 when he fell in the dust of the desert, years 
 of wliich we know nothing except that he 
 returned to his home at Tarsus. What a 
 coming home was that ! The Buddha came 
 back to his royal father with shaven head 
 and begging bowl, and history records many 
 another painful meeting between the old- 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 75 
 
 world father and the reforming son. But of 
 Paul's relations to his parents and to his 
 early teachers we learn nothing : a gulf is 
 fixed between his old and his new life, and 
 we find him obliged to earn his bread as a 
 carpet-maker or perhaps subsisting at times 
 on the alms of the pious. 
 
 Another great change in his future was 
 due to the celibacy of the sect which he 
 joined. The Jew was bound to marry early. 
 " Children's children are the crown of old 
 men," said the proverb. " Many children 
 are fit for the righteous," said Rabbi Simeon. 
 " At eighteen a man should marry," said 
 Judah son of Tamai. But Paul, awaiting 
 from day to day the great catastrophe, after 
 which there should be neither marrying nor 
 giving in marriage, though free from the 
 fanatical hatred of women which has distin- 
 guished Christian fathers of the Church, yet 
 " would have all men even as himself" 
 
76 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 Pride of education and the old habits of a 
 sect which held aloof from others struggled 
 ever in his heart with the new conviction. 
 It was difficult for him to go as an equal to 
 meet the Galilean fisher round whom the 
 Church was gathered. Never could he quite 
 enter into the spirit of him who taught that 
 men must become as little children. Even 
 in his latest days he penned the discordant 
 words : " When I was a child I spake as a 
 child, I understood as a child, I thought as a 
 child, but when I became a man I put away 
 childish things." 
 
( 77 ) 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 About this time there was great trouble In 
 Judea. The aged tyrant Tiberius had died 
 on his NeapoHtan island, and a madman of 
 evil life succeeded him. Agrippa, the crafty 
 Herodian, was at Rome drinking with the new 
 Emperor Caligula, whose toady he had made 
 himself long before. Caligula had decreed 
 that his statue should be set up and adored in 
 the Jerusalem Temple, and the Roman forces 
 were gathered at Antipatris to carry out the 
 decree. The crisis had however been delayed 
 by the good sense of Publius Petronius, the 
 leeate, who consented to "ask for further 
 orders ; " and the divine approbation of this 
 
78 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 act of prudence had been manifested by the 
 gracious rain which at once followed a long- 
 continued drought. 
 
 There were other evils in Jerusalem itself. 
 It is true that Caiaphas had been deposed 
 almost as soon as Pilate was disgraced, but 
 Jonathan son of Ananus, who thus recovered 
 his former office, was little better than the 
 usurper. 
 
 The clemency of the legates had given 
 greater liberty of action to the Sadducean 
 priests than that which they enjoyed even 
 under Pilate. The luxury of these pontiffs 
 exceeded any yet known in Jerusalem. Their 
 tunics cost an hundred minas. Some even 
 performed the sacrifices in gloves of silk. 
 The servants of the high priest beat the sons 
 of Israel in the street. The nephews and 
 cousins of the pontiff held all offices of im- 
 portance in the city. The mighty banquets 
 which he ate could only be compared to the 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 79 
 
 gluttony of Agrippa. It was whispered that 
 three hundred calves, three hundred pipes of 
 wine, and forty seahs of young pigeons were 
 daily required by the household of Ishmael 
 ben Phabi. 
 
 Amid these scenes of luxury and of agita- 
 tion Paul came back to Jerusalem, to see and 
 talk with two humble followers of Jesus who 
 still lived in the city — Peter the fisher and 
 James the brother of the Lord, with whom he 
 dwelt for fifteen days, his first initiation into 
 a closer fellowship with those to whom alone 
 the Master's life was fully known. Tradition 
 relates that James was of the most ascetic 
 class of an ascetic sect. He ate no meat, and 
 lived only on herbs and leaves. Hateful to 
 the luxurious priesthood, he was yet respected 
 by the people, and when twenty-four years 
 later he was stoned, together with his com- 
 panions, there were many in the city who 
 protested against the renewal of persecutions 
 
8o PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 which had not been attempted for nearly a 
 generation. 
 
 If you would wish to know what these ob- 
 scure pietists believed, and how the doctrines 
 which in after-years took so many forms and 
 developed so many strange antagonisms first 
 were taught, there is still extant a little letter 
 by James to the twelve tribes of Israel — a 
 letter which you may read in a quarter of an 
 hour, and which sets forth clearly his simple 
 creed. Nor can it be said that (save in a 
 few quaint beliefs which were commonly held 
 by all men around him) this letter has be- 
 come either obsolete or without a value even 
 now, eighteen centuries and more since it was 
 penned. We may regard some of its sayings 
 as truisms, but they were not so when they 
 were written. Only because they have ever 
 since been inculcated on generations of human 
 beings have they come to be accepted as the 
 highest ideals of civilized man. If we look 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 8i 
 
 back at the barbarism, the selfish sensuality, 
 the mad luxury, the bitter slavery, of the age 
 in which this letter was written, we can hardly 
 fail to acknowledge that the little band of 
 humble ascetics who looked to some better 
 future for the world were indeed the "salt 
 of the earth." Utopians they were no doubt 
 pronounced to be by practical men who 
 knew the world, but, reader, have you studied 
 Moore's " Utopia," and have you discovered 
 that in a few centuries the dreams of enthu- 
 siasts become the realities of life ? 
 
 " Pure religion and undefiled is this," said 
 James : " to visit the fatherless and widows in 
 their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted 
 from the world." Against the rich and 
 powerful, whether Roman emperor or Saddu- 
 cean pontiff, he brought the charge which the 
 experience of every day proved true: "Ye 
 have despised the poor." Not that revolution, 
 equality, or socialism were preached hy James 
 
82 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 or by Jesus himself. Horses must be curbed 
 by bits : ships must be directed by rudders : 
 the Essene sects were ever obedient to 
 authority, and never sought to be " many 
 masters ; " but because the rich had forgotten 
 (or, rather, as yet had never conceived) their 
 duty to the oppressed. " Behold the hire of 
 the labourers who have reaped down your 
 fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, 
 crieth, and the cries of them which have reaped 
 are entered into the ears of the Lord of 
 Hosts." " Ye have condemned and killed the 
 just, and he doth not resist you." The old 
 hatred of war, of pride, and of lust breathes in 
 this short letter ; the old Essene command, 
 " Swear not at all ; let your yea be yea, and 
 your nay, nay," is repeated. We are among 
 the Quakers of the age, and the love of jus- 
 tice, mercy, and freedom, which was almost 
 extinct among greedy priests and ambitious 
 politicians, was nourished by a few poor Jewish 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 83 
 
 heretics more zealously than by all the philo- 
 sophers of Athens or of Rome. 
 
 There are no doubt beliefs which find 
 utterance in James' letter which seem igno- 
 rant enough. To try to cure sick persons by 
 oil and prayer may excite the contempt of the 
 modern scientific physician. We do not 
 believe that rain is granted to the solicita- 
 tions of hermits any more than it is due 
 to the spells of Zulu witch doctors. James 
 announced that the coming of the Lord was 
 nigh, and eighteen centuries have passed 
 since then. But, if we would know the secret 
 of the vitality of this small sect, we must turn 
 rather to those truths which remain true to 
 our own days, and not solely criticize their 
 simple-minded errors. " For if there come 
 into your meeting a man with a gold ring and 
 fine clothes, and there come also a poor man 
 with vile attire, and ye have respect to him 
 that weareth the gay clothing, and say to him, 
 
84 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 Sit thou here in a good place, and say to the 
 poor, Stand thou there .... Hearken, my 
 beloved brethren, hath not God chosen the 
 poor ? " Is this a text from which no 
 sermons may be preached even in our day ? 
 And yet more, did it not need preaching 
 when the terrible luxury of the times was 
 grinding the very life out of those uncared- 
 for dregs of humanity } 
 
 With such teaching, a simple life and a very 
 primitive organization went hand in hand. 
 We know before a century was over how 
 these little social groups were distributed all 
 over Western Asia and Italy. They existed 
 in Rome, they were found on the gloomy 
 shores of Bithynia, they had centres at Pella 
 and Kokaba beyond Jordan, they were even 
 established in Corinth and in Thessaly. The 
 distinctive rite was the Holy Supper — which 
 had been a practice among Essenes many 
 eenturies before — now consecrated yet more 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 85 
 
 by that last sad occasion when Jesns had 
 eaten it before his death. The cup of wine, 
 the broken bread, recalled the Servant of God. 
 " As this bread was scattered upon the 
 mountains " — so ran one of their prayers — 
 "and being brought together became one, so 
 let thy church be gathered from the ends of 
 the earth." The gnostic mystics had not yet 
 tampered with the rite ; it was reserved for 
 those who had received the Essene initiatory 
 baptism. To Phny it appeared clear that it 
 was only an " innocent meal ;" and the frequent 
 baptisms were usually thought to be only due 
 to habits of cleanliness and chastity ; nor 
 was there any cause for persecution in the 
 practice of penance and confession, which 
 even the worshippers of I sis were then also 
 adopting, or in the kiss of peace which other 
 Orientals gave and took. A native of 
 Shechem has described for us the meetings 
 on the first day of the week which the 
 
86 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 followers of James used to hold : when men 
 from city and country met to read the 
 prophets and to hear the expositions of the 
 elders with pious exhortations and prayers, 
 followed by the bread and wine, and by the 
 distribution to those who were sick and 
 absent, by the hands of deacons. Hymns 
 also were sung, no doubt in that high nasal 
 falsetto which you may still hear at the 
 Passover supper. After the common feast 
 there was a further washing of hands, and 
 also after every prayer. 
 
