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Paul in

sible theory for the total change of such a man, at such a time, and under such circumstances. The minute investigation of this much agitated question could scarcely be in its place in the present work. But to doubt, in whatever manner it took place, the divine mission of Paul, would be to discard all providential interposition in the design and propagation of Christianity.

Unquestionably it is remarkable how little encouragement Paul seems at first to have received from the party, to join which he had sacrificed all his popularity with his countrymen, the favour of the supreme magistracy, and a charge, if of severe and cruel, yet of an important character; all, indeed, which hitherto appeared the ruling objects of his life. Instead of assuming at once, as his abilities and character might seem to command, a distinguished place in the new community into which he had been received; instead of being hailed, as renegades from the opposite faction usually are, by a weak and persecuted party, his early course is lost in obscurity. He passes several years in exile, as it were, from both parties; he emerges by slow degrees into eminence, and hardly wins his way into the reluctant confidence of the Christians; who, however they might at first be startled by the improbability of the fact, yet felt such reliance in the power of their Lord and Redeemer, as scarcely we should have conceived to be affected by lasting wonder at the conversion of any unbeliever.

Part of the three years which elapsed between the conversion of Paul and his first visit to Jerusalem, were passed in Arabia (1). The cause of this retirement into a foreign region, and the part of the extensive country, which was then called Arabia, in which he resided, are altogether unknown. It is possible, indeed, that he may have sought refuge from the Jews of Damascus, or employed himself in the conversion of the Jews who were scattered in great numbers in every part of Arabia. The frontiers of the Arabian king Arabia. bordered closely on the territory of Damascus, and Paul may have retired but a short distance from that city. During this interval, Aretas, whose hostile intentions against Herod, the tetrarch of Galilee, Vitellius, the prefect of Syria, had made preparations to repress, had the boldness to invade the Syrian prefecture, and to sieze the important city of Damascus. It is difficult to conceive this act of aggression to have been hazarded unless at some period of public confusion, such as took place at the death of Tiberius. According to Josephus, Vitellius, who had collected a great force to invest Petra, the capital of the Arabian king, on the first tidings of that event, instantly suspended his operations, and withdrew his troops into their winter quarters. At all events, at the close of these three

(1) The time of St. Paul's residence in Arabia is generally assumed to have been one whole year, and part of the preceding and the follow

ing. The expression in the Epist, to the Galatians, (i. 17, 18.) appears to me by no means to re. quire this arrangement.

years Damascus was in the power of Aretas. The Jews, who probably were under the authority of an ethnarch of their own people, obtained sufficient influence with the Arabian governor to carry into effect their designs against the life of Paul (1). His sudden apostasy from their cause, his extraordinary powers, his ardent zeal, his unexampled success, had wrought their animosity to this deadly height; and Paul was with difficulty withdrawn from their fury by being let down from the walls in a basket, the gates being carefully guarded by the command of the Arabian governor.

Among the most distinguished of the first converts was Barnabas, a native of Cyprus, who had contributed largely from his possessions in that island to the common fund; and whose commanding character and abilities gave him great influence. When Paul, after his escape from Damascus, arrived at Jerusalem, so imperfect appears to have been the correspondence between the more remote members of the Christian community, (possibly from Damascus and its neighbourhood having been the seat of war, or because Paul had past considerable part of the three years in almost total seclusion), at all events, such was the obscurity of the whole transaction, that no certain intelligence of so extraordinary an event as his conversion had reached the apostolic body, or rather Peter and James, the only Apostles then resident in Jerusalem (2). Barnabas alone espoused his cause, removed the timid suspicions of the Apostles, and Paul was admitted into the reluctant Christian community. As peculiarly skilled in the Greek language, his exertions to advance Christianity were particularly addressed to those of the Jews to whom Greek was vernacular. But a new conspiracy again endangering his life, he was carried away by the care of his friends to Cæsarea, and thence proceeded to his native city of Tarsus (3).

