After the twelfth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles you read almost nothing in regard to Jerusalem. The scene of the apostle's labor is changed. It is now more important that the gospel should be preached through the world; and you have a gradual progress from Jerusalem and Judea, to Samaria, to Antioch, and finally to Rome. Home missions, we may say, led to foreign missions.

We have the passage from Peter to Paul, we have the passage from Jerusalem to Rome, we have the passage from Jews to Gentiles, we have the passage from local to universal; and as this passage is made we have speeches and utterances on the part of Peter and on the part of Paul which give us typical illustrations of their way of presenting the great truth to those whom they address.

If you take, for example, Paul's utterances to the heathen, there is one comparatively long speech at Athens. Then you have a comparatively long speech to the Jews of Pisidia, and then you have another comparatively long speech to the Jews at Rome.

So you have a marvelous system of selection that takes out the important things and sets them before us, with the one idea of showing how the gospel that once was thought by the Jews to belong to themselves. alone is to be preached as the means of salvation tỏ every human being, both Jew and Gentile.

In this process we have a beautiful incentive to broad and universal work in the kingdom of Christ. Just so surely as we are shut up in ourselves, and fancy that we are brought into the kingdom of Christ simply for our own sake, just so surely the blessings of the

kingdom will be taken from us and will be bestowed upon others. The Acts of the Apostles breathes the most liberal spirit, and urges us to no selfish conception of the kingdom of God, but to efforts to extend his gospel to earth's remotest bound.

Let me go back to the thought with which I began. The Acts of the Apostles narrates to us the beginning of the work of Christ in the church and in the world, the work of Christ since his ascension. It lays down the principle of that work. It teaches us of the resurrection, which was the main subject of preaching. It tells us something of the power in which that historical fact was to be proclaimed, the power of the Holy Spirit. It teaches something of the greatness and power which is possible to Christ's servants, and it teaches that we are to leave all personal considerations and devote ourselves to the great work of subduing the world. But in all this it gives us only the beginning. It tells us only what Christ BEGAN to do and to teach while here in the flesh, with the view of spreading his gospel from Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria to Antioch and Ephesus and Athens and Corinth and Rome, and to the ends of the earth.

Now the Acts of the Apostles is, so to speak, first of all, his new work in the foundation of the church through the preaching of the gospel; and we have in it a clue to the method of Christ's labor, and his promise that success shall attend that labor as it goes on through all the ages, until his purpose is accomplished and the whole world shall be brought back to God.

At the end of the first chapter of John's Gospel there is a text which I think we might well apply here.

Jesus says, "Nathanael, because I said I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou? Greater things than these shalt thou see." Then he goes on to speak of the heavens opening and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man, intimating that he was to be the medium of communication between earth and heaven, the channel through which all God's blessings were to flow to the world. "Greater things than these shall ye see," says Christ. As he utters those words to Nathanael he utters those words to us. We have seen great things since the time when the Acts of the Apostles was written. The gospel has been preached in almost every heathen land of the habitable world, and thousands have been converted; still Christ can say to us, "Greater things than these shall ye see "; and there never will be a time, even after all his wonderful revelations of the divine nature, after all the wonderful triumphs of his kingdom, when he will not be able to turn to the sacramental host that follows him and say, "Greater things than these shall ye see." The Acts of the Apostles, like the gospel itself, is only the beginning of the more wonderful future that is before us. Let us thank God and take courage, for "mercy shall be built up forever."

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS

THERE is no writing of the New Testament that more needs to be studied in connection with the history of the writer than the Epistle to the Romans. The apostle Paul was born about the year 7 or 8 of our era, in Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, in Asia Minor. Cilicia was populated with Greeks, and Tarsus was no mean city. It was a place of great literary and philosophical activity. It almost ranked with Athens and Alexandria.

The schools of Tarsus were famed throughout the world, and Paul received in his early days the best education in Greek literature and in Greek philosophy. He refers three several times to Greek poets, and there are other indications that he was familiar with Greek poetical literature. In his controversy with the Stoics and Epicureans, he shows a very correct and distinct knowledge of their doctrine.

Paul, although he was born at Tarsus, was a Roman citizen, and a Roman citizen at the time when to be a Roman was almost greater than to be a king. He was a Roman citizen not because all the inhabitants of Tarsus had had Roman citizenship conferred upon them. As a matter of fact, Roman citizenship was conferred upon all the inhabitants of Tarsus at a later time; but at this time Paul was free-born, because his father was already a Roman citizen. The father may have rendered some special service to the state and so may have had Roman citizenship conferred upon him.

There is no question but that this conferring of Roman citizenship must have given to the family of the apostle Paul a high social position; and it is quite evident in all the bearing of the apostle, both in the Acts and in his Epistles, that there was with him that abiding sense of dignity which belongs to one who, from his earliest years, has been accustomed to regard himself as among the best of his fellow citizens. There was a rank and honor which belonged to those who had this dignity of Roman citizenship, and at that distance from Jerusalem there was an enjoyment of some privileges and a broadening of the mind which would not have been possible if Paul had been born at Jerusalem, even though he had been there a Latin and a Roman.

But it is not enough to speak of Paul as a Roman citizen. More than by his Roman citizenship was he characterized by the fact that he was a Jew. He was a Hebrew of the Hebrews. He was a Pharisee, and the son of a Pharisee. He was of the tribe of Benjamin, of the straitest sect of the Jewish religion; and, therefore, in his twelfth year, he appears to have been sent to Jerusalem for his education.

Having what could be gotten at Tarsus, and perhaps returning to Tarsus afterward for certain portions of his study, it would appear that from the age of twelve years a very large portion of his time was spent at Jerusalem. At Jerusalem the very highest advantages that the Jewish religion could afford were his, for he sat at the feet of Gamaliel, the greatest Jewish teacher of his time, and not only a great Jewish teacher, but a great man as well, as appears from the fragments of his teaching that are left to us.

L