 There were, however, claims made, and 
 commonly received as well authenticated, 
 which no religious sect of our own times has 
 long been able to support. It was believed 
 that these holy men not only cured sickness 
 by prayer and unction, but were able also to 
 cast out devils. The claim was not peculiar 
 to the sect or to the country. Philosophers 
 and ascetics from India to Italy many centuries 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 87 
 
 before, and many other centuries after, made 
 this claim. It was commonly believed that holy 
 men had power over demons, and especially 
 those who knew Chaldean charms. Rome 
 was full of such wonder-workers, at whom 
 philosophers scoffed and to whom the popu- 
 lace went to inquire. Nor are they extinct 
 among us even now. The claim made by 
 the followers of Jesus was, that they exor- 
 cised without reward or hire. There were 
 the demons who threw their victims down, 
 those who stalked by their sides, those who 
 inhabited their bodies as pythonic and ventri- 
 loquial spirits. Demons, says the author who 
 describes these beliefs about a century later, 
 invade even houses, and plague their human 
 victims with fancies both in chapels and 
 in chambers. This belief in the power of 
 exorcising devils was at once a strong claim 
 in the vulgar opinion, and also the best 
 reason for the contempt felt by Roman 
 
88 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 philosophers for a sect whose teaching they 
 took no pains to investigate. If these same 
 philosophers had found occasion to visit the 
 dim cemeteries where the despised pietists 
 were laid, they might perchance have found 
 something more to admire in the short 
 memorial texts on the walls. " My most 
 sweet child." " My dearest wife." " My 
 innocent dove." " My honoured father and 
 mother." " My most loved husband." *' My 
 spotless lamb." Such are the tokens of affec- 
 tion which have come down to our own times 
 in the Roman catacombs, in a city disgraced 
 by every crime, every species of barbarous 
 torment of his fellows, that man has ever 
 conceived. It was not unnatural for men of 
 education to laugh at what seemed only a 
 new craze, or popular delusion, but it had been 
 better for the Empire if the truths which 
 underlay these errors had been earlier re- 
 cognized. 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 89 
 
 Only fifteen days Paul stayed at Jerusalem 
 with his new associates — men whom he had 
 once both despised and hated, and with whom 
 even now he had some difference of opinion. 
 Fifteen days was not long to devote to a 
 new religion, but there was not much to learn 
 or teach. The main point was agreed, that 
 Jesus the Messiah was soon to return. Nor 
 was there any doubt in their minds that the 
 teaching was to be laid before Greeks as well 
 as Jews. The school of which Gamaliel was 
 the head was liberal in its views as to the 
 Gentiles ; the Essenes had never narrowed 
 their sympathies within the bounds of Phari- 
 saic pride. It was to the poor and the out- 
 cast that they turned, and the peasants were 
 not Jews, nor even of Jewish race. Peter, 
 the rude fisher, may have had in his veins the 
 blood of those stubborn old Canaanites whom 
 the Hebrews never exterminated ; and there 
 is indeed nothing more notable than the 
 
90 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 tolerance which in this age was growing up, 
 under the Roman influence in the East, where 
 Jew, Greek, barbarian, Egyptian, and ItaHan 
 Hved together in the same cities and under 
 the same rulers. The school of Shammai 
 might proclaim that not a single human being 
 save themselves was to enjoy a future life, 
 but the idea of a religion which took no 
 count of race, custom, or language, of caste 
 or class, was already five centuries old in 
 Asia. 
 
 Moreover, as regarded the advocacy of 
 the cause, Paul felt his own powers to be 
 all-sufficient. Had he not studied under the 
 most learned doctors ? Was not his education, 
 compared to Peter's, as that of the Oxford 
 graduate to the ploughman ? He came rather 
 to approve than to be approved ; lo announce 
 his equality, rather than his submission. Did 
 he ask anything of the life and thoughts of 
 the Master they both served ? If so, the 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 91 
 
 knowledge he gained seems to have had 
 Httle place in his after-thoughts. Had he 
 but truly humbled his heart and left to us a 
 contemporary record of all that he was told, 
 we should willingly have dispensed with the 
 Rabbinical rhetoric, the vehement self-asser- 
 tion, the philosophic explaining away of 
 ancient narratives, of which he seems to have 
 been so proud, but which in our own days 
 have so little value. One circumstance alone 
 excites his imagination and fills his mind. 
 This unknown teacher, whose words he never 
 quotes and whose life he never records, was 
 reported to have been seen of his disciples 
 after death. The testimony of Peter and 
 James on this point — of men neither learned 
 nor sceptical themselves — he took unques- 
 tioned. Like others of the same age, he was 
 fully persuaded of the possibility of such an 
 occurrence, and the visions which he had 
 himself seen convinced him of the truth. 
 
92 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 Thus, after that brief visit to Jerusalem, 
 he went back to Asia Minor convinced of 
 occurrences which never came within his 
 own knowledge, and zealously advocating — 
 though but imperfectly representing — the 
 claims of a Master to whom he had never 
 spoken, and predicting an immediate catas- 
 trophe which as year after year passed by he 
 conceived to be ever at hand, but which 
 more than eighteen centuries after his death 
 is still as much unrealized as on the first day 
 of his preaching. It is among the most 
 remarkable facts in history that truths which 
 apply to man in all ages and countries should 
 have been spread abroad in the Roman 
 empire by means of such illusions and 
 mingled with so many errors. 
 
( 93 ) 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 It was by trading communication that the 
 nations of the old world, like those of our 
 own times, were brought into such peaceful 
 relations as served to spread civilization and 
 knowledge. The warlike expeditions of 
 conquering races and the missionary zeal of 
 reformers did less to diffuse a common culture 
 than was accomplished by trade. The 
 soldier is feared ; the missionary awakes 
 religious opposition ; the trader is useful 
 and welcome to all. It was thus that the 
 new creed and life which Paul advocated 
 spread only along the trade routes of the 
 Mediterranean, where Jewish merchants had 
 
94 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 preceded the new preacher, estabhshing them- 
 selves in every trading city and along every 
 shore. Whether Paul himself was engaged in 
 commerce or solely occupied by his mission, 
 it was with traders that he journeyed and in 
 commercial cities that he preached. 
 
 Of his travels we gather very little from 
 
 the letters to his followers which he penned 
 
 from a distance. He refrains, as a rule, from 
 
 boasting of his difficulties, but once he breaks 
 
 forth with a summary of his toils. " Of the 
 
 Jews," he says, " I five times received forty 
 
 stripes save one, thrice was I beaten with rods, 
 
 once was I stoned ; thrice I was shipwrecked ; 
 
 a day and a night have I been in the deep, 
 
 journeying oft, perils from waters, perils from 
 
 robbers, perils from my own countrymen, 
 
 perils from the heathen, perils in the city, 
 
 perils in the wilderness, perils of the sea, 
 
 perils among false brethren. In weariness 
 
 and painfulness, in watchings oft, in hunger 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 95 
 
 and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and 
 nakedness, besides the things which are 
 without, which come on me daily — the care 
 of all the churches." 
 
 It was a restless, feverish life. Wherever 
 he went he roused the passions of Jew and 
 Greek alike. Not, it would seem, himself a 
 lovable man, but one always ready to contend 
 with friend as well as foe, he was intolerant 
 to Peter, he quarrelled with Barnabas, he 
 was never content to work with other men ; 
 but yet there were in the man great powers 
 and affections which could not be marred 
 even by the hardness of his indomitable will. 
 No persecution ever shook his purpose, no 
 doubt or discouragement paralysed his action. 
 A man with whom all strong and stern men 
 who followed him have been in sympathy, 
 and whose mind has influenced the history 
 of many lands where his foot never trod. 
 
 We have an account of his travels, written 
 
96 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 perhaps by one of the next generation, which, 
 though invaded by the legendary overgrowth 
 which in those times sprang up so quickly 
 round the history of any man of mark, yet 
 no doubt faithfully represents the main events 
 of his wandering life ; and, except when the 
 writer is not in accord with the few notes 
 left to us in Paul's own letters, the narrative 
 of this legend may be accepted for our 
 guidance. 
 
 From Antioch and the shallow bay of 
 Seleucia the new preacher crossed over by 
 sea to Cyprus. He passed along the 
 southern coasts as far as the famous shrine of 
 Aphrodite at Paphos, then the scene of one 
 of the most degrading rituals of paganism. 
 On the altar of the goddess no blood was 
 ever shed, and men believed that no rain ever 
 fell upon it. The great conical stone which 
 was her emblem veiled an obscene meaning. 
 The votive offerings were equally obscene, 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 97 
 
 and her votaries were the sacred prostitutes 
 of Phoenicia and Babylon. In the courts 
 where white doves fluttered in flocks, and 
 among the rose gardens of Paphos, these 
 black-robed girls, with hair woven into 
 mitres, with plumes, coloured scarves, and 
 many jewels, with pinks, roses, and pome- 
 granate blossoms in their locks, eyes dyed 
 with stibium, hands and cheeks with henna, 
 necklets of gold, amber, and glass, the dove 
 in one hand, the myrtle-bough in another, 
 showed their unveiled faces to the crowd. 
 These were the priestesses of the old world, 
 whose time was now so short, representing 
 the least cruel, but not the least degrading, 
 rites of Asiatic paganism. 
 
 From Cyprus he sailed north to the Gulf 
 of Attalia. A great deal of Paul's life was 
 spent upon the sea, and the trials of these 
 long, tedious voyages were not the least that 
 he endured. Not only shipwreck and storm, 
 
 G 
 
98 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 but the crowded filthy galleys, often creeping 
 only under the oars which the slaves, stung 
 with the whip, laboured wearily to pull 
 through the waves, must be endured, some- 
 times for weeks together. Pleasant it may 
 have been at times to sail the "wine- 
 coloured sea " among the rocky islands of 
 Greece, but not when overcrowded ships 
 were labouring in the fierce winter storms 
 of this inhospitable coast, and the waves 
 dashed over the frightened mob, the chained 
 slaves, the savage sailors. 
 
 Landing on the Pamphylian coast, Paul 
 followed the trade route to Iconium, clam- 
 bering up the steep mountains, with woods 
 of pine, oak, and beech, deep alpine ravines 
 with foaming streams, beyond which towered 
 the snowy tops of the Carian mountains, and 
 thus reached the treeless downs of Lycaonia, 
 where water is found only in deep wells, and 
 where a coarse grass for the flocks alone 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 99 
 
 springs from the desert soil. It was a 
 country where only pastoral tribes had ever 
 lived — the wild Turkish peasants who tended 
 their goats, camels, and black cattle, or lived 
 by robbery, or drove their rude waggons to 
 the great salt lake farther north, bringing 
 into Iconium the wools and salt which were 
 their only saleable articles. Over these 
 plains the wild asses yet roamed. In the 
 mountains there were boars and wolves, 
 and on the open downs the wild deer 
 and antelope. Everywhere the rocks were 
 pierced with ancient tombs, relics of bygone 
 races. The peasants themselves lived, like 
 the Seirites of old, in underground bur- 
 rows. Over this country the road lay for 
 two hundred miles by Iconium back to 
 Tarsus. 
 
 It was a region still full of wild legends, 
 and where men still believed the Qrods some- 
 times to come down to earth. On the west 
 
loo PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 was the kingdom of Midas, the king with 
 ass's ears. On the east, at Apamea, the 
 Chaldean legend of the ark and of the flood 
 was still believed. It was here that Zeus 
 and Hermes came as travellers to visit the 
 pious Baucis and her husband. Men might 
 perhaps yet point out the aged trees bend- 
 ing towards each other in which the souls 
 of the happy pair were still believed to 
 dwell. 
 
 What hope was there of teaching better 
 things to the naked and starving savages 
 of this desert ? Hardly, in some places, had 
 they ever seen a stranger. At one village 
 (so the story goes) the travellers were re- 
 ceived as gods, with sacrifices. Paul, with 
 his low thin figure and rapid speech, these 
 slow-witted boors regarded as Hermes, and 
 his tall comely companion as Zeus. The 
 Jews of Iconium were furious, and roused 
 up fanatics to stone him and leave him for 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. loi 
 
 dead. A strange experience truly — on one 
 day to be adored as a god, and on the next 
 to be stoned for a blasphemer. 
 
