was wanted a man of cool brain, who on that side of his nature should be conservative, and yet he must be a man of warm heart, capable of the noblest enthusiasm to the noblest of causes. He must be a thinker and yet an actor. He must be a man able to associate with plain men, such as the tent-makers and carpenters of the old world, and yet he must have sufficient of nerve as well as of courtly manner, to stand, if need be, before Felix and Cæsar. And the fit man must come not while Jesus lives, nor just after his death. Peter is the man for that time. Nor yet again can a hundred years go by; for then the good cause had been half wrecked, and the facts would have needed to be freshly proved. But this man-this man so essential— must come just as the gospel has done its best among the Jews, and is about to step forth and win its way as a system of fact and doctrine for the head and the heart of every man in all the world. He must appear too at the time when miracles are waning in number and in influence on the minds of men; when moral miracles are taking the place and eclipsing the splendor of physical manifestations, and the gospel is showing itself less as the power of God in "signs and wonders" and more as "the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth." And these demands of the case before us are all met by such a man as Saul of Tarsus. His life and character and teaching are exactly what must needs be to fill the gap, to meet the want. Some man there must be at that very time to do this work. And no other man has ever been named for the place; and so Paul," the apostle to the Gentiles," and next the "Chief Apostle," is more than a possibility. He is a probability so strong, he is a man so necessary to the other known facts, that both our logical and our moral judgments justify us in saying that Paul must have been.

We are told of an astronomer who, discovering the perturbations of certain stars, insisted that there must be another planet as yet undiscovered. By easy calculation he found where it must needs be; and directing his glass to the quarter of the heavens that his figures had indicated, his eye rested in a moment upon the missing star. So here: given the Judea of Malachi the prophet, then the Judea of the age when Jerusalem was destroyed; next―omitting the unknown factors-take the Christians of the third century. Now supply those factors. Put in as one of them the Christian facts as related in the gospels-Christ's life, death, resurrection, his rejection by the Jews; also his representatives left in the world, men of the character of Peter and John, and there is just one factor that can supply the place. Paul, in his life and his work, is that one necessary factor. Or, yet again: put in Paul's life and labor, and the other

factor must be Christ's life and teaching and death and resurrection -the Christian facts. Put these both into the equation, and it is a perfect thing, and no term is missing. Jesus being what he was and doing his work, Paul must needs follow; and Paul in his turn necessitates Jesus.

2. Advancing a step in the argument, it is now claimed that Paul is a historic character. He is not a myth, but a man. For our knowledge of the more minute facts of his history we are dependent upon the New Testament. But the stamp he left upon the early disciples, the work he performed in moulding the church as well as in extending her boundaries, render any attempt to discredit his actual historic existence as absurd as to cast doubt on the existence of Alexander or Cæsar or Columbus, the men whose names are the synonyms of history. Indeed, the complaint has been made that Paul has eclipsed Christ. And while the Protestant has reproached, and justly too, the Romanist with the fact that his religion is the religion of Mary and Jesus, of the mother and her child, the Romanist in turn has insisted that the Protestant has believed first in Paul, and only afterwards in Jesus, that he has coined his doctrines with the superscription of the apostle rather than of the Master. To reply to this allegation is not the purpose of this paper; but the fact of the charge is quoted to show, as one among a hundred things that might be named, the prodigious influence of Paul and the certainty that his is a historic character.

3. His conversion. In the last century, two sceptics, Mr. West and Lord Lyttleton, agreed to take, one the alleged resurrection of Christ, the other the alleged conversion of Paul, as the two points most vulnerable in our religion, that by exposing the fraud they might deal a death-blow to Christianity. The result is said to have been the conversion of both of them. And Lord Lyttleton was persuaded to give the results of his study to the world. The little volume made no small stir at its publication, and it enjoyed for a time a vast popularity. His argument, briefly stated, was this: Paul was not an impostor, was not a mere enthusiast, was not a deceived man. If neither of these, then the facts as stated must stand, the conversion did actually occur, and Christianity, confirmed by these facts, is true. These points were admirably argued, and the book exactly met the objections then prevalent. For, whatever proved a single fact to the men of his time proved all the facts; proved Christianity as a whole. Not then, as now, did men claim to be Christians and yet to eliminate from the Christian documents the carefully recorded facts of our religion. So that Lyttleton's

argument goes not far enough to meet the new issues that are raised. It must be shown now, not only that Paul was actually converted, but it must be also shown that the Christian facts were involved in such a conversion; that such a conversion is in the natural order of development from the gospels; that such a conversion was to be expected. And so a man's heart is fresh from the miracles of the gospels he will be thoroughly prepared for just such an exhibition of mingled grace and power. A conversion that was simply the logical result of truth made influential by the Holy Spirit, would by no means meet the demands of the case. The surprise to a man imbued with the spirit of the gospels, would be at the absence rather than the presence of miracles. It is true that, on merely worldly principles, Paul was the least likely of any man on earth to be converted. But he is for that very reason the better subject for that grace which is then and there, by ways that God shall choose, so to meet and change him that he shall be convert and apostle in one.

In that conversion there are three noticeable things, viz., the outward miracle, the inward manifestation, and the truths of the Christian religion so communicated that he is an accredited apostle, sent forth personally by the Master's special and peculiar call. Let us examine these three particulars and see how they bear on the theme before us, viz., Paul as a witness for Christianity.

