PUBLIC-DOMAIN CHRISTIAN BOOK
The Life of St. Paul
Stalker, James · 45,428 words · 68 reading sections
Foreword
E-text prepared by Al Haines Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration (map). See 21828-h.htm or 21828-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/1/8/2/21828/21828-h/21828-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/1/8/2/21828/21828-h.zip) by Author of…
655 wordsSECTION 2His Place In History
Paragraphs 1-12. 1, 2. The Man Needed by the Time. 3, 4. A Type of Christian Character. 5-8. The Thinker of Christianity. 9-12. The Missionary of the Gentiles. 1. The Man for the Time.--There are some men whose lives it is impossible to study without receiving the impression that they were expressly sent into the …
722 wordsSECTION 3His Place In History
Nor was it ever doubtful either to himself or to others that it was the influence of Christ which made him what he was. The truest motto for his life would be his own saying, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." Indeed, so perfectly was Christ formed in him that we can now study Christ's character in his, and …
716 wordsSECTION 4His Place In History
7. Paul was a born thinker. His mind was of majestic breadth and force. It was restlessly busy, never able to leave any object with which it had to deal until it had pursued it back to its remotest causes and forward into all its consequences. It was not enough for him to know that Christ was the Son of God: he had to …
697 wordsSECTION 5His Place In History
11. Before the appearance of Paul on the scene, the execution of this task had been begun. Jewish prejudice had been partially broken down, the universal character of Christianity had been in some measure realized, and Peter had admitted the first Gentiles into the Church by baptism. But none of the original apostles w…
427 wordsSECTION 6His Unconscious Preparation For His Work
Paragraphs 13-36. 14-16. DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH. His Love of Cities. 17, 18. HOME. 19-26. EDUCATION. 19. Roman citizenship; 20. Tent-making; 21, 22. Knowledge of Greek Literature; 23-26. Rabbinical Training. Gamaliel. Knowledge of Old Testament. 27-30. MORAL AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 28. The Law; 29, 30. Depa…
889 wordsSECTION 7His Unconscious Preparation For His Work
The inhabitants of the city were numerous and wealthy. The majority of them were native Cilicians, but the wealthiest merchants were Greeks. The province was under the sway of the Romans, the signs of whose sovereignty could not be absent from the capital, although Tarsus itself enjoyed the privilege of self-government…
775 wordsSECTION 8His Unconscious Preparation For His Work
18. The feeling of belonging to a spiritual aristocracy, elevated above the majority of those among whom he lived, would be deepened in him by what he saw of the religion of the surrounding population. Tarsus was the center of a species of Baal-worship of an imposing but unspeakably degrading character, and at certain …
690 wordsSECTION 9His Unconscious Preparation For His Work
21. Education.--It is a question natural to ask, whether, before leaving home to go and get his training as a rabbi, Paul attended the University of Tarsus. Did he drink at the wells of wisdom which flow from Mount Helicon before going to sit by those which spring from Mount Zion? From the fact that he makes two or thr…
763 wordsSECTION 10His Unconscious Preparation For His Work
26. He himself learned much here which was of great moment in his subsequent career. Although he was to be specially the missionary of the Gentiles, he was also a great missionary to his own people. In every city he visited where there were Jews he made his first public appearance in the synagogue. There his training a…
748 wordsSECTION 11His Unconscious Preparation For His Work
29. At Jerusalem.--We cannot tell in what year Paul's education at the college of Jerusalem was finished or where he went immediately afterward. The young rabbis, after completing their studies, scattered in the same way as our own divinity students do, and began practical work in different parts of the Jewish world. H…
790 wordsSECTION 12His Unconscious Preparation For His Work