 It was in the towns only that any converts 
 were made. The muids of the shepherds 
 could conceive nothing better than sorcery. 
 They made a shrine for Apollonius of 
 Tyana, the silent philosopher who was 
 said to exorcise demons and to raise the 
 dead. They were willing to worship Paul 
 himself, but they had not heard of the 
 "World-King," the divine ruler who was 
 expected at that time by Indians and 
 Persians, by the writers of Sibylline oracles, 
 nay, even by Romans like Virgil, as well as 
 by the Pharisees. Paul told them he was 
 but a man like themselves, and they left him 
 for the Jews to stone. .Iconium was only a 
 small town, where traders bought the wool, 
 and where roads from various reoions met. 
 The springs here watered a few gardens, and 
 
102 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 wooden houses rose from the bare and 
 wind-swept steppes. There were Jewish 
 merchants here, with a synagogue, and to 
 them Paul expounded his beHefs, meeting 
 with his usual reception : a few believed, a 
 greater number were furious against the 
 heretic. The expulsion of Paul was, how- 
 ever, never the defeat of his teaching, for 
 wherever he went a few poor believers were 
 left behind him. 
 
 How long these journeyings lasted we do 
 not know, but Paul lived not less than four- 
 teen years on the south coasts of Asia Minor 
 before he again went up to Jerusalem to see 
 the brethren. During this time tlie sect had 
 spread through Syria, and some were found 
 even in Antioch, and here first they received 
 a name which has been theirs ever since. 
 The Greek language was that in which — as 
 a sort of lingua franca — the new teaching 
 was mainly uttered, and, to the Greeks, the 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 103 
 
 followers of Messiah were Christians ; but 
 the common people knew nothing of Christos, 
 and in vulgar parlance the term was almost 
 at once changed to Chrestian, or "pietist." 
 The new ascetics were known, in fact, as 
 "good folk" by those who neither cared for, 
 nor were able to understand, their tenets, 
 and only saw their blameless life. The mis- 
 take was pointed out constantly for three 
 centuries, yet the old error continued ; nor 
 was there anything of which the Christians 
 need have felt ashamed in the popular mis- 
 nomer. 
 
 Antioch, the great trading capital of Asia, 
 was already the abode of Essene hermits, 
 whose caves remain burrowed in its rocks. 
 Its pillared streets, its race-course, its baths 
 theatres, aqueducts, basilicas, and statues, its 
 population of two hundred thousand souls, its 
 ramparts scaling the mountains, its famous 
 shrine of Daphne among the oleander 
 
104 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 thickets of the Orontes, made Antioch a 
 centre of civiHzation, without a peer in 
 Western Asia. The Jew, the Syrian, the 
 Greek, the Mede, the Chaldean, the Itahan, 
 and the Egyptian met in its streets ; and the 
 Roman ruled them all. There were syna- 
 gogues where the pagans went to swear faith 
 to one another — an oath in a Jewish syna- 
 gogue being, for some unknown reason, held 
 sacred — and in these same synagogues there 
 were strange dances, with the blowing of cow- 
 horns at the feast of Tabernacles. The 
 lower classes were as superstitious as else- 
 where. They tied old coins of Alexander 
 the Great to the limbs of their children for 
 luck, and decked themselves with amulets. 
 The greatest misery and the most unbounded 
 luxury existed side by side. The furniture 
 was of gold, the robes of silk, in rich men's 
 houses ; the slaves were beaten with thongs, 
 or their flesh torn with hooks, at their 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 105 
 
 masters' pleasure. Amorous songs and 
 voluptuous spectacles, a public conversation 
 such as we can hardly parallel save in the 
 Court of the Merry Monarch, were scandal- 
 ous only in the eyes of the Essene pietists. 
 The beggars swarmed in the streets, and 
 justice was sold in the Forum. Jesters, 
 magicians, tumblers, and sorcerers abounded 
 — men who would cast out devils for hire, 
 and sell love philtres to the young. At the 
 feast of Majuma the temple women swam in 
 the baths for the edification of the public, and 
 already no self-respecting person was to be 
 found approaching the shrine of Daphne. 
 The talk was of chariot-racine and of 
 actresses, of the great pageants in which 
 elephants drew gilded coaches, or of the 
 latest mountebank. Yet even here there 
 were a few sober men whose minds were 
 bent on better things than the barbarous 
 vanities of a decaying society. 
 
io5 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 In Antioch a dispute arose between Peter 
 and Paul. We have Paul's account of the 
 matter, which does him credit. We have not 
 got Peters, and must therefore beware lest 
 we condemn him unheard. But, though the 
 fact of this dispute cannot be doubted, there 
 is no reason to suppose that the results were 
 either alienation or hatred. If the facts are 
 as Paul relates them, and, if Peter had really 
 learned the teaching of his Master, he may 
 have been willing to confess his error. It 
 was, after all, not a very serious matter which 
 Paul insisted on settling. Peter had eaten 
 with the Gentiles till some of James's 
 friends arrived, when he was careful to avoid 
 offence by so doing. Paul not only blamed 
 this exclusiveness, but somewhat ungene- 
 rously taxed Peter with dissimulation. In 
 his account he is anxious to show that it was 
 only a passing disagreement, in which he was 
 on the side of liberality towards the stranger. 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 107 
 
 The habits of a lifetime cannot be shaken off 
 by every man at once. James had Httle 
 regard for Gentiles, having lived among 
 his own people. Paul from childhood had 
 lived with those of other races, and the 
 question was not which course was right, but 
 whether Peter was justified in his harmless 
 dissimulation, which Paul so unceremoniously 
 exposed. 
 
 Out of this incident a great quarrel has 
 been supposed by some writers to have 
 arisen, of which there is no mark at all in the 
 early literature of the subject. If Paul had 
 hated the followers of Peter, he would never 
 have shrunk from so saying in every letter he 
 penned. He does not, however, say any- 
 thing of the sort, and it is only a century later, 
 when the growth of the Christian sect had 
 led to many diversities and oppositions, that 
 this antagonism finds expression. The 
 Italian Christians follow Paul; the Syrians 
 
io8 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 make James or Peter their champion. The 
 later schism had no existence among the 
 immediate contemporaries of the Master who 
 taught that it was enough for the disciple 
 to be as his Lord. 
 
( I09 ) 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 A SECOND visit to the wild regions of Lyca- 
 onia was followed by a journey which took 
 Paul to the Ionian coast, and thence to Greece. 
 At Jerusalem and at Antioch the Christian 
 creed was known ; the zealous preacher 
 desired that it should be spread abroad in 
 other cities of the civilized world, in Athens, 
 in Corinth, nay, even in Rome and to the 
 " ends of the earth " in Spain. 
 
 We have seen Paul in contact with the 
 Judaism of Jerusalem, the Syrian luxury of 
 Antioch, the barbarism of Asia Minor. We 
 now follow him to one of the great centres of 
 philosophic education. It is true that Athens 
 
110 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 no longer held its proud position as queea 
 of tlie civilized world. It was no longer the 
 centre of an active free State, pushing forth 
 its conquering colonies and thrusting back 
 the tide of invasion from the East. There 
 was no Plato or Aristotle or Socrates in 
 Athens when Paul reached its Acropolis ; 
 the great thinkers were no more; the narrow 
 pedants, who could do little more than pre- 
 serve what Greece, centuries before, had 
 produced, reigned in the Athenian schools. 
 The four great philosophic sects no longer 
 contended, and men, who perhaps had given 
 up the questions which they asked, were 
 content with an eclectic repetition of what 
 was most generally admired in the teaching 
 of each ancient master. The country was 
 ruined, suffering from the exactions of Roman 
 rulers. Its trade and its art were drawn 
 away to Antioch and to Rome ; the fields 
 were hardly tilled, and the poverty of all 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. m 
 
 classes was such that impious men had 
 already even laid hands on the innumerable 
 statues in gold and ivory and bronze which 
 crowded the temples — gifts of heroic citizens 
 of former days. 
 
 Philosophy in Athens was confined to the 
 few. The lower classes were as superstitious 
 and as ignorant as elsewhere. They believed 
 in the oracles which crows and goats, trained 
 by the priests, uttered, as the learned pig 
 astonishes the yokel. They consulted 
 Hercules by throwing dice — as the Cliinese 
 townsman still divines his fate. The mystic 
 orgies, the human sacrifices, the brutal con- 
 tests of boys who fought in bands in celebra- 
 tion of the feast days, the indecent pictures 
 which adorned the walls of houses, the 
 licence of manners and of talk among all 
 classes, witnessed a barbarism like that of 
 other Greek lands through which Paul had 
 journeyed or in which he had been reared. 
 
112 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 His attention was chiefly roused by the 
 innumerable statues, from the rude painted 
 figures of primitive times to the later glories 
 of Phidias, mingled with inferior Roman work, 
 and, a little later, with images even of Nero 
 himself. At the port of Athens he found 
 altars with the inscription " To unknown 
 Gods," which were standing a century later 
 when Pausanias visited the city, and these 
 especially arrested his thoughts. He argued 
 and expounded daily in the markets with 
 Jew and Greek, and aroused the curiosity 
 even of the Epicureans and Stoics — the latter 
 well inclined to the ascetic teaching of the 
 kindred Essene sect. 
 
 Now, Paul has told us that he always 
 strove to make his preaching intelligible and 
 acceptable by presenting it in familiar guise. 
 He was " all things to all men," no doubt 
 because, as a rule, he regarded all men as less 
 gifted and more ignorant than himself. But 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 113 
 
 of Greek philosophy he knew as Httle as he 
 did of the classical Greek tongue, and, when 
 he came thus into contact with men who 
 were versed in the highest thought of the 
 greatest Greek thinkers, his deficiency 
 became apparent. Invited to the Acropolis, 
 he hesitated not a moment to improve his 
 opportunities. " Men of Athens," he said, 
 " I perceive you to be most religious." He 
 takes as a text the altar to the " unknown 
 God," and not only declares that this God is 
 the creator of man and of the universe, but 
 adds his conviction that only to the followers 
 of Jesus was this God known, and that Jesus 
 himself had risen from the dead in proof of 
 his divine nature. 
 
 Now, when they heard this conclusion to 
 an argument which in its opening phrases 
 was in accord with their own views, some 
 mocked and some more courteously deferred 
 the question. The success was next to 
 
 H 
 
114 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 nothing, and it was not till many generations 
 later that any Athenian philosopher joined 
 the Christians. The general verdict was, 
 that the preacher had nothing new to say. 
 As regarded resurrection, that was no new 
 idea. Apollonius was even then vulgarly 
 believed to be raising the dead. Plato had 
 believed that a Persian sage had risen from 
 his funeral pyre on the twelfth day. This 
 Jesus whom Paul preached (and preached so 
 imperfectly) was apparently only a new 
 wonder-worker, like the countless other 
 practisers of magic in whom the populace 
 believed. 
 
 As regarded the one God, maker of all 
 things, even Sophocles had long ago pro- 
 claimed the truth in better words than Paul's 
 broken jargon of Jewish Greek. 
 
