_SAUL AND SINAI._
"Saul was certain days with the disciples which were at Damascus.
And straightway in the synagogues he proclaimed Jesus, that He is
the Son of God."--ACTS ix. 19, 20.
We have bestowed a great deal of attention upon the incidents at
Damascus, because the conversion of Saul of Tarsus is more closely
connected with the truth and authenticity of Christianity than any
other event save those immediately connected with the life and
ministry of our Lord Himself. We shall, however, in this chapter,
endeavour to discuss the remaining circumstances of it which the Acts
of the Apostles brings under our notice.
I. We are told in verse 17 of the visit of Ananias to Saul. "Ananias
departed, and entered into the house; and laying his hands on him
said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, who appeared unto thee in
the way which thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mayest receive thy
sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost." This conversation with
Ananias is largely expanded by St. Paul himself in the account which
he gives us in Acts xxii., while in his speech to Agrippa in the
twenty-sixth chapter he entirely omits all mention of Ananias, and
seems to introduce our Lord as the only person who spoke to him, and
yet there is no real inconsistency. St. Paul, in fact, in the latter
address is intent on setting vividly before Agrippa the sum total of
the revelations made by Christ. He ignores, therefore, every secondary
agent. Ananias was Christ's messenger. His words were merely those
which Christ put into his mouth. St. Paul goes, therefore, to the root
of the matter, and attributes everything, whether uttered by our Lord
or by Ananias, to the former alone, who was, indeed, the great
Inspirer of every expression, the true Director of every minutest
portion of this important transaction.
The ninth chapter, on the other hand, breaks the story up into its
component parts, and shows us the various actors in the scene. We see
the Lord Jesus consciously presiding over all, revealing Himself now
to this person and again to that person. We get a glimpse for a moment
behind the veil which Divine Providence throws around His doings and
the doings of the children of men. We see Christ revealing Himself now
to Saul and then to Ananias, informing the latter of the revelations
made to the former; just as He subsequently revealed Himself almost
simultaneously to Cornelius at Cæsarea and to Simon Peter at Joppa,
preparing the one for the other. The Lord thus hints at an explanation
of those simultaneous cravings, aspirations, and spiritual desires
which we often find unaccountably arising amid far distant lands and
in widely separated hearts. The feelings may seem but vague
aspirations and their coincidence a mere chance one, but the typical
cases of Saul and Ananias, or of Cornelius and St. Peter, teach the
believer to see in them the direct action and government of the Lord
Jesus Christ, turning the hearts of the fathers to the children and of
the disobedient to the wisdom of the just. Surely we have an instance
of such simultaneous operations of the Divine Spirit, and that on the
largest scale, in the cravings of the world after a Saviour at the age
and time when our Lord came! Virgil was then preaching in tones so
Christian concerning the coming Saviour whom the world was expecting,
that the great Italian poet Dante exempts him from hell on account of
his dim but real faith. The Wise Men were then seeking Christ from a
far country; Caiaphas was prophesying concerning a man who was to die
for God's people. Mankind, all the world over, was unconsciously
longing with a divinely inspired desire for that very salvation which
God was then revealing; just as upon the narrower stage of Damascus or
Cæsarea Jesus Christ inspired Saul and Cornelius with a Divine want
and prepared Ananias and Peter to satisfy it. John Keble in his poem
for Easter Monday has well seized and illustrated this point, so full
of comfort and edification, turning it into a practical direction for
the life of the human spirit:--
"Even so the course of prayer who knows?
It springs in silence where it will,
Springs out of sight, and flows
At first a lonely rill.
"Unheard by all but angel ears,
The good Cornelius knelt alone,
Nor dreamed his prayers and tears
Could help a world undone.
"The while upon his terraced roof,
The loved apostle to the Lord,
In silent thought aloof,
For heavenly vision soared.
"The saint beside the ocean prayed,
The soldier in his chosen bower,
Where all his eye surveyed
Seemed sacred in that hour.
"To each unknown his brother's prayer,
Yet brethren true in dearest love
Were they--and now they share
Fraternal joys above."
Ananias, guided by Divine Providence, enters into Saul's presence,
states his mission, lays his hands upon him and restores him to sight.
