The Damascus of Bible times still stands, with a population of 135,000
people. It was a gay city of white and glistering architecture, its
minarets and crescents and domes playing with the light of the morning
sun; embowered in groves of olive, citron, orange and pomegranate; a
famous river plunging its brightness into the scene--a city by the
ancients styled “a pearl surrounded by emeralds.”
A group of horsemen are advancing upon that city. Let the Christians of
the place hide, for that cavalcade coming over the hills is made up of
persecutors.
Their leader is small of stature and unattractive in some respects,
as leaders sometimes are insignificant in person--witness the Duke of
Wellington and Dr. Archibald Alexander. But there is something very
intent in the eye of the man at the head of this troop, and the horse
he rides is lathered with the foam of a long and a quick travel of 135
miles. He cries “Go ’long” to his steed, for those Christians must be
captured and must be silenced, and that religion of the cross must be
annihilated.
Suddenly the horses shy off, and plunge until their riders are
precipitated. Freed from their riders, the horses bound snorting away.
You know that dumb animals, at the sight of an eclipse or an earthquake,
or any thing like a supernatural appearance, sometimes become very
uncontrollable.
A new sun had been kindled in the heavens, putting out the glare of the
ordinary sun. Christ, with the glories of Heaven wrapped about Him,
looked out from a cloud and the splendor was insufferable, and no wonder
the horses sprang and the equestrians dropped.
Dust-covered and bruised, Saul attempts to get up, shading his eyes with
his hand from the severe luster of the heavens, but unsuccessfully, for
he is struck stone blind as he cries out: “Who art Thou, Lord?”
Jesus answered him:
“I am the One you have been chasing. He that whips and scourges those
Damascine Christians whips and scourges Me. It is not their back that is
bleeding; it is Mine. It is not their heart that is breaking; it is Mine.
I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest.”
From that wild, exciting and overwhelming scene there rises up the
greatest preacher of all ages--Paul; in whose behalf prisons were rocked
down, before whom soldiers turned pale, into whose hand Mediterranean sea
captains put control of their shipwrecking craft, and whose epistles are
the advance courier of the Resurrection Day.
I learn, first, from this scene that a worldly fall may precede a
spiritual uplifting. A man does not get much sympathy by falling off a
horse. People say he ought not to have got into the saddle if he could
not ride. Those of us who were brought up in the country remember well
how the workmen laughed when, on our way back from the brook, we suddenly
lost our ride. At the close of the great Civil War, when the army passed
in review at Washington, if a general had toppled from the stirrups it
would have been a national merriment.
Here is Paul on horseback--a proud man, riding on with government
documents in his pocket, a graduate of a most famous school in which the
celebrated Dr. Gamaliel had been a professor, perhaps having already
attained two of the three titles of the school: Rab, the first; Rabbi,
the second; and was on his way to Rabbak, the third and highest title.
I know from Paul’s temperament that his horse was ahead of the other
horses. But without time to think of what posture he should take, or
without any consideration for his dignity, he is tumbled into the dust.
And yet that was the best ride Paul ever took. Out of that violent fall
he arose into the apostleship. So it has been in all the ages, and so it
is now.
You will never be worth any thing for God and the Church until you lose
fifty thousand dollars, or have your reputation upset, or in some way,
somehow, are thrown and humiliated. You must go down before you go up.
Joseph finds his path to the Egyptian court through the pit into which
his brothers threw him.
Daniel would never have walked amid the bronze lions that adorned the
Babylonish throne if he had not first walked amid the real lions of the
cave.
Paul marshals all the generations of Christendom by falling flat on his
face on the road to Damascus.
Men who have been always prosperous may be efficient servants of the
world, but will be of no advantage to Christ. You may ride majestically
seated on your charger, rein in hand, foot in stirrup, but you will never
be worth any thing spiritually until you fall off. They who graduate from
the School of Christ with the highest honors have on their diploma the
seal of a lion’s muddy paw, or the plash of an angry wave, or the drop
of a stray tear, or the brown scorch of a persecuting fire.
In nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of the thousand there is no
moral or spiritual elevation until there has been a thorough worldly
upsetting.
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.
Truly, Paul was the chief of sinners. No outbreak of modesty when he said
that. He was a murderer. He stood by when Stephen died, and helped in
the execution of that good man. When the rabble wanted to be unimpeded
in their work of destroying Stephen, and wanted to take off their coats
but did not dare to lay them down lest they be stolen, Paul said: “I will
take care of the coats.” So they put their coats down at the feet of
Paul, and he watched them, and he watched the horrid mangling of glorious
Stephen.
Is it not a wonder that when Paul fell from the horse he did not break
his neck--that his foot did not catch somewhere in the trappings of
the saddle, and he was not dragged and kicked to death? He deserved
to die--miserably, wretchedly and for ever--notwithstanding all his
metaphysics, eloquence and logic.
It seems to me as if I can see Paul today, rising up from the highway to
Damascus, brushing off the dust from his cloak and wiping the sweat of
excitement from his brow, as he turns to us and all the ages, saying:
“This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ
Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.”
If it had been a mere optical illusion on the road to Damascus, was
not Paul just the man to find it out? If it had been a sham and
pretense, would he not have pricked the bubble? He was a man of facts
and arguments, of the most gigantic intellectual nature, and not a man
of hallucinations; and when I see him fall from the saddle, blinded and
overwhelmed, I say there must have been something in it.
I have been reading this morning, in my New Testament, of a Mediterranean
voyage in an Alexandrian ship. It was in the month of November.
On board that vessel were two distinguished passengers--one, Josephus,
the historian, as we have strong reasons to believe; the other, a
convict, one Paul by name, who was going to prison for upsetting
things--or, as they termed it, “turning the world upside down.”
This convict had gained the confidence of the captain. Indeed, I think
that Paul knew almost as much about the sea as did the captain. He had
been shipwrecked three times already, and had dwelt much of his life amid
capstans, yardarms, cables and storms, and he knew what he was talking
about.
Seeing the equinoctial storm was coming, and perhaps noticing something
unseaworthy in the vessel, he advised the captain to stay in the harbor.
But I heard the captain and the first mate talking together. They say, in
effect:
“We can not afford to take the advice of this landsman, and he a
minister. He may be able to preach very well, but I do not believe he
knows a marlinespike from a luff tackle. All aboard! Cast off! Shift the
helm for headway. Who fears the Mediterranean?”
They had gone only a little way out when a whirlwind, called Euroclydon,
made the torn sail its turban, shook the mast as you would brandish a
spear, and tossed the hulk into the heavens. Overboard with the cargo! It
is all washed with salt water and worthless now, and there are no marine
insurance companies. All hands, ahoy, and out with the anchors!
Great consternation comes on crew and passengers. The sea monsters snort
in the foam, and the billows clap their hands in glee of destruction.
In the lull of the storm I hear a chain clank. It is the chain of the
great apostle as he walks the deck or holds fast to the rigging amid the
lurching of the ship. The spray drips from his long beard as Paul cries
out to the crew, in tones of confidence:
“Now, I exhort you to be of good cheer, for there shall be no loss of any
man’s life among you, but of the ship. For there stood by me this night
the angel of God--whose I am and whom I serve--saying: ‘Fear not, Paul.
Thou must be brought before Cæsar; and lo, God hath given thee all them
that sail with thee.’”
Fourteen days have passed, and there is no abatement of the storm. It is
midnight. Standing on the lookout, the man peers into the darkness, and,
by a flash of lightning, sees the long white line of breakers, and knows
they must be coming near to some country, and fears that in a few moments
the vessel will be shivered on the rocks.
The ship flies like chaff in the tornado. They drop the sounding line,
and by the light of the lantern they see it is twenty fathoms. Speeding
along a little farther, they drop the line again, and by the light of
the lantern they see it is fifteen fathoms. Two hundred and seventy-six
souls within a few feet of awful shipwreck!