 " One in good truth — yea, God is one, 
 Who made the heaven and the widespread earth. 
 Blue billows of the deep, might of the wind. 
 But we poor mortals, in our ignorance, 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. "5 
 
 To so'acc trouble of our hearts have raised 
 
 Likeness of gods of stone, and brass, and wood, 
 
 And figures wrought in ivory and gold. 
 
 And sacrifices and vain festivals, 
 
 Have offered these, and deemed ourselves devout." 
 
 Poor Paul had never heard of Sophocles, 
 and knew only by hearsay the teaching of 
 Plato. lie came to preach the immortality 
 of the soul to men who had already both 
 conceived the idea and doubted the results 
 of their own thought. " The soul," said 
 Plato, " departs to deity, but, if earthly 
 minded, is held fast and haunts the tomb, or 
 wanders until imprisoned once more in a 
 body." The final bliss to which the followers 
 of Plato looked was that to which Buddhist 
 and yet earlier Brahmin thinkers had long 
 since pointed, when the real should be free 
 from the illusion of material existence, the 
 idea^ as Plato called it, free from the pheno- 
 mena which fade away and die. '' Around 
 the Ruler of all, all things move, and 
 
ii6 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 he only is the cause of all good thuiors." 
 "There is but one God" was not a new 
 idea in Athens. Pythagoras had known it 
 even before Plato. 
 
 The minds of the philosophers were, 
 indeed, occupied by quite other questions. 
 Any who were more than mere pedagogues 
 or impostors robed in the Stoic cloak were 
 concerned rather to know what was the 
 primary divine origin of matter — whether 
 Thales was right when he said water, or 
 Heraclitus in considering air, to be the ori- 
 ginal material, or Anaximander the heavenly 
 bodies, or Strato sky and earth, or Plato 
 the stars. 
 
 Absurd as such speculation may sound, it 
 was an immense stride from the old ignor- 
 ant cosmogonies of Babylonian tablets and 
 Hebrew scrolls : it was the dawn of that 
 spirit of inquiry into the facts of existence to 
 which we owe the truths of modern science. 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. n? 
 
 Yet there was a text from which Paul 
 might have preached even to these men 
 had he but learned it himself, had he but 
 sat on the Galilean hillside with the Master 
 of whom he knew so little, and whom he 
 was degrading in the eyes of the world 
 to the rank of an ordinary magician : 
 " Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy 
 brother's eye, and considerest not the beam 
 that is in thine own eye ? " 
 
 At Athens Paul was not persecuted. He 
 failed to impress the more cultivated, and left 
 hardlv a convert behind. At Corinth, how- 
 ever, where first he met the Roman Jews 
 Aquila and his wife Priscilla — carpet-makers 
 like himself, who had been driven out of 
 Rome with others in the time of Claudius — 
 there w^as a Jewish colony mingling with 
 many other elements of mixed population. 
 Here, as in other towns where the Jews were 
 strong, Paul's preaching roused the fiercest 
 
ii8 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 opposition. But the proconsul was a man 
 of education and character, elder brother of 
 Seneca, and possessing that spirit of good- 
 natured tolerance which made the Romans 
 capable of ruling other races. He neither 
 took the Jewish side nor was he interested 
 in Paul's peculiar views. It was nothing to 
 him that the Jews beat their Rabbis before 
 the judgment-seat, so long as public order 
 was not seriously menaced. For this wise 
 conduct, fit for a governor of mingled 
 populations, Marcus Annseus Novatus, the 
 adopted child of Junius Gallion, has come 
 down to us in the pages of history in the 
 false guise of a careless and indifferent 
 Gallio. 
 
 In time Paul left Corinth and, with Aquila 
 and Priscilla, passed over to Ephesus, and, 
 leaving them there, returned to Antioch. It 
 would appear that his companions returned 
 to Rome when, with the accession of Nero, 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 119 
 
 the city was once more opened to the Jews ; 
 and a fact which is often forgotten seems 
 to be indicated by the mention of their 
 names in a letter from Paul to the Roman 
 Jewish converts which appears to have 
 been written some years after the death of 
 Claudius — the fact that at least thirty of 
 the new sect had settled in the Imperial 
 city before Paul himself came thither as a 
 prisoner. 
 
 A year passed, and Paul again traversed 
 Asia Minor and arrived a second time at 
 Ephesus. His work was attracting- more 
 attention than it used to do fourteen years 
 or so before, when the number of his 
 friends and converts was so small. In 
 those years he had succeeded in plant- 
 ing little social centres in most of the 
 larger towns, where their secluded life 
 and quiet disapprobation of the manners 
 and morals of the many were gradually 
 
120 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 rousing the hatred of Jew and Greek 
 alike. 
 
 We know how in every age the hatred 
 of the majority increases in proportion as 
 the success of a new idea becomes assured. 
 At first silent contempt is expected to kill 
 the eccentricity which is so patent to the 
 ordinary mind. The idea grows even under 
 this chilly frost, and one by one individual 
 minds are attracted. Still, it is only the 
 opinion of the few, and, therefore, unsafe 
 in the eyes of those who follow like sheep 
 the old appointed bell-wethers of society. 
 Neither contempt nor ridicule nor futile 
 persecution had killed this seed, and it 
 was becoming — only twenty-four years after 
 the execution of Jesus — an absolute danger 
 to those whose livelihood depended on the 
 established creeds. 
 
 At Ephesus it is said that soothsayers had 
 burned their books and joined the pietists, 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 121 
 
 and great was the indignation of the classes 
 whose very existence depended on the 
 Ephesian shrine when they heard of Paul's 
 return. Antioch represented wealth, Athens 
 education, Rome the government of the 
 world, but Ephesus was the centre of con- 
 servative fanaticism. To the classic religion 
 of Greece, the city of the mother-goddess was 
 as Jerusalem to the Jew, or Alexandria to 
 the strange foreign Serapis who had deposed 
 Osiris. Greek and Roman alike in other 
 towns were tolerant of local gods and of 
 local philosophies. In Ephesus the traders 
 who lived by the temple had but one 
 opinion on the atheism which would ruin 
 the city. Zeal for the goddess was a 
 respectable covering for personal interest, 
 and the celebrated argument of the silver- 
 smiths Is one common enough among us 
 yet, for " great Is Artemis of the Ephe- 
 sians." 
 
13- PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 The original shrine had been a beech or 
 elm tree, into which a black meteorite had 
 fallen. The tree decayed, but the stump was 
 still adored, and when the great temple, with 
 its cloisters and pillars, rose round the shrine 
 of the "stone that fell down from Zeus," a 
 hideous symbolic statue was erected. The 
 mother-goddess, with her many breasts, with 
 her tower-crown, and oreole of cherubim, 
 stretched forth her hands and supported the 
 lions on her arms. Her robe was blazoned 
 with the emblems of animal creation, with 
 roses, serpents, and winged harpies. The idol 
 was not that which Callimachus described as 
 raised by the Amazons, yet it was more 
 archaic than the statues of Athens. Under 
 many names she was known in many lands, 
 and pilgrims came from East and West to 
 worship, taking home with them the little 
 silver shrines which the smiths of the town 
 made as models of the sanctuary, and which 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 123 
 
 no doubt were blessed by the " king priests " 
 who served her. 
 
 The Temple of Artemis was the centre of 
 life in Ephesus. The town was rich and 
 luxurious — full of magicians, diviners, musi. 
 cians, and buffoons, of goldsmiths and silver- 
 smiths, of those who sold amulets and votive 
 offerings, of those who dealt in " Ephesian 
 letters" and spells; full, too, of Jews, who 
 dealt perhaps in forbidden trade with idolaters 
 — a city where the people preyed on human 
 ignorance and superstition. So sacred was 
 the shrine, that public funds from various 
 States were hoarded in its treasury as if 
 in a bank. The sculptured columns of the 
 temple were as large as those raised by 
 Herod in Jerusalem, and the glory of ver- 
 milion and blue, with tracery of gold, made 
 the shrine resemble an Egyptian rather than 
 a Grecian fane. Established relis^ion mono- 
 polizes the wealth and influence of the age, 
 
124 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 and the carpet-maker's crime in condemning 
 Artemis was more heinous than his preach- 
 ing of a future catastrophe. 
 
 It was, then, no easy task that PubHus 
 Vedius Antoninus, the " town secretary," was 
 forced to undertake when he mediatized 
 between the justly incensed goldsmiths of 
 Ephesus and the enthusiast whose pernicious 
 doctrine of the vanity of idols had been 
 freely published in the schools. Perhaps, like 
 Gallio, he despised the ignorance of those he 
 ruled, but toleration stops short when public 
 order is threatened, and public inquiry is 
 demanded when the proprieties have been 
 outraged. Before, however, this lawful course 
 was possible, the innovator had left Ephesus, 
 to carry his discord-breeding tongue to Jeru- 
 salem. 
 
 Artemis is no more, the great temple is in 
 ruins ; but the image of the mother-goddess 
 still stands in famous shrines where pilgrims 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 125 
 
 who adore the name of Christ pray to idols ; 
 and still her stolid form, her silver and gold, 
 are the most immovable of barriers to the 
 progress of truth and freedom for man- 
 kind. 
 
( 1^6 ) 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 It was about this time that Paul wrote 
 certain famous letters to his friends in Rome, 
 in Corinth, and among the Galatians which 
 (with others of less certain authenticity) 
 express the views which he held, and which 
 probably he continued to hold to the end of 
 his life. Without a knowledge of these 
 writings no account of his life can be 
 complete, yet there is perhaps no more 
 wearisome task than that of obtaining from 
 these obscure and rambling effusions — which, 
 though written with all the fire and energy of 
 an enthusiast, are yet the products of a 
 Rabbinical education — a connected view of 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 1-7 
 
 the teachinor which he was convinced to be 
 truth. Most writers concernino; Paul fail to 
 interest us because they are more concerned 
 with this teaching than with the adventures 
 and personality of the strange teacher. It 
 is the man who is interesting, and not his 
 letters ; yet without the letters we cannot 
 know the man. 
 
 One point about these letters which must 
 be clearly remembered is the small amount 
 of originality which they evince. Paul was 
 not a genius of the first creative order. He 
 preached another. He was a convert, a 
 missionary, and an enthusiast, not the Master 
 of the World. 
 
 Mankind has recognized his proper place 
 in history. Buddha and Jesus have been 
 made gods ; Paul has never been more than 
 a saint. The words and thoughts of Buddha 
 and of Jesus still echo in men's hearts, and 
 will do so for ever ; but Paul's work was done 
 
128 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 long ago, and the world would be no poorer 
 if his letters were forgotten. The zealous 
 missionary is a necessity in history, but he 
 stands in the second rank as the bearer of 
 good tidings, not in the first rank of those 
 who have dared to think new thous^hts for 
 the good of men, and to suffer even for their 
 sakes. 
 
 Once only does Paul rise to the true con- 
 ception of the Gospel which he preached. 
 " For hardly for a righteous man will one die, 
 yet for a good man peradventure some would 
 even dare to die. But God commendeth his 
 love towards us in that while we were yet 
 sinners Christ died for us." It is because of 
 the life and death of the founder, and not 
 because of the fantastic philosophy of Paul, 
 that Christianity has become the religion of 
 civilized man. 
 