Ananias is careful, however, to disclaim all merit so far as he is
himself concerned in the matter of this miracle. His language is
exactly the same in tone as that of the apostles Peter and John when
they had healed the impotent man: "Why marvel ye at this man? or why
fasten ye your eyes on us, as though by our own power or godliness we
had made him to walk?... By faith in His name hath His name made this
man strong," were their words to the people. "In the name of Jesus
Christ of Nazareth, walk," was their command to the man himself. And
so in the case of Ananias, he attributes the healing power to Jesus
Christ alone. "The Lord Jesus, who appeared unto thee, ... hath sent
me, that thou mayest receive thy sight." The theology and faith of the
Church at Damascus were exactly the same as those of the Apostles and
Church at Jerusalem. And what a confirmation of Saul's own faith must
this miracle have been! It was then no passing vision, no fancy of a
heated imagination which he had experienced; but he had the actual
proof in his own person of their objective reality, a demonstration
that the power of Jesus of Nazareth ordered all things, both in heaven
and earth, healing the bodily as it could illuminate the spiritual
eye.
II. Ananias restored Saul's sight. According to the ninth of Acts his
mission was limited to this one point; but, according to St. Paul's
own account in the twenty-second chapter, he made a much longer
communication to the future Apostle: "The God of our fathers hath
appointed thee to know His will, and to see the Righteous One, and to
hear a voice from His mouth. For thou shalt be a witness for Him unto
all men of what thou hast seen and heard. And now why tarriest thou?
Arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on His name."
Ananias predicted to Saul his future mission, his apostleship to all
nations, and the fact that the Apostle of the Gentiles would find the
root and sustenance of his work in the force of personal conviction
with which his miraculous conversion had endowed him. Personal
knowledge, individual acquaintance with the things of the eternal
world was then, as it is still, the first condition of successful work
for Jesus Christ. There may be intellectual power, intense energy,
transcendent eloquence, consummate ability; but in the spiritual order
these things avail nothing till there be joined thereto that sense of
heavenly force and reality which a personal knowledge of the things
unseen imparts. Then heart answers to heart, and the great depths of
man's nature respond and open themselves to the voice and teaching of
one who speaks as St. Paul did of what "he had seen and heard."
There are two points in this address of Ananias as reported by St.
Paul himself to which we would direct special attention. Ananias
baptized Saul, and used very decided language on the subject, language
from which some would now shrink. These two points embody important
teaching. Ananias baptized Saul though Christ had personally called
him. This shows the importance which the Holy Scriptures attach to
baptism, and shows us something too of the nature of Holy Scripture
itself. St. Luke wrote the Acts as a kind of continuation of his
Gospel, to give an account to Theophilus of the rise and progress of
Christianity down to his own time. St. Luke in doing so tells us of
the institution of the Eucharist, but he does not say one word in his
Gospel about the appointment of baptism. He does not record the
baptismal commission, for which we must turn to St. Matthew xxviii.
19, or to St. Mark xvi. 16. Yet St. Luke is careful to report the
baptism of the three thousand on the Day of Pentecost, of the
Samaritans, of the eunuch, and now of St. Paul, as afterwards of
Cornelius, of Lydia, of the Philippian jailor, and of the Ephesian
followers of John the Baptist. He records the universality of
Christian baptism, and thus proves its obligation; but he does not
give us a hint of the origin of this sacrament, nor does he trace it
back to any word or command of the Lord Jesus Christ. He evidently
took all these things as quite well known and understood, and merely
describes the observance of a sacrament which needed no explanation on
his part. The writings of St. Luke were intended to instruct
Theophilus in the facts concerning our Lord's life and the labours of
certain leading individuals among His earliest followers; but they
make no pretence, nor do the other Gospels make any pretence, of being
an exhaustive history of our Lord's ministry or of the practice of the
earliest Church; and their silence does not necessarily prove that
much was not known and practised in the early Church about which they
have no occasion to speak.[52] The words of Ananias and the obedience
of Saul show us the importance which the Holy Spirit attached to this
sacrament of baptism. Here was a man to whom Christ Himself had
personally appeared, whom Christ had personally called, and to whom He
had made long-continued revelations of His will. Yet He instructed him
by the mouth of Ananias to receive the sacrament of baptism. Surely if
any man was ever exempted from submission to what some would esteem
the outward ordinance, it was this penitent and privileged convert!