The outward miracle has a use. It was to him what the Bible is to us-a proof that Christianity is true. Paul is alone, except always his servants. There is no disciple of rank or culture with him who can restate in forcible words the proofs that Jesus is the Christ. He must have heard of Christ's miracles, but it is not in evidence that he had ever seen any one of them. He had denied the reality of those of which he had heard, or, like his Jewish brethren, had ascribed them to Beelzebub. He shall now see a miracle. As to the alleged supernatural appearance of Christ after his death, that had been to him too absurd for belief. He shall now see Christ for himself. The light is seen by all, but the mortal form in the light is seen only by him. He cries out in his terror, as he falls to the ground: "Who art thou, Lord?" "I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest." The outward miracle has done its work-has ministered, as far as mere physical miracles can do, towards his conversion. It has made him aware, intellectually, of the general truthfulness of Christianity. It has prepared him for that deeper work which God's Spirit must perform upon his soul.

Turn now to the moral manifestation. Some have called this the chief miracle. There is a sense in which every conversion may be called

miraculous. The truth always tends to convert. But it never does it without the supernatural touch of the Holy Spirit. Men in the field or in the workshop who had not known for forty years what the inside of a church was like, have been singularly impressed by the truths of religion, and have found mercy. But in these cases of sudden conversion, the truth has been known in childhood, or the facts of religion have been gathered from the general knowledge of the Christian community in which the man has lived. But in Paul's case the very elements were wanting. Apart from his senses, apart from what he sees or hears, by the direct communication of God's grace the elementary truths and duties of Christianity must be disclosed to him. And it is to be observed that in telling this experience, he sometimes omits entirely the physical miracle, and dwells in such a way upon the manifestation of moral truth as to lead us to feel that in his mind the chief miracle was the moral miracle. He was of "sinners the chief," on whom "God had mercy" as a special "pattern or example," that should "show forth the long-suffering of God." He was a "blasphemer and an injurious person," who would have been beyond mercy except that he was "in ignorance" of the full truth.

The outward miracle and the inward manifestation harmonize completely both in time and character. Paul is overpowered with the inward manifestation of the truth; and correspondently there is an outward light. His will yields, and, at the same moment, his body falls to the earth. There is an inward voice. It tells him the truth. And at that instant there is an audible voice heard by all, though he only distinguishes the words. And his reply to Christ is in exactly the fitting words, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" Some have wondered at the language, have marveled that there are no direct words of confession; as if any confession could be greater than that of an energetic man who has been "doing" all his life, and now finds all his works wrongly done, and asks submissively that Christ will teach him what to do. It is the proud philosopher casting aside all his learning, and beginning the alphabet. Men have wondered that he does not say, "God be merciful to me a sinner." But in saying what he does, he says all that, and far more than that. Looked upon esthetically and dramatically, had the words been left to man to fill out, Paul says the very words he should say. He, a man of imperious will, self-confident, self-centered, self-poised, is so bowed in spirit, so broken down in his humility, as to give up his will absolutely, without one reservation, to yield it blindly to another, not knowing what he would be bidden to do. Some men uttering his words would have meant little. But Paul

means everything by them. He cries, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" And with the holy life which followed that conversion he answers his own question.

Mark, now, the particular facts of Christianity which are asserted in this conversion. He sees Christ. He says "it pleased God to reveal his Son in me." Ananias says to him, "The Lord Jesus, who appeared to thee in the way;" and again he says this appearance was that "thou shouldst see the Just One and hear the voice of his mouth and be his witness." And Paul himself says, "Last of all he was seen of me also." And in Luke's narrative Paul is represented as recognizing the bodily form of Jesus and saying, "Lord, what wilt have me to do?" But this occurred after the resurrection, so that Paul saw the risen Lord. He is thus a witness not only to an actual and historical Christ, but to his resurrection, as an accomplished fact. But the resurrection carries with it the previous death. As the resurrection is no common fact, it presupposes no common death. And such a death and such a resurrection carry with them a belief in a peculiar previous life. A miraculous birth, a miraculous career, a miraculous death, a miraculous resurrection, are facts that go together, compelling in some sense each other. For the greater miracle of the resurrection from the dead believed, it can no longer be objected to the lesser miracles of the life that they are either improbable or impossible. This is the culmination of those. So that this conversion is a conversion in which God had in view Paul's work as a "chosen vessel." And he ordered the facts in such a way that this conversion was in all coming time to be a direct testimony to the main facts, and through these an indirect testimony to all the facts of the religion of Jesus. Paul thus becomes our fifth gospel.

4. Paul's use of the Christian facts in his speeches and letters. Only a few of his speeches have come down to us; and those were always delivered under circumstances which did not call for any endorsement of the minute facts of Christ's life. In two of them he was interrupted just as he began to speak about Jesus. In three of them he speaks in self-defence rebutting the charges of his enemies. In the speech before Agrippa and in the speech on the stairs, he asserts the fact of the resurrection-the chief miracle-of Christ; the miracle that if true carries with it in the minds of his hearers all the others. Had he entertained the least doubt about that miracle, he was too shrewd a rhetorician to have even named it. Had he doubted any other miracle popularly ascribed to Jesus, he would have disarmed the prejudice against him by repudiating it. The resurrection of Jesus stood, in the popular mind, intimately