 In reading these strange letters we seek 
 to know first what Paul thought of him- 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 1^9 
 
 self; next, what he beHeved of God, of 
 Jesus, and of the future ; and, last, what he 
 commended to his followers as the practical 
 outcome of such beliefs. 
 
 And first as regarded himself, we know 
 Paul claimed to speak as one inspired, who 
 had seen visions, and knew truths, not from 
 James or from Peter, but from the spirit of 
 Jesus himself. " For I neither received it," 
 he writes, " of man, neither was I taught it but 
 by the revelation of Jesus Christ." He also 
 believed himself to possess extraordinary 
 powers. " Truly the signs of an apostle 
 were wrought among you in all patience, 
 in signs and wonders and mighty deeds." 
 The superiority which he claims is not that 
 of personal character (he allow^s with proud 
 humility, that he is no more than others), but 
 that of a man wdiom God chose and gave to 
 him a message which he had no choice save 
 to proclaim to all. Men so convinced are 
 
 I 
 
ISO PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 the only men who have done great things in 
 the world. 
 
 As regards God himself, the beliefs of 
 Paul were unaltered by his conversion. He 
 held still the views of the broad Pharisaic 
 school of Hillel and of Gamaliel. The change 
 in his beliefs was that which has again and 
 again divided into new sects those who — 
 whether they be Buddhists, Brahmins, Chris- 
 tians, or Moslems — have seen in some one 
 man the " World Teacher " or the " World ' 
 King " predicted in the prophetic writings of 
 their creed, predicted not only by Hebrew 
 prophets, but by Persians, Hindus, and 
 Arabs. The majority have always been 
 content to expect such a Saviour in the 
 future. The minority have hastened to re- 
 cognize him in the present. The result has 
 been the continual subdivision of systems 
 of religion in all cases in which such a figure 
 was expected. It was thus that the Druzes 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 131 
 
 split off from Islam. It is thus that the 
 Soudanese Moslems are divided from Islam 
 In our own times. Paul and Gamaliel were 
 divided only on one point — as to whether 
 or no Jesus was the Messiah. Celsus points 
 out, three centuries later, that the schism 
 between Jew and Christian rested only on 
 this peculiar tenet. The hope remains the 
 same even when, century after century, 
 Messiahs innumerable fail and die, for the 
 pious disciple proclaims that it is but for a 
 time that his belief seems belied, and that his 
 dead hero must certainly return to prove him 
 right. 
 
 Paul, then, believed In one God. It took 
 mankind some four thousand years at least to 
 fully develop this belief, and even then the 
 one God was surrounded with hosts of spirits. 
 Men began with countless gods In every 
 river, tree, cloud, and planet. They went on 
 to establish a divine oligarchy of seven, 
 
^32 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 twelve, or three heavenly rulers. They 
 whispered at first to the wise only that these 
 three (or seven, or twelve) were one, and at 
 length they deposed the celestial council in 
 favour of one King and Father. Islam, the 
 latest of religions, is the one which teaches 
 least, and who shall say what in another four 
 thousand years men may or may not believe ? 
 Only one thing is sure. The past is dead, 
 and mankind generally does not retrace the 
 steps which its dim intellect has made 
 secure. 
 
 The conception of God which Paul 
 believed was indistinguishable from that of 
 other Jewish philosophers. Philo, the vene- 
 rable and esteemed writer who, having read 
 Plato, tried hard to reconcile Greek philo- 
 sophy with Judaism, had influenced Gamaliel, 
 and, through him, became Paul's master. 
 "Principalities and powers," aeons, archons, 
 pleroma, gnosis, the demiurge, logos, bathos, 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 133 
 
 and upsoina, all those crabbed terms which 
 represented in his own time rehgious philo- 
 sophy, were known to and are used by Paul. 
 The whole system, with its endless allegories 
 and belief in terminology which took the 
 place of thought, is dead to us, but to Paul 
 and to his successors for many centuries such 
 systems represented knowledge in ages when 
 true logic was unknown, and when observation 
 of fact was not conceived to be necessary as 
 the first step towards final truth. The gnosis 
 is dead, but the impatience of man is the same. 
 He still tries to reach at a bound results which 
 can only be worked up to by the insect-like 
 labour of countless minds through unnum- 
 
 o 
 
 bered years. 
 
 In one respect the school to which Paul 
 belonged was far advanced. He believed in 
 a God who was God of the Gentiles as well 
 as of the Jews. The more orthodox shuddered 
 at the thought ; to them the Jew was a being 
 
13^ PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 different to all other men, destined for im- 
 mortality, while Gentiles were to die like the 
 beasts, and be no more. It may seem a small 
 thing to us but in the time of Paul it was 
 a great stride in intellectual thought — for 
 a Jew. 
 
 Another belief which Paul had been taught 
 by his masters was that there existed a 
 " hidden meaning" of the Hebrew Scriptures. 
 Mankind appears always to be determined to 
 fuid more in ancient writino-s than the author 
 meant to express. It is so that the student 
 of Dante and of Shakespeare reads into his 
 author fancies which never entered the mind 
 of the earlier genius. It was so that Philo, 
 shocked by the rude legends of his own 
 people, allegorized the stories of the Hebrew 
 patriarchs. The belief lasted long, and Origen 
 elaborated yet further the allegorical teaching 
 of Paul. Many of Paul's mystic explanations 
 are found also in the Talmud, handed down 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 135 
 
 by disciples of Gamaliel who had not broken 
 away from their original creed. There is no 
 need to expand on such a subject, for the 
 teaching is no longer of importance to those 
 who are free from the restraints of Judaism, 
 who observe no Sabbath, who perform no 
 sacrifices, who are uncircumcised and never 
 decked with phylacteries, yet who gravely 
 read the injunctions of the Pentateuch as 
 sacred documents of their creed. Perhaps 
 among book creeds there is none which 
 presents such strange and inconsistent sur- 
 vivals as does the religion of Europe in the 
 present century. 
 
 One of the most orio^inal of Paul's views 
 was that concerning the Law of Moses. 
 Education had so ingrained into his nature a 
 belief in the divine origin of national customs 
 that it was impossible for his intellect to 
 escape entirely from the influence of such 
 teachine- But in his mind he reconciled his 
 
136 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 old and new views, with honesty of thought 
 no doubt, though with a strange absence of 
 logical courage. The Law was, he believed, 
 a divine institution intended to rule the Jews 
 until Messiah came ; Messiah only could 
 sweep away the Law; and with Jesus it 
 ceased to bind even the Jew. The Gentile 
 who believed on Jesus had no need of the 
 Law ; the Jew who believed might well con- 
 tinue his traditional practice and yet be 
 gathered into the same fold. Soon — very 
 soon — Jesus must return, and then, with the 
 end of the world, the Law would cease to be. 
 There was perhaps no tenet of Paul's that 
 was more odious to Jews than this latitudi- 
 narian teaching as to the Law. To the 
 orthodox it was as eternal, as perfect, as fitted 
 for all acres and stasfes of civilization as the 
 Gospel is held to be by Christians, who believe 
 the Law of Moses to be no longer binding. 
 To the zealots of Jerusalem this dogma was 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 137 
 
 even more repulsive than a belief in the 
 actual presence of the rejected Messiah. 
 The man who writes of Jesus as human is 
 not more odious to the pious of England in 
 our days than was the man who dared to 
 predict future life for one who had not been 
 circumcised on the eighth day. 
 
 Thoughtful writers have held that Paul 
 regarded Jesus only as a human prophet. It 
 is difficult to see how they reconcile to such 
 a view the plain language of his letters. In 
 Paul's day the belief in divine incarnations was 
 common to every Asiatic race ; and though he 
 never speaks of virgin birth or of ascension 
 from Olivet — legends which grew up perhaps 
 later, or which were believed only by the 
 more ignorant Christians — yet it is certain 
 that Paul believed Jesus to have risen from 
 the dead on the third day, to have been the 
 " Son of God " by whom the world had been 
 made, and who was sitting beside a heavenly 
 
133 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 throne in a palace above the crystal firma- 
 ment, and who soon — very soon — would 
 come back to gather the elect and to judge 
 the world. Jew, Persian, and Hindu alike 
 believed in such a figure, and, though all 
 Israel were " sons of God," Paul, if we 
 take his writings as evidence, held that the 
 nature of Jesus was something more than 
 mortal. It is vain to try to reconstruct 
 history in accordance with modern scepti- 
 cism ; and because, in our own age, we may 
 deny the possibility of such incarnation, it 
 does not follow that Paul did not believe in 
 the dogma which was so generally credited 
 by his contemporaries. 
 
 What Paul may have meant by his 
 explanation of a hard fact when he said 
 that Jesus was " crucified through weak- 
 ness," it is not proposed to ask. Many 
 explanations are possible, but the question 
 is of little importance. His doctrine as to 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 139 
 
 atonement, which has so much influenced all 
 later teachers, is very clearly set forth. He 
 believed that God was angry with men, and 
 that some gift more precious than any 
 common sacrifice had become necessary to 
 appease his wrath. This sacrifice was to 
 be, not human, but divine. Jesus, as a divine 
 person, had sacrificed himself as a victim 
 bearing the sins of all other men. His death 
 was to be the vengeance on sin which would 
 satisfy God. It was a barbarous and most 
 illogical idea. The just was to die for the 
 unjust, and the just God was to be satisfied 
 by himself slaying his own son, and no longer 
 to feel wrath against those who had really 
 done evil. In a few more centuries it may 
 seem difficult to thinking men that such a 
 belief should ever have existed, but it repre- 
 sents a confused train of human thought 
 which has for many ages found expression in 
 action. Not only the Jews, but all peoples of 
 
I40 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 Asia and of Europe have tried for countless 
 years to avert the dreaded anger of some 
 god or gods by a bribe or present. The 
 Celtic herdsman flunof a bullock down the 
 cliff to the devil to save the rest of the 
 flock. The sins of men were laid on the 
 goat sent to Azazel among the Jews. The 
 Moabites, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans 
 sacrificed men to the savage tyrants of 
 heaven. They even slew their own children 
 that they themselves might escape the 
 clutches of satiated vengeance. Jehovah 
 only was appeased by the death of his own 
 son ; but the gods who have died for man, 
 the self-sacrificers who rise again, are many, 
 and you may read of them in Vedic poems, 
 in Norse legends, in the wild myths of 
 Phrygia and of India, as well as in the 
 epistles of Paul the apostle. 
 
 Such were Paul's views as to the past. 
 As regarded the future, they were equally 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 141 
 
 definite. He believed, as many before him, 
 and as yet more since his time, have beheved, 
 that the world was shortly to come to an end. 
 He expected with his own eyes to see the form 
 of Jesus in the air, descending to earth from 
 that golden city above the firmament where 
 he pictured the Galilean sitting on a throne 
 beside the throne of God — coming in the 
 clouds of heaven, and all the holy angels wiih 
 him, to judge mankind and to execute ven- 
 geance on his enemies. It was to occur 
 before Paul's death, and this at least we 
 know, that it did not so occur. 
 