But no: to him the words of God's messenger are the same as to the
humblest sinner, "Arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins." I
have known of truly good men who showed their want of spiritual
humility, or perhaps I should rather say of spiritual thought and
reflection, in this direction. I have known of persons aroused from
religious torpor and death by powerful though one-sided teaching. God
has blessed such teaching to the awakening in them of the first
elements of spiritual life, and then they have stopped short. They
were called, as Saul was, in an unbaptized state. They had never
previously received the sacrament of regeneration according to
Christ's appointment, and when Christ aroused them they thought this
primal blessing quite sufficient, and judged it unnecessary to obey
the full commands of Christ and be united by baptism to His Body the
Church. They judged, in fact, that the blessing of conversion absolved
them from the sacrament of responsibility; but such was not the view
of the primitive Church. The blessing of conversion as in St. Paul's
case, the visible and audible descent of the Holy Ghost as in the case
of Cornelius, hindered not the importance nor dispensed with the
necessity of the sacrament of baptism, which was the door of admission
to the Divine society and to a higher level in the Divine life than
any hitherto attained. Persons who act as those misguided individuals
of whom we have spoken stop short at the first principles of the
doctrine of Christ, and they attain to none of its heights, they sound
none of its depths, because they bend not their wills, and learn not
the sweetness and the power involved in spiritual humiliation and in
lowly self-denying obedience taught by the Master Himself when He
said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven."[53]
[52] Archbishop Whately used to make an important distinction
between things _anti_-Scriptural and things _un_-Scriptural.
Things _anti_-Scriptural cannot be tolerated by the Church,
because they contradict the Word of God. Things _un_-Scriptural,
that is, things about which Scripture is silent and for which no
direct warrant can be produced, may be right or wrong, useful or
vicious. Sunday schools, for instance, are in this sense
unscriptural. The Scriptures are silent about them, and if direct
warrant with chapter and verse be required for them, none such can
be produced. Hooker, in his Third Book, ch. v.-viii., has a
powerful argument upon this subject as against the ultra-reformers
or Puritans of his day, who would have tied the Church within much
tighter bonds than ever Judaism submitted to.
[53] I have known cases where baptism was rejected avowedly on
these grounds. This is of course a natural result of the pushing
individualism in religion to an extreme, and is often found among
what we may call extreme Protestants. It naturally results from
two errors. First of all, from a rejection of the article of the
Apostles' Creed, "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church." Such men
reject the doctrine of a Church as a great fundamental article of
the Creed, one of the necessary articles of the Christian faith,
and therefore they reject baptism which is the door of entrance
into the Divine society. And, secondly, they reject the true
definition and idea of a sacrament. They view baptism, for
instance, as the expression merely of a faith already received,
and as nothing more. If, then, they express this faith
sufficiently by their life and actions, baptism seems to them an
empty and vain ceremony. But surely this was not St. Paul's view,
either when he received baptism at the hands of Ananias, or when
he wrote in the sixth of Romans "We were buried therefore with Him
through baptism into death."
The language, again, of Ananias about baptism sounds strange in some
ears, and yet the experience of missionaries is a sufficient
explanation of it. What is that language? "Arise, and be baptized, and
wash away thy sins." These words sound startling to one accustomed to
identify the washing away of sin with the exercise of faith, and yet
there they stand, and no method of exegesis will avail to make them
say anything else than this, that baptism was for Saul the washing
away of sin, so that if he did not accept baptism his sins would not
have been washed away. The experience, however, of those who labour in
the mission field explains the whole difficulty. Baptism is the act of
open confession and acknowledgment of Christ. St. Paul himself teaches
the absolute importance of this confession: "With the heart man
believeth unto righteousness; with the mouth confession is made unto
salvation."[54] Pagan converts are even still abundantly found who are
willing to accept the pure morality and the sublime teaching of
Christianity, who are willing to believe and see in Jesus Christ the
supreme revelation of God made to the human race, but who are not
willing to incur loss and persecution and trial for His sake by the
reception of Christian baptism and a public confession of their faith.