32. But the truce could not last, and these scenes of peace were soon to be invaded with terror and bloodshed. Christianity could not keep such a truce; for there is in it a world-conquering force, which impels it at all risks to propagate itself, and the fermentation of the new wine of gospel liberty was sure sooner o…
762 wordsSECTION 13His Conversion
Paragraphs 37-50. 37, 38. Severity of the Persecution. 39-42. Kicking against the Goad. 43, 44. The Vision of Christ. 45-48. Effect of his Conversion on his Thinking. 49, 50. Its Effect on his Destiny. 37. Severity of the Persecution.--It was the persecutor's hope utterly to exterminate Christianity. But little d…
826 wordsSECTION 14His Conversion
Their arguments, too, must have told on a mind like his. He had heard Stephen proving from the Scriptures that it behooved the Messiah to suffer; and the general tenor of the earliest Christian apologetic assures us that many of the accused must on their trial have appealed to passages like the fifty-third of Isaiah, w…
666 wordsSECTION 15His Conversion
45. Effect on Paul's Thought.--It would be impossible to exaggerate what took place in the mind of Paul in this single instant. It is but a clumsy way we have of dividing time by the revolution of the clock into minutes and hours, days and years, as if each portion so measured were of the same size as another of equal …
846 wordsSECTION 16His Conversion
49. Effect on his Future.--The three dark days were not done before he knew one thing more--that his life was to be devoted to the proclamation of these discoveries. In any case this must have been. Paul was a born propagandist and could not have become the possessor of such revolutionary truth without spreading it. Be…
446 wordsSECTION 17His Gospel
Paragraphs 51-67. 51-53. SOJOURN IN ARABIA. 54-58. FAILURE OF MAN'S RIGHTEOUSNESS. 56. Failure of the Gentiles. 57. Failure of the Jews. 58. The Fall the ultimate Cause of Failure. 59-65. THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD. The New Adam. The New Man. 66, 67. LEADING PECULIARITIES OF THE PAULINE GOSPEL. 51. Sojourn in Arab…
671 wordsSECTION 18His Gospel
53. We have no detailed record of what the outlines of his gospel were till a period long subsequent to this; but, as these, when first they are traceable, are a mere cast of the features of his conversion, and, as his mind was working so long and powerfully on the interpretation of that event at this period, there can…
847 wordsSECTION 19His Gospel
58. The truth is, Gentiles and Jews had both failed for the same reason. Trace these two streams of human life back to their sources and you come at last to a point where they are not two streams but one; and, before the bifurcation took place, something had happened which predetermined the failure of both. In Adam all…
783 wordsSECTION 20His Gospel
This was an inference from Paul's own experience. It was not as a Jew, but as a man, that he had been dealt with in his conversion. No Gentile could have been less entitled to obtain salvation by merit than he had been. So far from the law raising him a single step toward salvation, it had removed him to a greater dist…
698 wordsSECTION 21His Gospel
But Christ is a new Adam, a new head of humanity, and those who are connected with Him by faith become heirs of a double heritage of a precisely opposite kind. On the one hand, just as through our birth in the first Adam's line we get inevitably entangled in guilt, like a child born into a family which is drowned in de…
769 wordsSECTION 22The Work Awaiting The Worker
67. But it is in its conception of Christ that Paul's gospel wears its imperishable crown. The Evangelists sketched in a hundred traits of simple and affecting beauty the fashion of the earthly life of the man Christ Jesus, and in these the model of human conduct will always have to be sought; but to Paul was reserved …
749 wordsSECTION 23The Work Awaiting The Worker
71. As soon as this event had taken place, the arena was clear for Paul's career, and a door was immediately opened for his entrance upon it. Almost simultaneously with the baptism of the Gentile family at Caesarea a great revival broke out among the Gentiles of the city of Antioch, the capital of Syria. The movement h…
650 wordsSECTION 24The Work Awaiting The Worker
75. The Greeks were the first to take possession of the world. They were the people of cleverness and genius, the perfect masters of commerce, literature and art. In very early ages they displayed the instinct for colonization and sent forth their sons to find new abodes on the east and the west, far from their native …