 The doctrine of the resurrection of the 
 righteous was commonly believed by the 
 Pharisees, but the views held as to details 
 were various. Paul ag^reed with those who 
 expected the resurrection bodies to be 
 spiritual, and not material. This view ob- 
 viated all those difficulties which sceptics 
 raised as to pious men torn and devoured 
 
142 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 by beasts and eaten by fishes, as to the 
 decay of corpses and the scattering of bones 
 in desecrated tombs. 
 
 Yes, such difficulties arose only when the 
 new body was expected to be material, like 
 the old, but did not arise when a sort of 
 ghostly spirit form was expected to grow 
 from the corpse sown in the earth as 
 seed for the new form, just as corn 
 springs up glorious from the grain in the 
 furrow. Paul's simile has been admired and 
 even regarded as proof, though science sees 
 no parallel between the germ and the dead 
 relics of a former organism ; but the parallel 
 was drawn by other Rabbis as well as by 
 Paul, and was perhaps part of the teaching of 
 Gamaliel. The dead were to arise in spirit 
 forms, and those who, with Paul, should be 
 alive on earth were "in a moment," while 
 the trumpet sounded, to undergo a painless 
 change. 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 143 
 
 This belief influenced every institution of 
 the new churches. All men were to live as 
 though the great event was expected from 
 hour to hour. They were to be pure and 
 kind, to be obedient to authority, excellent 
 in family life, not to undertake new engage- 
 ments or to seek for wives, yet to fulfil such 
 work as they had in hand, and even to wed 
 the affianced. They were to collect for the 
 poor, to have all things in common, to 
 assemble in their churches, hearing the 
 prophecies read, exhorting one another, and 
 commemorating the supper of Jesus. Above 
 all, they were to refrain from the vices which 
 disgraced the age, and to turn a deaf ear to 
 those who preached that the circumstances 
 abrogated all law, and that the liberty of 
 Christ was a licence to indulge in every 
 passion of a body about to be thrown off 
 for ever. 
 
 The dogmas so taught by Paul were 
 
144 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 falsified by time, but the simple, loving life 
 which Jesus desired for his disciples is yet 
 the ideal towards which mankind slowly 
 and with difficulty creeps, and which it may 
 perhaps at length attain. 
 
( ^45 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 In the year 54 a.d. a great misfortune came 
 upon the Empire in the accession of Nero. 
 Never, perhaps, was a great duty laid on such 
 incompetent shoulders. The man who might 
 have found a life's work in ruling the civilized 
 world was little better than a fifth-rate dilet- 
 tante, intent on receiving false praise for his 
 poems and epigrams, or even for his skill 
 as a charioteer. Awkward, half blind, his 
 chestnut locks curled over his head, robed in 
 the loose dress of an Oriental, his blue 
 eyes and heavy lip, his foolish and con- 
 ceited air, his yet more foolish pretensions 
 to the character of artist, were proper 
 
 K 
 
146 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 characteristics of the victim of every kind 
 of aesthetic impostor, yet of one whose 
 will as master of the world was obeyed 
 to the borders of the Parthian deserts. We 
 cannot wonder that with such a master the 
 world went wrong. Misfortunes, crimes, and 
 disorganization, which were not repaired till 
 a century had elapsed, followed the degrada- 
 tion of the central power. Well might sober 
 and honest men look on this age as the end 
 of the world ; and indeed, in one sense, with 
 the closing years of the century the old world 
 did expire, and something newer and better 
 rose from the ruin of ancient systems, with 
 the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, and 
 the spread of Christianity in Italy. 
 
 Nero, from whose education, before the 
 cruelty and insanity of his nature had 
 developed, so much was hoped, had reigned 
 nearly four jears when Paul, in the summer- 
 time, once more came up to Jerusalem, the 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 147 
 
 recognized centre of the Christian societies. 
 He found it Httle changed. One venal and 
 greedy pontiff had succeeded another in rapid 
 succession as one procurator after another 
 came to the province. The luxury and the 
 discontent, the hatred of Rome and of the 
 Gentiles, remained the same. Felix was no 
 better a ruler than Pilate, and owed his post 
 to the intrigues whereby his brother Pallas 
 brought Nero and Agripplna to power. He 
 was a freedman of Claudius, cruel, greedy, and 
 debauched. He had married three queens in 
 succession, and his ambition knew no bounds. 
 The dagger was his argument against those, 
 who opposed him, and of no crime was he 
 believed incapable. His lease of power was 
 short, and in about two years he was super- 
 seded, for Agrippa was still intriguing in 
 Rome and had the ear of Nero. With 
 Agrippa the representation of the Emperor's 
 head first appeared upon the Syrian coins, 
 
X4S PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 marking the progress of Roman power and 
 the decay of that old policy of conciHation 
 by which earlier rulers had avoided collision 
 with the Law of Moses. 
 
 In one respect there was a difference, 
 however. Paul was no longer an obscure 
 youth of mistaken life. He was the hated 
 and dreaded enemy of Pharisee and Sadducee 
 alike. His actions were watched, and his 
 Gentile companions regarded with distrust. 
 Whether throug^h the malice of some one 
 enemy or through the sudden passion of the 
 multitude, Paul had not been long in the city 
 when the mob rose against him. It was said 
 that he had brought a Greek into the Temple, 
 and, but for the Roman guard, his life would 
 have been forfeited. The charge was no 
 doubt false, for Paul himself was mindful of 
 the prejudices of others, and the prohibitory 
 texts were plainly carved on the boundary 
 barrier in Greek, warning the foreigner that 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 149 
 
 It was death to enter. But zealots watchln?- 
 a fane peculiar to their own creed are never 
 careful to examine the truth of such a charge, 
 and in our own times a Moslem sanctuary 
 would be watched with equal care by the 
 ignorant and dangerous peasantry whose fury 
 may be roused by a word from their leaders. 
 To some obscure soldier of the Roman 
 garrison we owe the life of Paul In this crisis, 
 and the consequent history of his career in 
 Rome. 
 
 Felix was at the time in Caesarea, the 
 almost pagan city by the sea where the 
 procurators dwelt in spring-time ; and 
 Claudius Lysias commanded the garrison. 
 If we may credit the account of his bio- 
 grapher, Paul had gone up to the Temple 
 to present certain Nazarites before the 
 priests. The Jews of Asia recognized and 
 denounced him. " Men of Israel," they 
 cried, " help ! This is the man that teacheth 
 
I50 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 everywhere against our people, and the 
 Law and this place, and further brought 
 Greeks into the Temple, and hath polluted 
 this holy place." The curt narrative brings 
 vividly before us that angry crowd, the 
 Romans hastening down the cloisters from 
 the rock of Antonia, arresting the man 
 round whom those savage bearded and 
 gaberdined zealots gesticulated with in- 
 creasing frenzy. On the stairs of the 
 castle their prisoner was allowed to 
 make his defence, yet a defence which still 
 further incensed those who heard him 
 boldly confess the very heresies with which 
 he was charged. The stolid legionaries 
 rested on their spears while Paul, safe in 
 their keeping, confessed the "Just One," and 
 his impotent foes cast off their clothes and 
 threw dust into the air. The ereat spates 
 closed on the prisoner, and on the morrow 
 Government inquiry was opened. 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 151 
 
 Another scene of violence followed, in 
 the stone hall by the Temple court, where 
 Pharisees and Saddiicees, assembled in 
 council, sat to judge the heretic, and were 
 unable to refrain from dissensions amonsf 
 themselves. Once more the soldiers brought 
 back their prisoner by force, fearing lest he 
 should be torn in pieces in the council 
 chamber ; and a conspiracy of Sicarii bent 
 on his murder became known to the com- 
 mander of the garrison. A prudent police 
 officer was Claudius Lysias, and by night 
 he hurried Paul and his escort from the 
 city, down the rugged mountain roads, by 
 the blue springs of Antipatris, and over 
 the broad sandy plains of Sharon. To 
 the " most excellent Felix ' he sent his 
 report of a supposed Roman citizen, rescued 
 from the Jews, " whom I perceived to be 
 accused of questions of their Law, but to 
 have nothing laid to his charge worthy of 
 
152 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 death or bonds." Such was the aspect of 
 the case to the soldier. The message 
 which to Paul was the salvation of the 
 world, the Gospel of the Son of God, cruci- 
 fied some thirty years before, was to the 
 Roman a mere sectarian tenet of Jewish 
 superstition. Small indeed was the result 
 as yet of the death of Jesus, and little was 
 his name known among men. Nay, even 
 a century later we find Celsus of the same 
 opinion with Lysias, and regarding the 
 whole difference between Jew and Christian 
 as a merely foolish dispute whether a cer- 
 tain o^od had or had not been incarnate — • 
 a matter answered for both in a few words : 
 "No god or son of god has come, or ever 
 will come, down from heaven to earth." 
 
 There was no doubt a certain cleverness 
 in Paul's own attitude at this crisis. The 
 Sadducees were in power, and he claimed that 
 the only real charge against him was the 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 153 
 
 preaching of a resurrection in which the 
 Pharisees beHeved. Thus both in Jerusalem, 
 and again at Caesarea before FeHx, when ac- 
 cused by the servile and flattering Tertullus, 
 the interpreter of the priests, who shamelessly- 
 extolled the "great quietness enjoyed and 
 worthy deeds done by the providence " of the 
 Roman tyrant, he sowed dissension among 
 his enemies, and reduced the controversy to 
 a merely sectarian Jewish question. Thus 
 no decision was reached, and the influence 
 of Drusilla herself, the Jewish wife of 
 Felix, combined with his ow^n sordid desire 
 to sell freedom to his prisoner. For two 
 years he held Paul in bonds in the seaside 
 capital, and so left him when his short reign 
 was over. For two years the wanderer 
 was confined in the filthy prison, perhaps on 
 that long southern jetty round w^hich the blue 
 waves of the Mediterranean w^ere ever lap- 
 ping, wdiile in the winter nights the great 
 
154 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 breakers stormed against the walls of those 
 dark vaults where a no less stormy spirit was 
 caged. Two centuries more must pass before 
 Origen, a martyr to his own fame, will come 
 to the same city to spend long years in 
 defending every word and thought penned by 
 Paul to his friends in Greece and in Rome, 
 and yet another century before a church will 
 rise close to the site of the prison, and a 
 proud bishop rule the province where Felix 
 now is growing rich on bribes. How can 
 we speak of the triumph of Christianity, the 
 sudden spread of truth, the victory of the 
 Gospel, when three hundred years must 
 slowly follow, with ever-warring disputes, 
 before the new faith can claim even an 
 equality with the established rites of the 
 ancient world ? Compared with the triumph 
 of Muhammad, that of Jesus was a slow 
 and insensible evolution of mingled truth 
 and error contending with other systems 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. i55 
 
 not wholly false. And so in our own 
 time the truths destined to live are still 
 clogged with errors doomed to die, and 
 the faith of the future grows unsuspected 
 in our midst. 
 