They may believe with the heart in the revelation of righteousness and
may lead moral lives in consequence, but they are not willing to make
public confession leading them into a state of salvation. They are, in
fact, in the position of Saul of Tarsus as he prayed in the house of
Judas, but they will go no farther. They will not act as he did, they
will not take the decisive step, they will not arise and be baptized
and wash away their sins, calling on the name of Jesus Christ. And if
Saul of Tarsus had been like them and had acted as they do, he might
have received the vision and have been convinced of the truth of Jesus
Christ and of His mission, but yet his moral cowardice would have
spoilt the whole, and Saul would have remained in his sins,
unpardoned, unaccepted, reprobate from Christ, because he remained
unbaptized. Christianity, in fact, is a covenant, and forgiveness of
sins is one of the blessings attached to this covenant. Until men
perform its conditions and actually enter into the covenant the
blessings of the covenant are not granted. Baptism is the door of
entry into the covenant of grace, and till men humbly enter within the
door they do not exercise true faith. They may believe intellectually
in the truth and reality of Christianity, but, till they take the
decisive step and obey Christ's law, they do not possess that true
faith of the heart which alone enables them, like Saul of Tarsus, to
obey Christ and therefore enter into peace.
[54] Romans x. 10.
III. The next step taken by the Apostle is equally plainly stated:
"Straightway in the synagogues he proclaimed Jesus, that He is the Son
of God." But, though the words of the Acts are plain enough, it is not
so easy to reconcile them with St. Paul's own account, as given in the
Epistle to the Galatians (i. 15, 16, 17), where he states, "When it
was the good pleasure of God to reveal His Son in me, immediately I
conferred not with flesh and blood, but I went away into Arabia, and
again I returned to Damascus." In the ninth chapter of the Acts we
find the statement made that _immediately_ after his baptism he
preached Christ in the synagogues of Damascus, while in his own
biographical narrative he tells us that _immediately_ after his
baptism he went away into Arabia. Is there any way in which we can
reconcile them? We think so, and that a very simple one. Let us first
reflect upon the story as told in the Acts. St. Luke is giving a rapid
history, a survey of St. Paul's life of public activity. He is not
telling the story of his inner spiritual experiences, his conflicts,
temptations, trials, revelations, as St. Paul himself set them forth.
He knew not of them, in fact. St. Luke knew merely the exterior public
life of which man had cognisance. He knew nothing, or but little, of
the interior life of the Apostle, known only to himself and to God.
St. Luke therefore tells us of his early work at Damascus. St. Paul
himself tells us of that early work, but also shows us how he was
prepared for that work by his retirement into Arabia. Both agree in
the main point, however, and place the scene of his earliest Christian
efforts in the very spot, Damascus, which he had in his human
prevision destined for himself as the field of his bitterest
antagonism to the faith of the Crucified. This is an important point.
St. Luke wrote his historical narrative twenty-five years or
thereabouts after St. Paul's conversion. He may have often visited
Damascus. Tradition makes Antioch, a town of the same district, his
birthplace. St. Luke must have had abundant opportunities of
consulting witnesses who could tell the story of those eventful days,
and could describe St. Paul's earliest testimony to his new
convictions. But these men only knew St. Paul as he appeared in
public. They may have known very little of the inner history of his
life as he reveals it in his Epistle to the Galatians when vindicating
his apostolic authority and mission.[55]
[55] St. Luke's informants, twenty-five years after the events,
would naturally only remember the leading points, the most
striking events of St. Paul's early Christian career. Few people
realise how hard it is to recall the events of twenty-five years
ago in anything like consecutive order. We preserve upon the whole
a lively and a true impression; but till we go and consult
documents, diaries, journals, etc., it is almost impossible to
state the succession of events in accurate order. I was trying the
other day to recall the events of my own public life twenty-five
years ago anent the controversy which raged about the
disestablishment of the Irish Church, into which I plunged with
the vehemence of early manhood, and I failed to distinguish events
which must have been separated by months and even by years. How
much more easily must others have failed accurately to follow
details of St. Paul's life known only to himself!
Let us now see whether we cannot harmonise St. Paul's autobiographical
narrative in the Epistle with the Evangelist's narrative in the Acts;
always remembering, however, that an imperfect knowledge is never more
completely felt than in such cases. When we try to harmonise an
account written from the subjective side by one individual with an
objective and exterior narrative written by some one else, we are like
a man looking at a globe and trying to take it all in at one glance.
One side must be hidden from him; and so in this case, many
circumstances are necessarily concealed from us which would solve
difficulties that now completely puzzle us. But let us to our task, in
which we have derived much assistance from the commentary of Bishop
Lightfoot upon Galatians. St. Paul, we are told in ch. ix. 19,
received meat after the visit of Ananias and was strengthened. St.