759 wordsSECTION 25The Work Awaiting The Worker
Wherever the Jews were settled, they had their synagogues, their sacred Scriptures, their uncompromising belief in the One true God. Not only so: their synagogues everywhere attracted proselytes from the surrounding Gentile populations. The heathen religions were at that period in a state of utter collapse. The smaller…
366 wordsSECTION 26The First Journey
Paragraphs 70-114. 79-88. THE FIRST JOURNEY. 79, 80. His Companions. 81. Cyprus. Change of his Name. 82-87. The Mainland of Asia Minor. 83. Desertion of Mark. 84. Antioch-in-Pisidia and Iconium. 86-87. Lystra and Derbe. 88. Return. 89-108. THE SECOND JOURNEY. 90, 91. Separation from Barnabas. 92, 93. Unrecorded …
711 wordsSECTION 27The First Journey
In the presence of these exigencies Paul unfolded for the first time the mighty powers which lay in him. An access of the Spirit seizing him and enabling him to overcome all obstacles, he covered the Jewish magician with disgrace, converted the Roman governor, and founded in the town a Christian church in opposition to…
698 wordsSECTION 28The First Journey
When the Sabbath came round, they would cease from toil, like the other Jews in the place, and repair to the synagogue. They joined in the psalms and prayers with the other worshipers and listened to the reading of the Scriptures. After this the presiding elder might ask if any one present had a word of exhortation to …
707 wordsSECTION 29The First Journey
87. In the intense love of such hearts Paul received compensation for suffering and injustice. If, as some suppose, the people of this region formed part of the Galatian churches, we see from his Epistle to them the kind of love they gave him. They received him, he says, as an angel of God, nay, as Jesus Christ Himself…
354 wordsSECTION 30The Second Journey
89. In his first journey Paul may be said to have been only trying his wings; for his course, adventurous though it was, only swept in a limited circle round his native province. In his second journey he performed a far more distant and perilous flight. Indeed, this journey was not only the greatest he achieved but per…
738 wordsSECTION 31The Second Journey
He still went forward in the same direction through Phrygia and Galatia. Bithynia, a large province lying along the shore of the Black Sea, and Asia, a densely populated province in the west of Asia Minor, seemed to invite him and he wished to enter them. But the Spirit who guided his footsteps indicated, by some means…
669 wordsSECTION 32The Second Journey
At only four miles' distance lay the Plain of Troy, where Europe and Asia encountered each other in the struggle celebrated in Homer's immortal song. Not far off Xerxes, sitting on a marble throne, reviewed the three millions of Asiatics with which he meant to bring Europe to his feet. On the other side of that narrow …
731 wordsSECTION 33The Second Journey
99. Women and the Gospel.--A prominent feature of the work in Macedonia was the part taken in it by women. Amid the general decay of religions throughout the world at this period, many women everywhere sought satisfaction for their religious instincts in the pure faith of the synagogue. In Macedonia, perhaps on account…
731 wordsSECTION 34The Second Journey
103. Athens.--His destination was Athens, the capital of the country. As he entered the city, he could not be insensible to the great memories which clung to its streets and monuments. Here the human mind had blazed forth with a splendor it has never exhibited elsewhere. In the golden age of its history Athens possesse…
727 wordsSECTION 35The Second Journey
107. There were other elements of discouragement in Corinth. It was the Paris of ancient times--a city rich and luxurious, wholly abandoned to sensuality. Vice displayed itself without shame in forms which struck deadly despair into Paul's pure Jewish mind. Could men be rescued from the grasp of such monstrous vices? B…
320 wordsSECTION 36The Third Journey
109. It must have been a thrilling story Paul had to tell at Jerusalem and Antioch when he returned from his second journey; but he had no disposition to rest on his laurels, and it was hot long before he set out on his third journey. 110. In Asia.--It might have been expected that, having in his second journey plante…