 In the sixth year of Nero, Porcius Festus, 
 the new governor, reached Caesarea in August, 
 and a strong, just man thus followed the 
 tyrant Felix. But with him came Agrippa, 
 and the sister of whom scandalous stories 
 were already whispered. The deferred ques- 
 tion of Paul's punishment was raised by the 
 high priest, Ismael Ben Phabi, and before this 
 august audience he was at length brought 
 forth. The Roman, new to his post, was glad 
 of the advice of Agrippa. " There is a cer- 
 tain prisoner left by Felix," he said, " against 
 whom there is an accusation as to certain 
 questions of their own superstition and of 
 one Jesus, which was dead, and whom this 
 Paul affirmed to be alive." Such, no doubt, 
 
156 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 was the official docket on the subject left 
 by Felix, and for the sake of peace Festus 
 determines to send the accused out of the 
 country to Rome, where he must take his 
 fate — either pardoned by Nero, and probably 
 no more troubling the Judean province, or 
 (according as the humour of the moment 
 may decide) sent to confront wild beasts in 
 the wooden theatre where the Roman aris- 
 tocracy are daily delighted with blood. 
 
 In Agrippa Paul may have fancied that he 
 would find some knowledge of the Scriptures, 
 and some breadth of view to which to appeal. 
 If so, he little knew the man. The burning 
 rhetoric which — as in his letters — constituted 
 his argument, was to Festus a mere raving 
 of the scholar blinded by enthusiastic study. 
 It was from Agrippa that the cold, cynical 
 words came to his ears : " Almost thou per- 
 suadest me to be a Christian." 
 
 Few episodes in ancient writings are more 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 157 
 
 graphic than is the account of Paul's long 
 journey to Rome by sea. Closely studied 
 and fully understood, it is familiar to our 
 ears. 
 
 How he was carried by the coasting ships 
 to Asia Minor, and delayed by contrary winds 
 under Cyprus. How thence he reached the 
 long rocky island of Crete towering to the 
 snowy peak of Ida ; how thence the sailors 
 ventured all too late across the mouth of 
 the Adriatic towards Italy. How, caught 
 by the stormy winter wind, they were for 
 a fortnight "driven up and down in Adria " 
 while neither "sun nor stars in many days 
 appeared." How, in the stress of the tem- 
 pest, they passed chains round the vessel 
 to keep its creaking planks from bursting. 
 How they sounded and found first twenty 
 then fifteen fathoms, and cast anchors from 
 the stern and " wished for the day." How 
 they ran their vessel into a creek, having 
 
15S PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 cut off the boat, and cast the wheat into 
 the sea. How they loosed the rudder 
 bands and hoisted the mainsail, and, falling 
 upon a place where two seas met, ran the 
 vessel ashore. How the hinder part was 
 broken and the fore part stuck fast; how 
 the prisoners were not slain, and all escaped 
 safe to the shore of Malta. How afterwards 
 they were warmed at a great fire, and the 
 barbarous people showed no little kindness. 
 How Paul, who had encouraged all and 
 worked hard to save all, and who, because 
 the snake in the firewood did not bite him, 
 was regarded as almost divine, was carried 
 from Malta to Syracuse and to Rhegium and 
 to Puteoli, and thence, by the Appian Way, 
 reached the imperial city, and was received 
 by his friends in safety. 
 
 All this his biographer has told so well 
 and so vividly that we cannot doubt the 
 truth of the account. It is said that an 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 159 
 
 old sea-captain heard this chapter read, 
 perhaps for the first time, and, rising 
 in his place as the reader came to the 
 letting go of the anchors, shouted, ** Luff, 
 ye lubbers ! Land-lubbers, luff ! " Surely to 
 very few authors has such a compliment been 
 paid. 
 
( i6o ) 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 Our wanderinors brinQf us once more to the 
 garden of the world, the centre of civihzed 
 life, and the great city of the Empire. He 
 who has not seen Italy ; who has not learned 
 the peaceful enjoyment of life which, under 
 its blue sky and among its vines and olives, 
 men have known from the earliest days when 
 the happy Etruscans sat with their mates at the 
 banquet ; whose ideas of life are based whether 
 on the struggle and misery of the snowy North 
 or on the fatalism of the Southern deserts, 
 can hardly have been able to conceive how 
 happy human existence may be. It was in 
 Italy that the creed of love and justice took 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. i6i 
 
 root and flourished first, among a people just, 
 free, and generous in the main, even when 
 degraded by Nero or held in bondage by 
 their ancient superstitions — a land where 
 song and music and glorious arts have had 
 their home, and whose civilization found its 
 way far and wide and laid the foundation of 
 many a later society. What do we not owe 
 to the Roman rule, which established law 
 and order over the half of England a century 
 later than the time we now consider, when, in 
 the great Antonine age, which falsified the 
 gloomy prophecies of the seer of Patmos, the 
 " Roman peace " was the blessing of a great 
 and civilized Empire ? 
 
 Whatever the evils which moralists de- 
 nounced in the capital itself may have been 
 — and no doubt they were great and terrible 
 — we must not fall into the error of supposing 
 that the conquering race of Italy was alto- 
 gether degraded. There were noble families 
 
 L 
 
16?. PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 where mothers and daughters lived peaceful 
 and respected, engaged in domestic duties 
 and in the education of their children. 
 Chastity, the love of one husband, the old 
 reverence which placed the matron first 
 after the father — these were Roman virtues 
 not yet forgotten, and finding expression in 
 funeral epitaphs or funeral orations which 
 still survive. The Stoic philosophy, so well 
 suited to the Roman character, had still its 
 great disciples among Patrician houses ; and 
 the asceticism of its rules was closely akin to 
 that of the Syrian Essene sects. Yet in the 
 Italian life there was an element of joyful 
 good-nature, tolerance, and enjoyment which 
 has perhaps never existed in the Asiatic 
 world. 
 
 Round Nero, indeed, a very different so- 
 ciety gathered ; the actor, the singer, and the 
 critic took the place of statesmen and phi- 
 losophers, and the cruelties of the amphi- 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 163 
 
 theatre formed his amusement. His contempt 
 for the old Roman Hfe, his partiaHty for 
 things Greek, opened the gates of Rome to 
 crowds of foreigners excluded by Claudius, 
 bringing with them a babel of languages, and 
 innumerable variety of religious systems, and 
 every vice and imposture known to Alexan- 
 dria, Antioch, or Ephesus. Yet with Stoicism 
 there was spread abroad an idea of "kind- 
 ness to all men " which has found expression 
 also in the epitaph of her who is called 
 "mother to all men, a parent helpful to 
 all." Little encouraged by the politiciaas 
 of the age, there w^ere in Italy, as well 
 as in Greece, societies founded for mutual 
 help and benefit, recognized by the law, 
 and holding their meetings under special 
 enactment. 
 
 In such a social condition the principles 
 of the new creed found a fitting soil, and 
 the faith spread quickly among a simple 
 
1 64 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 and kindly folk, whose slaves were free to 
 talk with their masters, and even to eat at 
 their tables; whose women were not secluded 
 in unseen chambers, but freely mingled in 
 all social gatherings, and softened by their 
 presence the manners of the race. 
 
 But, on the other hand, ignorance and 
 superstition marked the Roman civilization 
 not less than that of Asia or of Greece. 
 The love of wonders which we find in the 
 writings of Pliny marks an absence of sci- 
 entific knowledge which speaks ill for the 
 powers of observation as yet awakened. 
 There were few common fallacies which 
 he can have regarded as incredible. He 
 tells us that, by many, serpents are believed 
 to be born out of the marrow of the 
 human backbone. Ovid, in like manner, 
 believed the weasel to bring forth its young 
 through its mouth, and every scientific 
 blunder repeated by Irenaeus or Origen 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 165 
 
 seems to be traceable to the science of the 
 Roman literature. 
 
 The popular creed supposed in the universe 
 an endless struggle of spiritual beings, good 
 and bad ; every act of man and every event 
 of Nature was attributed to their influence. 
 From birth to death surrounded by these 
 unseen demons, men could neither eat nor 
 drink save by their aid. Lares, penates, 
 manes, and genii, ever present, were pro- 
 pitiated with countless altars, dedications, 
 and gifts. At every street corner, in every 
 market and shop, their shrines crowded close 
 upon one another, and, in the darkness, 
 ghosts and versipelH (or werewolves) lay in 
 wait. With averted face, the peasant flung 
 beans over his shoulder to the ghosts, as a 
 ransom for the living, or at the feast of 
 Pales sought purification from the Vestals 
 through the blood of a horse and the ashes 
 of a calf. 
 
i66 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 Strange were the ancient rites which still 
 survived. In February, the priests of Pan 
 whipped the brides at the festival of Luper- 
 calia. To Anna Perenna the young girls 
 sang indecent songs, and Fortuna Virilis 
 was worshipped naked by their mothers. 
 From the Milvian bridofe the Vestals flunof 
 images of " ancient men " as a gift to father 
 Tiber — the last trace of human sacrifices, 
 then already abolished. Scepticism, however, 
 existed side by side with such beliefs. 
 " None but boys," says Juvenal, "believe in 
 ghosts and regions under earth ;" and so also 
 thought Seneca. Yet the women had their 
 junones, the men their genii. They feared 
 the vampire lamia and the skeleton lemures, 
 and Caesar's statue itself presided over a 
 thousand attendant lares. 
 
 In such a world the little Christian society 
 of perhaps thirty persons had been founded 
 some years before Paul as a prisoner reached 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 167 
 
 Rome, and by these he was welcomed. They 
 were foreigners from Greece and Asia Minor, 
 friends of Aquilaand Priscilla, probably Jews 
 by birth though bearing Greek and Roman 
 names in many instances ; slaves and clients 
 were among them, members of the household 
 of Aristobulus and even of Caesar. Among 
 the great, the rich, and the powerful they 
 had neither friends nor patrons ; it was in their 
 own class of life that they found sympathy. 
 The slaves in the great households, the 
 artisans with whom they had trade relations, 
 were the first to join the infant sect. Even 
 a century later the critic reproaches them 
 with their influence among ignorant persons, 
 slaves, children, and women, " workers in 
 wool and in leather, and fullers, and untaught 
 rustics." " No wise man," says Celsus, " be- 
 lieves the gospel, being repelled by the mob 
 who have faith." But to that humble crowd 
 the words of the unknown teacher were com-r 
 
i68 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 fortable in their troubles. " Blessed are the 
 poor, the humble, the despised of this 
 world," said the Galilean. " They strive only 
 to attract the silly, the mean, the stupid — 
 low individuals devoid of perception," said 
 Celsus. 
 