About this time a more urgent and immediate danger than the Persecu progress of Christianity occupied the mind of the Jewish people. Jews by The very existence of their religion was threatened, for the frantic Caligula. Caligula had issued orders to place his statue in the Temple at Jerusalem. The historian of the Jews must relate the negotiations, the petitions, the artful and humane delays interposed by the prefect Petronius, and all the incidents which show how deeply and universally the nation was absorbed by this appalling subject (4). It caused, no doubt, as it were a diversion in favour of the Christians; and the temporary peace enjoyed by the churches is attributed, with great probability, rather to the fears of the Jews for their own religious independence, than to the relaxation of their hostility against the Christians (5).

(1) Acts, ix. 23. (2) Acts, ix. 20. (3) Acts, ix. 30.

(4) Joseph., Ant. xviii. 8. History of the Jews, ii. 178. 186.

(5) Benson (Hist. of first planting of Christianity) and Lardner take this view.

A. D.

39-41.

James.

This peace was undisturbed for about three years (1). The Apostles pursued their office of disseminating the Gospel in every part of Judæa, until Herod Agrippa took possession of the hereditary dominions, which had been partly granted by the favour of Caligula, and were secured by the gratitude of Claudius. Herod Agrippa affected the splendour of his grandfather, the first Herod; but, unlike him, he attempted to ingratiate himself with his subjects by the strictest profession of Judaism (2). His power appears to have been as despotic as that of his ancestor; and, at the instigation, no doubt, of the leading Jews, he determined to take vigorous meaDeath of sures for the suppression of Christianity. James, the brother of St. John, was the first victim. He appears to have been summarily put to death by the military mandate of the king, without any process of the Jewish law (3). The Jews rejoiced, no doubt, that the uncontrolled power of life and death was again restored to one who assumed the character of a national king. They were no longer restrained by the caprice, the justice, or the humanity of a Roman prefect, who might treat their intolerance with contempt or displeasure; and they were encouraged in the hope, that at the same great Festival, during which some years before they had extorted the death of Jesus from the reluctant Pilate, their new king would more readily lend himself to their revenge against his most active and powerful follower. Peter was cast into prison, perhaps with the intention of putting him to death before the departure of Herod from the capital. He was delivered from his bondage by supernatural intervention (4). If the author of the Acts has preserved the order of time, two other of the most important adherents of Christianity ran considerable danger. The famine, predicted by Agabus at Antioch, commenced in Judæa, in the fourth year of Claudius, the last of Herod Agrippa. If, then, Barnabas and Paul proceeded to Jerusalem on their charitable mission to bear the contributions of the Christians in Antioch to their poorer brethren in Judæa (5), they must have arrived there during the height of the persecution. Either they remained in concealment, or the extraordinary circumstances of the escape of Peter from prison so confounded the king and his advisers, notwithstanding their attempt to prove the connivance of the guards, to which the lives of the miserable men were sacrificed, that for a time, the violence of the persecution was suspended, and those who would inevitably have been its next victims, obtained, as it were, a temporary respite.

A. D. 44.

Death of

The death of Herod, during the same year, delivered the ChrisHerod. lians from their determined enemy. In its terrific and repulsive

(1) Acts, ix. 31. From 39 to 41, the year of nary mode of execution for that offence. James Caligula's death.

(2) Hist. of Jews, ii. 192. 196.

(3) Blasphemy was the only crime of which he could be accused, and stoning was the ordi

was cut off by the sword.
(4) Acts, xii. 1-23.
(5) Acts, xi. 30.

circumstances they could not but behold the hand of their protecting God. In this respect alone differ the Jewish and the Christian historian, Josephus and the writer of the Acts. In the appalling suddenness of his seizure, in the midst of his splendour and the impious adulations of his court, and in the loathsome nature of the disease, their accounts fully coincide.

CHAPTER II.

CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISM.

of Chris

tianity.