The managers of the vessel, pretending they want to look over the side of
the ship and undergird it, get into the small boat, expecting in it to
escape; but Paul sees through the sham, and he tells them that if they go
off in the boat it will be the death of them.
The vessel strikes! The planks spring! The timbers crack! The vessel
parts in the thundering surge! Oh, what struggling for life! Here they
leap from plank to plank. There they go under as if they would never
rise, but, catching hold of a timber, they come floating and panting on
it to the beach.
Here strong swimmers spread their arms through the waves until their
chins plow the sand, and they rise up, and ring out their wet locks
on the beach. When the roll of the ship is called, two hundred and
seventy-six people answer to their names.
Paul was the most illustrious merely human being the world has ever
known. He walked the streets of Athens and preached from yonder pile of
rocks, Mars Hill.
Though more classic associations are connected with Athens than with
any other city under the sun--because here Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,
Demosthenes, Pericles, Herodotus, Pythagoras, Xenophon and Praxiteles
wrote, chiseled, taught, thundered or sung--yet, in my mind, all those
men and their teachings were eclipsed by Paul and the Gospel he preached
there and in the near-by city of Corinth. Standing yesterday on the old
fortress at Corinth, the Acro-Corinthus, out from the ruin at its base
arose in my imagination the old city--just as Paul saw it.
I have been told that, for splendor, the world beholds no such wonder
today as that ancient Corinth, standing on an isthmus washed by two
seas--the one sea bringing the commerce of Europe, the other sea bringing
the commerce of Asia.
From her wharves, in the construction of which entire kingdoms had been
absorbed, war galleys with three banks of oars pushed out and confounded
the navy yards of all the world.
Huge handed machinery, such as modern invention can not equal, lifted
ships from the sea on one side and transported them on trucks across the
isthmus and sat them down in the sea on the other side.
The revenue officers of the city went down through the olive groves that
lined the beach to collect a tariff from all nations. The youth of all
peoples sported in her isthmian games and the beauty of all lands sat
in her theaters, walked her porticos and threw itself upon the altar of
her stupendous dissipations. Column, statue and temple bewildered the
beholder. There were white marble fountains into which, from apertures
at the side, there gushed waters everywhere known for health-giving
qualities. Around these basins, twisted into wreaths of stone, there
were all the beauties of sculpture and architecture; while standing, as
if to guard the costly display, was a statue of Hercules of burnished
Corinthian brass. Vases of terra cotta adorned the cemeteries of the
dead--vases so costly that Julius Cæsar was not satisfied till he had
captured them for Rome. Armed officials paced up and down to see that no
statue was defaced, pedestal overthrown or bas-relief touched.
From the edge of the city the hill held its magnificent burden of columns
and towers and temples (one thousand slaves waiting at one shrine), and
a citadel so thoroughly impregnable that Gibraltar is a heap of sand
compared with it. Amid all that strength and magnificence Corinth stood
and defied the world.
Oh, it was not to rustics who had never seen any thing grand that Paul
preached in Corinth. They had heard the best music that had come from the
best instruments in all the world; they had heard songs floating from
morning porticos and melting in evening groves; they had passed their
whole lives among pictures and sculpture and architecture and Corinthian
brass, which had been molded and shaped until there was no chariot wheel
in which it had not sped, and no tower in which it had not glittered, and
no gateway that it had not helped to adorn.
Ah, it was a bold act for Paul to stand there amid all that and say:
“All this is nothing. These sounds that come from the Temple of Neptune
are not music, compared with the harmonies of which I speak. These waters
rushing in the basin of Pyrene are not pure. These statues of Bacchus and
Mercury are not exquisite. Your citadel of Acro-Corinthus is not strong,
compared with that which I offer to the poorest slave who puts down his
burden at that brazen gate. You Corinthians think this is a splendid
city; you think you have heard all sweet sounds and seen all beautiful
sights. But, I tell you, eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have
entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for
them that love Him.” Following up Paul’s line of thought, we may say
the Bible, now, is the scaffolding to the rising Temple, but when the
building is done there will be no further use for the scaffolding.