by the Lord. I do not understand how Peter could have called upon these newly-convicted ones to be baptized into the name of Jesus Christ,' and above all to connect that baptism with 'the remission of sins,' if all the while he was thinking of his Lord as a man, and a man only. That he began his sermon by speaking of Jesus of Nazareth as a man approved of God,' is most true; but, naturally, he began with the manhood or humanity of the Lord, as that which all his hearers would confess at once; while, as he proceeds in his discourse, he seems to me to make statements about the Lord which are explainable only by the apostle's belief in His divinity, as well as His humanity.

37. (Acts vii. 54-56.) This chapter contains a report of the interrupted speech delivered by St. Stephen before the Jewish council, while the effect of the speech is described in these words: 'When they heard these things they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth. But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God.' This is not quite the position in the heavenly world which we can fairly attribute to a man, a man only, who simply died a martyr's death, as men had died before his day, and have died since.

38. (Acts vii. 59, 60.) And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.' So reads the Revised Version. As the Lord Himself had died, so did His servant learn to die. The Lord had said, 'Into Thy hands I commend my spirit ;' but before doing so had prayed, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do;' and now the Lord's first martyr is found asking his Master to do that which is not within the power of a human being to do, to receive the spirit of another at death, or to forgive the sin of another.

There are three accounts of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus in the Acts of the Apostles. One is in the 9th chapter, the second in the 22nd chapter, and the third in the 26th chapter. A careful comparison of these three accounts will show that one of them was given by St. Luke himself, the supposed writer of the book, and that the other two were speeches delivered by St. Paul,-one from the steps of the Castle of Antonia, and the other before King Agrippa. It will also be seen that the three accounts vary in what I am bound to think of as trivial details, although, in the narration of the main fact, there is, as has been well said by Dr. Farrar, no shadow of variation, and no possibility of doubt.' Dr. Farrar, in his Life and Work of St Paul, vol. i. page 195, when speaking of these variations in the three accounts, says: 'It is superfluous to repeat the reconciliation of these small apparent contradictions, because they are all reconciled and accounted for in the narrative of the text. Had they been of the smallest importance, had they been such as one moment of common sense could fail to solve, a writer so careful as St. Luke would not have left them side by side.' With this statement I entirely agree, while for the information of those who might like to pursue this subject, I beg to refer to Conybeare and Howson's Life and Epistles of St. Paul; Lewin's Life and Epistles of St. Paul; Ellicott's New Testament Commentary, vol. ii.; The Speaker's Commentary on the New Testament, vol. ii; and an article on Paul,' in Smith's Dictionary of the Bible,' vol. ii. page 731. With these authorities, to which others could easily be added, and Dr. Farrar's new work on St. Paul, any person who desires to do so may satisfy himself about the scriptural accounts of the great apostle's conversion. Before I go on to make the very few remarks which I desire to make on these three narratives, I should like to quote the following words from Dr. Farrar, because they are so pertinent to our subject. In vol. i. page 202, he says: 'And here let me pause to say that it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of St. Paul's conversion as one of the evidences of Christianity. That he should have passed, by one flash of conviction, not only from darkness to light, but from

one direction of life to the very opposite, is not only characteristic of the man, but evidential of the power and significance of Christianity. That the same man who, just before, was persecuting Christianity with the most violent hatred, should come all at once to believe in Him whose followers he had been seeking to destroy, and that in this faith he should become a "new creature," -what is this but a victory which Christianity owed to nothing but the spell of its own inherent power? Of all who have been converted to the faith of Christ, there is not one in whose case the Christian principle broke so immediately through everything opposed to it, and asserted so absolutely its triumphant superiority. Henceforth, to Paul Christianity was summed up in the one word, Christ. And to what does he testify respecting Jesus? To almost every single primarily important fact respecting His incarnation, life, sufferings, betrayal, last supper, trial, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and heavenly exaltation. We complain that nearly two thousand years have passed away, and that the brightness of historical events is apt to fade, and even their very outline to be obliterated, as they sink into the 'dark backward and abysm of time.' Well, but are we more keen-sighted, more hostile, more eager to disprove the evidence, than the con summate legalist, the admired rabbi, the commissioner of the Sanhedrin, the leading intellect in the schools,-learned as Hillel, patriotic as Judas of Gaulon, burning with zeal for the law as intense as that of Shammai? He was not separated from the events, as we are, by centuries of time. He was not liable to be blinded, as we are, by the dazzling glamour of a victorious Christendom. He had mingled daily with men who had watched from Bethlehem to Golgotha, the life of the Crucified, not only with His simple-hearted followers, but with His learned and powerful enemies. He had talked with the priests who had consigned Him to the cross; he had put to death the followers who had wept beside His tomb. He had to face the unutterable horror, which, to any orthodox Jew, was involved in the thought of a Messiah, who had 'hung upon a tree.' He had heard again and again the proofs which satisfied