Paul was never one of those high-wrought fanatics who despise food and
the care of the body. There was nothing of the Gnostic or the
Manichean about him, leading him to despise and neglect the body which
the Lord has given to be the soul's instrument. He recognised under
all circumstances that if the human spirit is to do its work, and if
God's glory is to be promoted, the human body must be sustained in
force and vigour. When he was on board ship and in imminent peril of
shipwreck and death, and men thought they should be at their prayers,
thinking of the next world alone, he took bread and blessed and set
the crew and passengers alike the healthy example of eating a hearty
meal, and thus keeping his body in due preparation for whatever
deliverances the Lord might work for them; and so, too, at Damascus,
his spiritual joy and hallowed peace and deep gratitude for his
restoration to sight did not prevent him paying due attention to the
wants of his body. "He took food, and was strengthened." And now comes
the first note of time. "Then was Saul certain days with the disciples
which were at Damascus. And straightway (εὐθέως) he
preached Christ in the synagogues, that He is the Son of God." The
very same expression is used by St. Paul in Galatians, where, after
speaking of his conversion, he says, "Immediately (εὐθέως)
I conferred not with flesh and blood, but went away into Arabia, and
again returned unto Damascus." Now my explanation, and not mine alone,
but that of Bishop Lightfoot, is this. After the new convert had
rested for a short time at Damascus, he retired into the Sinaitic
desert, where he remained for several months, perhaps for a whole
year. During this period he disappeared from the sight and knowledge
of men as if the earth had opened its mouth and swallowed him. Then he
returned to Damascus and preached with such power that the Jews formed
a plot against his life, enlisting the help of the governor on their
side, so that even the gates were watched that he might be arrested.
He escaped their hands, however, through the assistance of his
converts, and went up to Jerusalem.[56]
[56] Mr. Lewin, in his _St. Paul_, vol. i., p. 72, argues that the
governor or ethnarch, as he is called by St. Paul in 2 Cor. xi.
32, was the Jewish chief magistrate of Damascus, appointed to that
post by Aretas, King of Petra, who then held Damascus. The Jews
were allowed by the Romans to have chief magistrates of their own
wherever they lived in large colonies. At Alexandria, for
instance, where they occupied a large portion of the city, the
Jews were ruled by an Alabarch. Mr. Lewin shows in the same place
a picture of the exact spot in the walls where St. Paul is by
tradition said to have escaped.
But here another difficulty arises. The Acts tells us that "when Saul
was come to Jerusalem, he assayed to join himself to the disciples;
but they were all afraid of him, and believed not that he was a
disciple," whereupon Barnabas, fulfilling his office of mediation,
explanation, and consolation, took him and introduced him to the
Apostles; while on the other hand in the first chapter of Galatians
St. Paul himself speaks of his first visit to the Jerusalem Church
thus: "Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas,
and tarried with him fifteen days. But other of the Apostles saw I
none, save James the Lord's brother." Now the difficulty consists in
this. First, how could the disciples at Jerusalem have been suspicious
of St. Paul, if at least a year and a half had elapsed since his
conversion? for the Jewish method of counting time would not require
three whole years to have elapsed since that event. Secondly, how
could Barnabas have brought him to the Apostles as the Acts states, if
St. Paul himself says he saw none of them save Peter and James? As to
the first difficulty, we acknowledge at once that it seems at first
sight a very considerable one, and yet a little reflection will show
that there are many explanations of it. If St. Paul kept quiet, as we
believe he did, after his conversion and baptism, and departed into
the solitudes of Arabia, and then upon his return to Damascus,
perhaps after a year's retirement, began his aggressive work, there
may not have been time for the Church at large to get knowledge of the
facts. Communication, again, may have been interrupted because of the
contest between Herod and Aretas, in which Damascus played no small
part. Communication may not have been possible between the two
Churches.[57] Then, again, the persecution raised by Saul himself
seems to have practically extirpated the Jerusalem Church for a time.
"They were all scattered abroad except the Apostles," is the account
given of the Christian community at Jerusalem. The terror of that
persecution may have lasted many a long month. Numbers of the original
members may never have ventured back again to the Holy City. The
Jerusalem Church may have been a new formation largely composed of new
converts who never had heard of a wondrous circumstance which had
happened a year or two before to the high priest's delegate, which the
Sanhedrin would doubtless desire to keep secret.[58]
[57] All thought about Saul and his doings may just then have been
swallowed up in the national excitement about Caligula and his
attempt to set up his statue in the Temple. The trouble connected
with the Nazarene sect would seem to every true Jew but a small
matter compared with the outrage to Jehovah threatened by the mad
emperor. See more about this in the next chapter.
