[View him in his first conversion, and there can be no doubt but that the mercy vouchsafed to him was all of grace. He was a bitter persecutor of the Church of Christ. He was a volunteer in this bloody service : and, of his own accord, sought from the Jewish Sanhedrim a commission to search out, even in a foreign country, all who professed the Christian faith, and to bring them indiscriminately, whether men or women, bound to Jerusalem. In this very employment he was actually engaged, and was come near to the very city where he hoped to seize the victims of his cruel bigotry, when the Lord Jesus Christ arrested him in his mad career, and by his special grace converted him to the faith which he was labouring to destroy ^ It is further observable, that he alone of all the party heard distinctly the voice that spake to him, though they beheld the light which shined with preternatural splendour round about them ^ : and he alone of all the party, as far as we know, was converted unto God. What was there in his spirit and conduct that merited such a merciful distinction ? Or to what can we refer this mercy but to the free and sove- reign grace of God ? Here we are compelled to acknowledge an election altogether of grace ; and in this interpretation of the event we are fully justified by the assertion of St. Paul, who traces it to a determination of the Deity long previous to the period when it took place, even to a fore-ordained " separation of him from his mother's womb*^."
Through the zchole of his subsequent life the mercies vouch- safed to him must be traced to the same source. All his eminent attainments, and all his super-abundant labours, were fruits of the same electing love, and the same effectual grace. This he confessed to the latest hour of his life : he declared, that " in him, that is, in his flesh, dwelt no good thing*^;" and that his sufficiency even for so much as a good thought was altogether of God alone®. And in reference to this truth he displayed in the passage before us a peculiar jealousy : for being, in vindication of himself, constrained to say, that he had laboured more abundantly than any other of the Apostles, he adds with holy jealousy for the honour of his God, " yet not I ;" " yet, not I, but the grace of God that was with me*^."
Thus, to say the least, respecting the Apostle Paul the assertion in our text was true, " By the grace of God he was what he was." But,]
2. It is true with respect to us also —
[What is the state of every man previous to his conver- sion ? Are we not all " dead in trespasses and sins?" Have
a Acts xxii. 4 — 8. ^ Acts ix. 7. with xxii. 9. « Gal, i. 15. 1 Rom. vii. 18. « 2 Cor. iii. 5. ^ ver. 10.