Again, I learn from the subject that the religion of Christ is not a pusillanimous thing. People of this day try to make us believe that Christianity is something for men of small caliber, for women with no capacity to reason, for children in the infant class, under six years of age, but not for stalwart men.
Look at this man who is mentioned in the ninth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. Do you not think that the religion that could capture such a man as that must have some power in it?
Paul was a logician; he was a metaphysician; he was an all-conquering orator; he was a poet of the highest type. He had a nature that could swamp the leading men of his own day, and, hurled against the Sanhedrim, he made it tremble.
Paul learned all he could get in the school of his immediate vicinity; then he went to a higher school, and there mastered the Greek and the Hebrew, and also perfected himself in belles-lettres, until in after years he astonished the Cretans, the Corinthians and the Athenians by quotations from their own authors.
I have never found any thing in Carlyle or Goethe or Herbert Spencer that could compare in strength or in beauty with Paul’s Epistles. I do not think there is any thing in the writings of Sir William Hamilton that shows such mental discipline as you find in Paul’s argument about justification and the resurrection. I have not found any thing in Milton finer in the way of imagination than I can find in Paul’s illustrations drawn from the amphitheater.
There was nothing in Robert Emmet pleading for his life, or in Edmund Burke arraigning Warren Hastings in Westminster Hall, that compared with the scene in the court room when, before robed officials, Paul bowed and began his speech, saying: “I think myself happy, King Agrippa, because I shall answer for myself this day.”
I repeat the assertion that a religion that can capture such a man as that must have some power in it. It is time people stopped talking as though all the brains of the world were opposed to Christianity. Where Paul leads we can afford to follow.
I am glad to know that Christ has in the different ages of the world had in His discipleship a Mozart and a Handel in music; a Raphael and a Reynolds in painting; an Angelo and a Canova in sculpture; a Rush and a Harvey in medicine; a Grotius and a Washington in statesmanship; a Blackstone, a Marshall and a Kent in law.
The time will come when the religion of Christ will conquer all the observatories and universities, and then, through her telescope Philosophy will behold the morning star of Jesus, and in her laboratory see that “all things work together for good,” and with her geological hammer discover the “Rock of Ages.”
Instead of cowering and shivering when the skeptic stands before you and talks of religion as though it were a pusillanimous thing, take your New Testament from your pocket and show him the picture of the intellectual giant of all the ages, prostrated on the road to Damascus, while his horse is flying wildly away. Then ask the skeptic what it was that frightened the one and threw the other.
Oh, no! It is no weak Gospel. It is a most glorious Gospel. It is an all-conquering Gospel. It is an omnipotent Gospel. It is the power of God and the wisdom of God unto salvation.
Jesus and Paul were boys at the same time in different villages, and Paul’s antipathy to Christ was increasing. He hated every thing about Christ. He was going down then with writs in his pockets to have Christ’s disciples arrested. He was not going as a sheriff goes--to arrest a man against whom he has no spite--but Paul was going down to arrest those people because he was glad to arrest them. The Bible says: “He breathed out slaughter.” He wanted them captured, and he also wanted them butchered.
It was particularly outrageous that Saul should have gone to Damascus on that errand. Jesus Christ had been dead only three years, and the story of His kindness, generosity and love filled all the air. It was not an old story, as it is now. It was a new story. Jesus had only three Summers ago been in these very places, and Saul every day in Jerusalem must have met people who knew Christ, people with good eyesight whom Jesus had cured of blindness, people who were dead and had been resurrected by the Savior, and people who could tell Paul all the particulars of the crucifixion--just how Jesus looked to the last hour--just how the heavens grew black in the face at the torture. He heard that recited every day by people who were acquainted with all the circumstances, and yet in the fresh memory of that scene he goes out to persecute Christ’s disciples, impatient at the time it takes to feed the horses at the inn, not pulling at the snaffle, but riding with loose rein--faster and faster.