844 wordsSECTION 37His Writings And His Character
Paragraphs 115-127. 115-119. HIS WRITINGS. 115, 116. Principal Literary Period. 117. Form of his Writings. 118. His Style. 119. Inspiration. 120-127. HIS CHARACTER. 121. Combination of Natural and Spiritual. 122-127. Characteristics. 122. Physique; 123. Enterprise; 124. Influence over Men; 128. Unselfishness; 1…
658 wordsSECTION 38His Writings And His Character
118. His Style.--This may seem to detract from the value of these writings. We may be inclined to wish that, instead of having the course of his thinking determined by the exigencies of so many special occasions and his attention distracted by so many minute particulars, he had been able to concentrate the force of his…
675 wordsSECTION 39His Writings And His Character
119. His Inspiration.--It was God by His Spirit who communicated this revelation of truth to Paul. Its own greatness and divineness supply the best proof that it could have had no other origin. But none the less did it break in upon Paul with the joy and pain of original thought; it came to him through his experience; …
719 wordsSECTION 40His Writings And His Character
There is no foundation whatever for an idea of some recent biographers of Paul that his bodily constitution was excessively fragile and chronically afflicted with shattering nervous disease. No one could have gone through his labors or suffered the stoning, the scourgings and other tortures he endured without having an…
692 wordsSECTION 41His Writings And His Character
When a weak or insincere man attempts to be all things to all men, he ends by being nothing to anybody. But, living on this principle, Paul found entrance for the gospel everywhere, and at the same time won for himself the esteem and love of those to whom he stooped. If he was bitterly hated by enemies, there was never…
934 wordsSECTION 42His Writings And His Character
127. Devotion to Christ.--The other peculiarly Christian quality which shaped his career was personal devotion to Christ. This was the supreme characteristic of the man, and from first to last the mainspring of his activities. From the moment of his first meeting with Christ he had but one passion; his love to his Savi…
320 wordsSECTION 43Picture Of A Pauline Church
Paragraphs 128-144. 128, 129. THE EXTERIOR AND THE INTERIOR VIEW OF HISTORY. 130-143. A CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN A HEATHEN CITY. 131. The Place of Meeting. 132, 133. The Persons Present. 134-137. The Services. 138-148. Abuses and Irregularities. 139, 140. Of Domestic Life. 141-143. Inside the Church. 144. INFERENCES.…
698 wordsSECTION 44Picture Of A Pauline Church
131. Meanwhile the little company of Christians has been gathering from all directions to their place of worship; for it is the hour of their stated assembly. The place of meeting itself does not rise very clearly before our view. But at all events it is no gorgeous temple like those by which it is surrounded; it has n…
913 wordsSECTION 45Picture Of A Pauline Church
136. These phenomena are so remarkable that, if narrated in a history, they would put a severe strain on belief. But the evidence for them is incontrovertible; for no man, writing to people about their own condition, invents a mythical description of their circumstances; and besides, Paul was writing to restrain rather…
787 wordsSECTION 46Picture Of A Pauline Church
142. But there were still worse things inside the Church. Even the sacredness of the Lord's Supper was profaned. It seems that the members were in the habit of taking with them to church the bread and wine which were needed for this sacrament; but the wealthy brought abundant and choice supplies and, instead of waiting…
601 wordsSECTION 47His Great Controversy
Paragraphs 145-162. 146-148. THE QUESTION AT ISSUE. 149-153. THE SETTLEMENT OF IT. 149, 150. By Peter; 151. By Paul; 152, 153. By the Council of Jerusalem. 154-156. Attempt to unsettle it. 157, 158. Paul crushes the Judaizers. 159-162. A subordinate Branch of the Question: the Relation of Christian Jews to the L…
652 wordsSECTION 48His Great Controversy
148. Such undoubtedly was the tenor of popular sentiment in Palestine when Christ came; and multitudes of those who accepted Jesus as the Messiah and entered the Christian Church had this set of conceptions as their intellectual horizon. They had become Christians, but they had not ceased to be Jews; they still attende…