[58] It is expressly said in Acts ix. 26 that when Saul came to
Jerusalem he tried to join himself to the _disciples_. They,
knowing only of his record as a persecutor, were afraid of him.
Then Barnabas took him and brought him to the _apostles_.
These and many other considerations offer themselves when we strive to
throw ourselves back into the circumstances of the time and help to a
solution of the first difficulty which we have indicated. Human life
is such a complex thing that the strangest combinations may easily
find place therein. In this particular case we are so ignorant of the
facts, so many hypotheses offer themselves to account for the seeming
inconsistencies, that we hesitate not to identify the visit to
Jerusalem mentioned in the Acts with that recorded by St. Paul in the
Epistle to the Galatians. The second difficulty to which we have
alluded is this, How could Barnabas have brought him to the Apostles,
if St. Paul himself states that he saw none of the Apostles save Peter
and James the Lord's brother? We must remember, however, that St. Luke
and St. Paul wrote with two distinct objects. St. Paul, in the
Galatians, wished to show the independence of his revelations as
regards the Apostles of the circumcision, the Twelve technically so
called. Of these Apostles he saw not one, save St. Peter. St. Luke is
giving a broad external account of the new convert's earliest
religious history, and he tells us that on his first visit to the Holy
City his conversion was acknowledged and guaranteed by the
apostles,--not the Twelve merely, but the apostles, that is, the
senior members of the Christian community, embracing not merely the
original company chosen by Christ, but all the senior members of the
Church, like Barnabas, James, and others who may have formed a supreme
council to guide the affairs of the infant society. The word apostle,
in fact, is used very variously in the New Testament; sometimes in a
limited sense as confined to the Twelve, sometimes in a wider and more
general sense, embracing men like Barnabas, as in Acts xiv. 4, 14; St.
James, the Lord's brother, as in 1 Cor. xv. 7; Andronicus and Junias,
as in Rom. xvi. 7, and many others. It is quite possible, then, that
Barnabas may have brought Saul to the Apostolic council, and told
there the tale of his conversion though not one of the original
Twelve was present save St. Peter.[59]
[59] See Bishop Lightfoot's dissertation upon St. Paul's first
visit to Jerusalem, and the use of the term apostle in the New
Testament in his _Commentary on Galatians_, pp. 91-101. Cf. Volume
I. of this Commentary, p. 348.
We have now endeavoured to explain some of the difficulties which a
comparison of St. Paul's own autobiographical narrative with the Acts
discloses. Let us look again at the retirement into Arabia. This
retirement seems to us full of instruction and pregnant with meaning
for the hidden as well as the practical life of the soul. St. Paul as
soon as he was baptized retired into Arabia; and why, it may be asked,
did he retire thither? Some of the ancient expositors, as St.
Chrysostom and St. Jerome, both of whom wrote about the same period,
A.D. 400, thought that St. Paul retired into Arabia in order that he
might preach to the Arabians. St. Chrysostom, for instance, comments
thus: "See how fervent was his soul, he was eager to occupy lands yet
untilled. He forthwith attacked a barbarous and savage people,
choosing a life of conflict and of much toil." And the explanations of
Hilary, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret, and Œcumenius, all of
them ancient and acute expositors, are of exactly the same character.
Now this would have been a reversal of the Divine order in one
important aspect. The power of the keys, the office of opening the
kingdom of heaven to the Gentiles had been committed to St. Peter by
Jesus Christ. He had not as yet baptized Cornelius, and thus formally
opened the door of faith to the Gentiles. If St. Paul had preached to
the Arabians, he would have usurped St. Peter's place and function. We
believe, on the other hand, that God led the converted persecutor
into the deserts of Arabia for very different purposes. Let us note a
few of them.