 Upon this new society the respectable 
 Roman looked with suspicion and conser- 
 vative fear. His position was exactly that 
 of the orthodox of other ages. Atheism — 
 the atheism of the philosophers — he saw 
 spreading among the masses. This society, 
 unlike others, was secret. " What may they 
 not do," said prejudice, "in these secret gath- 
 erings ? What offence to morals, or conspiracy 
 against the public peace, may not there be 
 hatching ? " The sect was little known. It 
 differed, said the historian, from Jewish su- 
 perstition, yet it arose among the Jews. The 
 Christian refused to swear by the " Fortune 
 of Caesar," and burnt no incense to his statue. 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 169 
 
 There were endless forms of worship in 
 the city — the nuns of Isis, the cave initiation 
 of Mithra, the orgies of Bacchus, all discoun- 
 tenanced by Claudius, but all brought back 
 by popular enthusiasm. These were, how- 
 ever, not atheistic ; they did not deny the 
 existence of uncounted spirits. " The religion 
 of my father," said the middle-class Roman, 
 "is orood enough for his son." Such secret 
 societies were contrary to law ; nor coidd 
 any good be done by men who set children 
 against parents and made the slave despise 
 his master. It was the same race that inter- 
 preted dreams for the women, and claimed 
 to expel demons and to sell charms and 
 philtres — enemies to the State and to the 
 human race. " In presence of any man of 
 education they are silent, but in private they 
 pour forth wonderful tales to women and 
 children." " They deny the power of the 
 gods and of the oracles, in spite of the in- 
 
I70 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 numerable evidences which the temples con- 
 tain of miraculous events." For "to some 
 the gods have appeared in visible form. The 
 world is full of such instances. How many- 
 cities have been built in obedience to com- 
 mands received from oracles, how often in the 
 same way delivered from disease and famine ? 
 Or, again, how many cities, from disregard 
 or forgetfulness of oracles, have perished 
 miserably .'*.... How many who mourned 
 over their childlessness have obtained the 
 blessing they asked for ? How many have 
 turned away from themselves the anger of 
 demons ? How many were they whose 
 maimed limbs have been restored, and, again, 
 how many have met with summary punish- 
 ment for showing want of reverence to the 
 temples — some being instantly seized with 
 madness, others openly confessing their 
 crimes, others having put an end to their 
 lives, and others having become the victims 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 171 
 
 of incurable maladies ? Yea, some have been 
 slain by a terrible voice issuing from the 
 inner sanctuary." Such are the very words 
 of the argument put forward by those who 
 thought the Christians worth any notice 
 at all. 
 
 In this great world Paul is lost to us for 
 ever. Tradition says that he was beheaded 
 by Nero ; history knows nothing even of his 
 trial. The stormy life, the strenuous efforts 
 of thirty years, seemed to have done little to 
 cliange the history of the world. So long 
 and slow is the orrowth of new thino-s in 
 
 o o 
 
 men's minds, that the founders of thought 
 may never hope to see the building rise 
 complete. 
 
 Nothing to show but a few groups of 
 friends, a few letters in bad Greek, a 
 humble society of carpet-makers and fullers ! 
 And, after two years in Rome, an obscure 
 death ! 
 
172 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 On the 19th of July in the tenth year of 
 Nero's reign the great city was in flames. 
 Though large as Nineveh, the capital was 
 full of wooden buildings and of narrow lanes. 
 From the grand circus near the Palatine 
 Mount the fire spread among the shops, and 
 swept on to the Forum, and up the hills. 
 Thrice stamped out, it thrice blazed up, and, 
 mounting the Esquiline, it raged for three 
 more days. Of fourteen quarters, three were 
 in ruins and seven more were gutted. The 
 temples built by Servius Tullius, the palace 
 of Numa, the sacred courts of Jupiter Stator, 
 were no more ; the monuments of a proud 
 history, with statues and riches, shrines and 
 ancient landmarks, were swept away as it 
 were in a moment, and the capital of the 
 world was fallen indeed. 
 
 Stunned by misfortune, for a time the 
 Romans saw in this great conflagration the 
 anger of the gods, and the women devoted 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 173 
 
 themselves to pious acts of deprecation. 
 Tlie unreasoning anger of the pubHc 
 sought for a cause, and found it easily 
 enough in Christian atheism. These men, 
 who called the genii evil demons, who wor- 
 shipped no known god, who disobeyed the 
 Roman law — these were the wretches who 
 had brought down the anger of heaven on 
 the city. "Those whom the vulgar call Chris- 
 tians — a kind of men constantly expelled, 
 yet ever returning to our city, of a new 
 and evil superstition, hating all mankind." 
 So wrote the historian, but public rumour 
 far outstripped his charges. The Christians, 
 they said, ate human flesh, devoured babies 
 at their midnight orgies, poisoned the foun- 
 tains, adored a donkey-headed god. They 
 were wizards who worshipped the shameful 
 cross, seditious radicals who never adored 
 Csesar, " a third race " whose very name was 
 a crime, ungrateful to the spirits who pro- 
 
174 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 tected the world, and rousing the wrath of 
 Roman penates. The popular hate found 
 voice in the cry, " Christians to the lions ! " 
 and "for a time," says Tacitus, "the perni- 
 cious superstition was in part suppressed." 
 They perished in the skins of wild beasts, 
 torn by dogs ; they were nailed to crosses, 
 like their Master ; others, as torches, lighted 
 Nero's garden in the "evil tunic." The 
 better sort were beheaded ; the meaner were 
 mocked in their misery by the mob of the 
 amphitheatre. So fierce was the persecution 
 that even in the minds of their enemies 
 pity was roused by their sufferings, and 
 the cruel eagerness of Nero raised a 
 suspicion that on the Christians he had 
 laid the blame of his own mad and wanton 
 wickedness. 
 
 All this Christianity underwent, and yet 
 survived. It was not so many decades later 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 175 
 
 that complaints were made of their increasing 
 numbers. " The outcry is that the State is 
 filled with Christians : they are in the fields, 
 in the fortresses, in the islands ; persons of 
 every age, of both sexes, of all conditions, 
 and even of high rank, are passing over to 
 them." ''Were they to emigrate, the land 
 would be left almost empty," " the temple 
 revenues are dwindling day by day," and all 
 this within a century and a half from the 
 death of Paul. 
 
 Why was it, then, that Christianity sur- 
 vived ? It outlived neglect and contempt, 
 it outlived persecution and bitter opposition, 
 slanders and argument and even ridicule. 
 Nay, it outlived its own absurdities and 
 superstitions and schisms ; it has survived the 
 scandals of the indulgence, the cruel tyranny 
 of priests, the fires of the Inquisition, the 
 ruthless pruning of the Reformation, not less 
 than the scorn of Celsus and the false philo- 
 
176 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 sophy of Paul. Still it presents an unat- 
 tained ideal, and still it influences the history 
 of nations. The gods are dead, I sis and 
 Mithra no less than Jupiter or Tina. But 
 the crucified Christ has taken their place, 
 and the old adoration of the Bona Dea and 
 the genii is transferred to Mary and the 
 saints. This survival cannot have been 
 merely accidental ; it must be due to some 
 germ of truth which kept alive the creed 
 amid all its errors and absurdities. 
 
 We all know well what that divine germ 
 really was. Above the struggling crowds of 
 Vanity Fair stands high the great figure, 
 with chestnut locks and deep dark eyes and 
 thorn-crowned head, stretching forth the nail- 
 torn hands, and calling with a gentle voice : 
 " Come unto me, all ye who labour and are 
 heavy-laden, and I will give you rest." Great 
 minds and hearts, whatever the peculiarities 
 of their conceptions concerning the future 
 
PAUL OF TARSUS. 177 
 
 may be, have understood that call. Carlyle 
 understood it, Gordon understood it, all 
 those who have learned to despise and love 
 the world, to fix their eyes on higher things, 
 to labour for the good of man, have under- 
 stood that voice. Lay not to His charge the 
 cruelties of savage Europe in its middle age. 
 Remember how freedom has grown under 
 the influence, not indeed of Christianity, but 
 of Jesus ; how the slave has been freed ; 
 how justice and mercy have been taught by 
 those who were his true disciples in every 
 age. 
 
 Before us still lies the Utopia wherein 
 men shall be free and just to one another, 
 when there shall be no more war, nor oppres- 
 sion, nor poverty neglected by the rich, nor 
 violence of the poor, nor pride, nor scorn. 
 Still an Utopia which few believe to be a 
 future possibility ; yet, while an unattained 
 ideal still remains before the face of mankind, 
 
 U 
 
1 78 PAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 Jesus cannot be held to have lived In vain ; 
 nor is Paul, despite his failings, his limited 
 vision, his dim perception of the truth he 
 strove to teach, no longer worthy of our 
 notice among those whose lives have made 
 the history of the world. 
 
 fRINTED BY EALLANTVNE, HANSON AND CO. 
 LONDON AND EDINBURGH 
 
RABBI JESHUA. 
 
 Extracts from a lengthy and exhaustive Notice which 
 appeared in the Saturday Review, March 5, 1881. 
 
 •' That ' Rabbi Jeshua ' is a remarkable book must be 
 confessed, but it is scarcely a satisfactory one ; and 
 although we would not place it in an ' Index Expurga- 
 torius,' we think that it is oidy fair to the public that 
 they should be told beforehand what it contains. 
 
 *• The local colouring is exact ; the mysterious figure 
 of the forerunner of the Messiah is sketched with a 
 masterly hand. 
 
 " The fascinating style of a great poi'tion of the 
 volume makes this danger all the greater, and is one of 
 the unfortunate results of that disingenuousness with 
 which we are foi'ced to charge the Avork. 
 
 "It is therefore all the more unfair to inculcate 
 sceptical opinions under an insidious disguise, and to 
 endeavour to entrap listeners by a specious discourse. 
 
 '• The man who could write ' Rabbi Jeshua' ought to 
 have the courage of his opinions : if lie belong to the 
 
( 2 ) 
 
 rationalist ranks, he need fear no persecution, and lias 
 no cause for concealment. If he be a traitor in the 
 camp of the other side, he has good personal reasons 
 for remaining a mere nominis umbra, but he justifies 
 our oft-repeated accusation. 
 
 " The work contains a vast amount of learning in a 
 highly concentrated form .... but one who, with 
 scholarship and eloquence at his command — for wc 
 must own that the book bears evidence of both — 
 pretends to ignoi-e the whole Chi'istian fabric .... 
 will hardly gain much sympathy from a Christian 
 public. 
 
 '' As a memoir on the life of Our Lord, when stripped 
 of all supernatural attributes and circumstances, it is 
 not only a clever sketch, but a powerful testimony to 
 the mighty influence on humanity which the mere 
 human element of Christianity has exercised. 
 
 "The stores of Oriental myth and legend on which 
 the author draws throw great light upon the surround- 
 ings of the central figure of the narrative, and enable 
 us to understand much which before seemed vague and 
 uncertain. 
 
 " But the most remarkable feature in the whole book 
 is the life and movement which is thrown into the 
 word-pictui'es which the author paints. Take, for 
 instance .... conjectural certainly, but show nig a 
 deep insight into Oriental life," 
 
15 VoRK Street, Covent Gardf.v, 
 London, April 18S9. 
 
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