CHRISTIANITY had now made rapid and extensive progress Progress throughout the Jewish world. The death and resurrection of Jesus; the rise of a new religious community, which proclaimed the Son of Mary to be the Messiah, taking place on a scene so public as the metropolis, and at the period of the general concourse of the nation, must have been rumoured, more or less obscurely, in the most remote parts of the Roman Empire, and eastward as far as the extreme settlements of the Jews. If the religion may not have been actually embraced by any of those pilgrims from the more distant provinces, who happened to be present during the great festivals, yet its seeds may have been already widely scattered. The dispersion of the community during the persecution after the death of Stephen, carried many zealous and ardent converts into the adjacent regions of Syria and the island of Cyprus. It had obtained a permanent establishment at Antioch, where the community first received the distinctive appellation of Christians.

Christianity however, as yet, was but an expanded Judaism; it was preached by Jews; it was addressed to Jews. It was limited, national, exclusive. The race of Israel gradually recognising in Jesus of Nazareth the promised Messiah; superinducing, as it were, the exquisite purity of Evangelic morality upon the strict performance of the moral law; redeemed from the sins of their fathers and from their own by Christ; assured of the resurrection to eternal life; the children of Abraham were still to stand alone and separate from the rest of mankind, sole possessors of the divine favour, sole inheritors of God's everlasting promises. There can be no doubt that they still looked for the speedy, if not the immediate, consummation of all things; the Messiah had as yet performed but part of his office; he was to come again, at no distant period, to accomplish all which was wanting to the established belief in his mission. His visible, his worldly kingdom was to commence; he had passed his ordeal of trial, of suffering, and of sacrifice; the same age, and the

same people were to behold him in his triumph, in his glory, and even, some self-deemed and self-named Christians would not hesitate to aver, in his revenge. At the head of his elect of Israel, he was to assume his dominion; and if his dominion was to be founded upon a still more rigid principle of exclusion than that of one favoured race, it entered not into the most remote expectation, that it could be formed on a wider plan, unless, perhaps, in favour of the few who should previously have acknowledged the divine legislation of Moses, and sued for and obtained admission among the hereditary descendants of Abraham. Nothing is more remarkable than to see the horizon of the Apostles gradually receding, and Gradual instead of resting on the borders of the Holy Land, comprehending ment of at length the whole world; barrier after barrier falling down before of the the superior wisdom which was infused into their minds; first the Apostles. proselytes of the gate, the foreign conformists to Judaism, and ere long the Gentiles themselves admitted within the pale; until Christianity stood forth, demanded the homage, and promised its rewards to the faith of the whole human race; proclaimed itself in language which the world had as yet never heard, the one, true, universal religion.

enlarge.

the views

Christianity, an

As an universal religion, aspiring to the complete moral conuniversal quest of the world, Christianity had to encounter three antagonists, religion. Judaism, Paganism, and Orientalism. It is our design successively

conflict of

nity with

Judaism;

to exhibit the conflict with these opposing forces, its final triumph not without detriment to its own native purity and its divine simplicity, from the interworking of the yet unsubdued elements of the former systems into the Christian mind; until each, at successive periods, and in different parts of the world, formed a modification of Christianity equally removed from its unmingled and unsullied original: the Judeo-Christianity of Palestine, of which the Ebionites appear to have been the last representatives; the Platonic Christianity of Alexandria, as, at least at this early period, the new religion could coalesce only with the sublimer and more philosophical principles of Paganism; and, lastly, the Gnostic Christianity of the East.

External With Judaism Christianity had to maintain a double conflict: one Christia- external, with the Judaism of the Temple, the Synagogue, the Sanhedrin; a contest of authority on one side, and the irrepressible spirit of moral and religious liberty on the other; of fierce intolerance against the stubborn endurance of conscientious faith; of relentless persecution against the calm and death-despising, or often death-seeking, heroism of martyrdom the other, more dangerous ternal, and destructive, the Judaism of the infant Church; the old prejudices and opinions, which even Christianity could not altogether extirpate or correct in the earlier Jewish proselytes; the perpetual tendency to contract again the expanding circle; the enslavement

and in

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