The Lord led Saul there for the purpose of quiet and retirement. The
great commentators and expositors of the early Church, as we have
already noted, used to call St. Paul by the special title of "Vas
Electionis," the chosen vessel _par excellence_, chosen because
surpassing in his gifts and graces and achievements all the other
Apostles. Now it was with the "Vas Electionis" in the New Testament as
with many of his types in the Old Testament. When God would prepare
Moses for his life's work in shepherding, ruling, and guiding His
people through the deserts of Arabia, He first called him for many a
long day into retirement to the Mount of Horeb and the solitudes of
the Sinaitic desert. When God would strengthen and console the spirit
depressed, wounded and severely smitten, of his servant Elijah, He
brought him to the same mysterious spot, and there restored his moral
and spiritual tone, and equipped him with new strength for his warfare
by the visions of the Almighty lovingly vouchsafed to him. The Founder
or Former of the Jewish Dispensation and the Reformer of the same
Dispensation were prepared and sustained for their work amid the
solitudes of the Arabian deserts; and what more fitting place in which
the "Vas Electionis," the chosen vessel of the New Dispensation,
should be trained? What more suitable locality where the Lord Jesus
should make those fuller and completer revelations of Christian
doctrine and mystery which his soul needed, than there where
lightning-blasted cliff and towering mountains all alike spoke of God
and of His dealings with mankind in the mysterious ages of a
long-departed past? The Lord thus taught St. Paul, and through him
teaches the Church of every age, the need of seasons of retirement and
communion with God preparatory to and in close connexion with any
great work or scene of external activity, such as St. Paul was now
entering upon. It is a lesson much needed by this age of ours when men
are tempted to think so much of practical work which appears at once
in evidence, making its presence felt in tangible results, and so very
little of devotional work and spiritual retirement which cannot be
estimated by any earthly standard or tabulated according to our modern
methods. Men are now inclined to think _laborare est orare_, and that
active external work faithfully and vigorously rendered can take the
place and supply the want of prayer and thought, of quiet study and
devout meditation. Against such a tendency the Lord's dealings with
St. Paul, yea more, the Divine dealings with and leadings of the
eternal Son Himself, form a loud and speaking protest. The world was
perishing and men were going down to the grave in darkness and Satan
and sin were triumphing, and yet Jesus was led up of the Spirit into
the wilderness for forty days, and Saul was brought out into the
deserts of Arabia from amid the teeming crowds of Damascus that he
might learn those secrets of the Divine life which are best
communicated to those who wait upon God in patient prayer and holy
retirement. This is a lesson very necessary for this hot and fitful
and feverish age of ours, when men are in such a hurry to have
everything set right and every abuse destroyed all at once. Their
haste is not after the Divine model, and their work cannot expect the
stability and solidity we find in God's. The nineteenth-century
extreme is reproved by St. Paul's retirement into Arabia.[60] Man is,
however, such a creature that if he avoids one extreme he generally
tumbles into another. And so it is in this matter. Men have been ready
to push this matter of retirement into an extreme, and have considered
that they were following St. Paul's example in retiring into the
Arabian and similar deserts and remaining there. But they have made a
great mistake. St. Paul retired into Arabia for a while, and then
"returned again unto Damascus." They have retired into the deserts and
have remained there engaged in the one selfish task of saving their
own souls, as they thought, by the exercises of prayer and meditation,
apart from that life of active good works for the sake of others which
constitutes another department of Christianity equally vital to the
health of the soul.
[60] We may apply this typical fact in primitive Church history in
a very modern direction. It would be very well if candidates for
the sacred ministry always imitated St. Paul's departure into
Arabia. I have known a great many promising careers spoiled
because young deacons would select a heavy, laborious town or city
charge for the opening work of their ministry. They know nothing
of life or the world. They know nothing of preaching or pastoral
work. They have, too, all their mistakes to make, and they select
the most public place for their perpetration. But this is not the
worst. They form habits of busy idleness and of mental dissipation
which never leave them. The first two or three years of a young
clergyman's life generally determine his whole career. His life
never recovers the effect of the initial movement. I think the
great outcry, in the Church of England at least, against sermons
largely owing to the decay of study resulting from premature
activity on the part of the junior clergy. Premature development
in any direction is ever followed by premature decay, and when a
young priest or deacon is engaged every day and every night in the
week from an early service at 8 a.m. till night-school is finished
at 10 p.m. in external work, how can he prepare for teaching an
educated congregation on Sundays? And surely there ought to be
some little consideration for thinking men and educated women as
well as for others.
