palls, Ofttimes in my desert places a miracle befalls. Is it a trick o' the blood, a clearing dot in the brain? Sudden the far-off shower unguessed has filled the choking
stream ; Some rift in the grey horizon let through a crimson beam. Once more for me the sky is blue ; I quaff the wine of the air, And taste the fierce tang of the sea, and find the wild rose
fair; Once more I walk the allotted round with unreluctant feet, And daily bread has savour, and love and labour are sweet.
Oh, once in centuries olden, before Damascus Gate, Journeyed one with holden eyes and a dreary heart of hate ; When a glory shone round about him, and in one wondrous hour He had passed from death to life. Then knowledge and grace
and power And a new word filled his lips; and joy and courage and love Were born henceforth in his heart, with the vision that fell
from above. And still, when the days are bitter, and life is clogged with
care, And the heart is salt with unshed tears and tender with
despair, An angel stirs the stagnant soul, and lo ! there is healing
there. Once more my song is loosened, and the life and labour sweet ; Once more in the tangled weft the pattern shines complete; And I know that the self-same grace on my soul has been
outpoured. My spirit, by Damascus Gate, has heard the voice of her Lord.
III.
The Voice.
" And he fell upon the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me ? "
ACTS ix. 4 115
1. The vision was accompanied oy a voice. There is an apparent strangeness in the account which is given by himself, and by St. Luke, of the facts of St. Paul's conversion. That strangeness, that startling simplicity and plainness, carries with it the evidence of its own truthfulness. The temptation to a dishonest, or even to a weak nature, would have been to raise all the circumstances of such a change to the height of what would seem to men stately, Divine, terrible. All familiar speech, all that drew its birth from the common experience of mankind, would have been carefully excluded. The tongue of men and of angels would have seemed too feeble for so high a theme. There would have been an attempt to soar "into the third heaven," and to speak the words which it is not "lawful for a man to utter." St. Paul's language is, we know, very different. He uses here, as always, "great plainness of speech." He tells us, indeed, of " the glory above the brightness of the sun" which shone round about him; tells us how in that brightness he saw a form which others did not see, and heard ivords which they did not hear, although the voice of Him that spake filled them with strange fears; and then we come to that Divine message from the Lord of glory to the soul of His servant, and we find it simply this, "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks."
2. The words came with a startling abruptness; they were themselves plain and familiar. The young Jew of Tarsus might have read them in Greek books, or heard the proverb quoted a hundred times among his Hebrew friends. They belonged to the widespread treasure of similitudes and proverbs drawn from the simplest forms of man's life and work; and, as such, were not confined to any race or country. Those words St. Paul had probably had often in his thoughts, or on his lips. Never before, we may be sure, had they come to him as they came now; never before had he applied them to himself, and seen what they had to tell him of God's dealings with him. We may be sure that they were the very words he needed; that none which we should have thought loftier and more solemn could have done their work so
n6 WHY PERSECUTEST THOU ME?
effectually. What an entirely new light those words would throw on the zeal and vehemence in which the persecutor had gloried; how utterly they would reverse the judgments which he had passed on them! They revealed to him that he, the pride of the schools of Jerusalem, the rigid and scrupulous Pharisee, was, like the brute beast in that pro- verbial speech, struggling against the guidance of one mightier and wiser than himself, and by that resistance bringing upon himself nothing but an increase of pain and confusion. He was himself "kicking against the pricks." In his blindness and ignorance he did not, or would not, see the first promptings of the Almighty hand that marked out his true path for him. There had already been, as the words imply, signs and tokens of the will of God, goads that entered deep into his soul, and brought with them .pain and misery ; but he went on in spite of these, crushing all feelings of pity, doubt, remorse, and steeling himself into what seemed to him a noble and heroic hardness. These words bring before us a new phase in the mind of that persecutor.
3. It was a touching question to the infuriated man, whose great object was to obliterate every trace of the Christian religion and to harry and harass its adherents. It is not, " Why persecutest thou them ? " but, " Why persecutest thou MeV "God is angry with me," said Luther one day to the good monk Staupitz. "No," answered the venerable teacher, "you are angry with God." Saul of Tarsus was mad as a demon with hatred to Christ. Christ was gentle and loving to him, and the expostulation was most pathetic. "Why persecutest thou Me ? " Ineffably tender and close is the relationship between Him and all His disciples. Let the humblest member of His mystical body suffer, and at once the Head suffers, by the subtle yet potent influence of spiritual sympathy. He showed greater sensitiveness in regard to His mystical body than in regard to His physical body. He did not say anything like this to any of those who inflicted upon Him cruel and excruciating torture. He endured the pain and a»ony in the silence of patience. But when, after His ascension, His followers were being haled to prison, and condemned to