691 wordsSECTION 49His Great Controversy
152. But, when Paul and Barnabas came back from their first missionary tour to Antioch, they found that a still more decisive settlement of this question was required; for Christians of the strictly Jewish sort were coming down from Jerusalem to Antioch and telling the Gentile converts that, unless they were circumcise…
818 wordsSECTION 50His Great Controversy
156. Unfortunately they were by no means without success. They alarmed the consciences of Paul's converts and poisoned their minds against him. The Galatian church especially fell a prey to them; and the Corinthian church allowed its mind to be turned against its founder. But, indeed, the defection was more or less pro…
821 wordsSECTION 51His Great Controversy
161. Paul never, indeed, carried on a polemic against circumcision and the keeping of the law among born Jews. This was reported of him by his enemies; but it was a false report. When he arrived in Jerusalem at the close of his third missionary journey, the Apostle James and the elders informed him of the damage which …
592 wordsSECTION 52The End
Paragraphs 163-189. 163, 164. RETURN TO JERUSALEM. Prophecy of Approaching Imprisonment. 165-168. ARREST. 166. Tumult in Temple; 167. Paul before the Sanhedrim; 168. Plot of Zealots. 169-172. IMPRISONMENT AT CAESAREA. 170. Providential Reason for this Confinement. 171. Paul's later Gospel. 172. His Ethics. 173-…
686 wordsSECTION 53The End
166. This was actually the danger into which he fell. Certain Jews from Ephesus, the principal scene of his labors during his third journey, recognized him in the temple and, crying out that here was the heretic who blasphemed the Jewish nation, law and temple, brought about him in an instant a raging sea of fanaticism…
775 wordsSECTION 54The End
171. Paul's Later Gospel.--During these two years he wrote nothing; it was a time of internal mental activity and silent progress. But, when he began to write again, the results of it were at once discernible. The Epistles written after this imprisonment have a mellower tone and set forth a profounder view of doctrine …
661 wordsSECTION 55The End
173. Appeal to Caesar.--After Paul's imprisonment had lasted for two years, Felix was succeeded in the governorship of Palestine by Festus. The Jews had never ceased to intrigue to get Paul into their hands, and they at once assailed the new ruler with further importunities. As Festus seemed to be wavering, Paul availe…
687 wordsSECTION 56The End
It was not with the step of a prisoner, but with that of a conqueror, that he passed at length beneath the city gate. His road lay along that very Sacred Way by which many a Roman general had passed in triumph to the Capitol, seated on a car of victory, followed by the prisoners and spoils of the enemy, and surrounded …
753 wordsSECTION 57The End
We have an imperishable relic of these visits in an outburst of inspired eloquence which he dictated at this period: "Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil; for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of …
715 wordsSECTION 58The End
The composition of these Epistles was by far the most important part of Paul's varied prison activity; and he crowned this labor with the writing of the Epistle to the Ephesians, which is perhaps the profoundest and sublimest book in the world. The Church of Christ has derived many benefits from the imprisonment of the…
686 wordsSECTION 59The End
186. Second Imprisonment.--It was not long, accordingly, before Paul was lying once more in prison at Rome; and it was no mild imprisonment this time, but the worst known to the law. No troops of friends now filled his room; for the Christians of Rome had been massacred or scattered, and it was dangerous for any one to…
659 wordsSECTION 60Hints To Teachers And Questions For Pupils
189. So sin did its uttermost and its worst. Yet how poor and empty was its triumph! The blow of the axe only smote off the lock of the prison and let the spirit go forth to its home and to its crown. The city falsely called eternal dismissed him with execration from her gates; but ten thousand times ten thousand welco…
651 wordsSource & rights
Public domain in the USA; original historical text digitized by Project Gutenberg.
Project Gutenberg source record →
Historical Christian writing; not Scripture.