an Annas and a Gamaliel that Jesus was a deceiver of the people. The events on which the apostles relied in proof of His divinity had taken place in the full blaze of contemporary knowledge. He had not to deal with uncertainties of criticism, or assaults on authenticity. He could question, not ancient documents, but living men; he could analyze, not fragmentary records, but existing evidence. He had thousands of means close at hand whereby to test the reality or unreality of the resurrection, in which, up to this time, he had so passionately and contemptuously disbelieved. In accepting this half-crushed and wholly execrated faith he had everything in the world to lose, he had nothing conceivable to gain; and yet, in spite of all, overwhelmed by a conviction which he felt to be irresistible, Saul, the Pharisee, became a witness of the resurrection, a preacher of the Cross.'

To those who will take the trouble to compare the three accounts to which I have already alluded, it will be apparent that, for all practical purposes, we may now confine ourselves to the defence which St. Paul made before King Agrippa, Bernice, and Festus, as it is recorded in the 25th chapter of the Acts. It is, of course, a perfectly easy thing to get rid of these narratives by denying, in toto, the possibility, or, at any rate, the actuality of the supernatural, although even then the conversion of Saul has to be accounted for. It is also possible to assign the phenomena here stated to have occurred to the purely subjective workings of the apostle's mind and conscience, or to some physical derangement from which his system was at that moment suffering. I prefer to take the narratives as I find them, not only because I see nothing in them that is unreasonable and improbable, but because they themselves are the best answers to the questions of how Saul the Pharisee became Paul the Christian, and Saul the persecutor became Paul the Christian apostle. Now, looking at these narratives quietly and carefully, with no theological or philosophical prepossessions, taking them as they lie before one's eyes, do they suggest that the Being who stopped Saul as he journeyed to Damascus was

simply some man, as you and I are men? Do not the phenomena by which the interposition was accompanied, and the whole of what was said to this fiery persecutor, better consist with the interposition of a divine rather than of a simple human being? Suppose a person to read these accounts for the first time, one who had never heard of the controversies in the Christian world relative to the personality of Christ, would it readily or naturally occur to him that the Jesus of Nazareth who stopped Paul on the way was, after all, only a great man, 'born in honest wedlock,' who died a martyr's death, and went to a martyr's reward? Besides, I think some stress should be laid upon what Paul himself believed on this matter, while what he did believe may be gathered from the epistles he wrote to various Churches and to private individuals, and in which so much of his inner life finds the most vivid expression. I think, as we go through those epistles, we shall find that the apostle regarded the Lord Jesus as the pre-existent divine Son of God, and that he had none of that nervous apprehension with which some people to-day are afflicted, lest somebody, in some degree or some form, should say something about Jesus Christ that was inconsistent with the absolute supremacy of God the Father. Clearly St. Paul always believed that God was God and Christ was Christ, that the Father was not the Son, nor the Son the Father, that each personality was individual and distinct; but, had he believed that, in dealing with Jesus of Nazareth, and coupling His name with the eternal Jehovah, he was dealing with a man, and a man only, his language would have been guarded to an extent which, as a matter of fact, it is not, as any person may know for himself who will take the trouble to examine St. Paul's epistles. I cannot read this man's account of his 'conversion,' very properly so called, together with what he thought, and felt, and said about the Lord Jesus in subsequent days, and come to any other conclusion than that he looked upon his Lord as not merely having a divine mission to rule in the 'new creation' He had called into existence, but that He was Himself a divine Person, the Son of God, as we are not sons, and having the heavens as