XLIII.

PAUL.

JAD Paul not become a Christian, he might, no doubt, have been the head of the Pharisaic faction in the last expiring struggles of his nation; he might have rallied round him the nobler spirits of his countrymen, and by his courage and prudence have caused Jerusalem to hold out a few months or years more against the army of Titus. Still, at best, he would have been a Maccabæus or a Gamaliel; and what a difference to the whole subsequent fortunes of the world between a Maccabæus and a Paul, between the Jewish rabbi and the apostle of the Gentiles! It was not till the scales fell off from his eyes after the three days' stupor-till the consciousness of his great mission awakened all his dormant energies—that we really see what he was. That divine Providence which, as he himself tells us (Gal. i. 15), had "already separated him from his mother's womb," had no doubt overruled the circumstances of his earlier education for the great end to which he was afterward called; in him, as in similar cases, the natural faculties were, by his conversion, "not unclothed, but clothed upon;" the glory of divine grace was shown here, as always, not by repressing and weakening the human character, but by bringing it out for the first time in its full vigor. He was still a Jew; the zeal of his ancestral tribe, which had caused him "to raven as a wolf in the morning" of his life, still glowed in his veins when he "returned in the evening to divide the spoil" of the mightier