The history of Eastern monasticism is marked from its earliest days by
an eager desire to follow St. Paul in his retirement into Arabia, and
an equal disinclination to return with him unto Damascus. And this
characteristic, this intense devotion to a life of solitude strangely
enough passed over to our own Western islands, and is a dominant
feature of the monasticism which prevailed in Great Britain and
Ireland in the days of Celtic Christianity. The Syrian and Egyptian
monks passed over to Lerins and Southern Gaul, whence their disciples
came to England and Ireland, where they established themselves,
bringing with them all their Eastern love of solitary deserts. This
taste they perpetuated, as may be seen especially on the western coast
of Ireland, where the ruins of extensive monastic settlements still
exist, testifying to this craving. The last islands, for instance,
which a traveller sees as he steams away from Cork to America, are
called the Skelligs. They are ten miles west of the Kerry coast, and
yet there on these rocks where a boat cannot land sometimes for months
together the early monks of the fifth and six centuries established
themselves as in a desert in the ocean. The topography of Ireland is
full of evidences and witnesses of this desire to imitate the Apostle
of the Gentiles in his Arabian retirement. There are dozens of town
lands--subdivisions of the parishes--which are called deserts or
diserts,[61] because they constituted solitudes set apart for hermit
life after the example of St. Paul in Arabia and John the Baptist in
the deserts of Judæa. While, again, when we turn northwards along the
western seaboard of Ireland, we shall find numerous islands like the
Skelligs, Ardoilen or the High Island, off the coast of Connemara, and
Innismurry off the Sligo coast, where hermit cells in the regular
Egyptian and Syrian fashion were built, and still exist as they did a
thousand years ago, testifying to the longing of the human mind for
such complete solitude and close communion with God as Saul enjoyed
when he departed from Damascus.[62] The monks of ancient times may
have run into one extreme: well would it be for us if we could avoid
the other, and learn to cultivate self-communion, meditation,
self-examination, and that realisation of the eternal world which God
grants to those who wait upon Him apart from the bustle and din and
dust of earth, which clog the spiritual senses and dim the heavenly
vision.
[61] See Joyce's _Irish Names of Places_, vol. i., p. 325.
[62] I have touched upon the subject of the connexion between
Syria and Egypt and Oriental monasticism on the one hand, and
Gaul, England, and Ireland on the other, during the period which
elapsed between A.D. 400 and 900, in _Ireland and the Celtic
Church_, chs. ix. and xi. I have discussed it at greater length
and with fuller details in two papers upon the Knowledge of Greek
in Gaul and Ireland, read before the Royal Irish Academy in
February 1892, now published in the Proceedings of that body; and
also in two papers, one upon the Island Monasteries of Great
Britain and Ireland and the other on St. Fechin of Fore,
published, the former in the Journal of the Royal Society of
Antiquaries of Ireland for 1891, and the latter in the same
Journal for April 1st, 1892.
We can see many other reasons why Paul was led into Arabia. He was led
there, for instance, that he might make a thorough scrutiny of his
motives. Silence, separation, solitude, have a wondrous tendency to
make a man honest with himself and humbly honest before his God. Saul
might have been a hypocrite or a formalist elsewhere, where human eyes
and jealous glances were bent upon him, but scarcely when there alone
with Jehovah in the desert. Again, Saul was led there that his soul
might be ennobled and enlarged by the power of magnificent scenery, of
high and hallowed associations. Mountain and cliff and flood,
specially those which have been magnified and made honourable by grand
memories such as must have crowded upon Saul's mind, have a marvellous
effect, enlarging, widening, developing, upon a soul like Saul's, long
cribbed, cabined, and confined within the rigorous bonds of Pharisaic
religionism. Saul, too, was led up into those mysterious regions away
from the busy life and work, the pressing calls of Damascus, that he
might speak a word in season to us all, and especially to those young
in the Christian life, who think in the first burst of their zeal and
faith as if they had nothing to do but go in and possess the whole
land. Saul did not set out at once to evangelise the masses of
Damascus, or to waste the first weak beginnings of his spiritual life
in striving to benefit or awaken others. He was first led away into
the deserts of Arabia, in order that there he might learn of the deep
things of God and of the weak things of his own nature, and then, when
God had developed his spiritual strength, He led him back to Damascus
that he might testify out of the fulness of a heart which knew the
secrets of the Most High. The teaching of Saul's example speaks loudly
to us all. It was the same with Saul as with a greater than he. The
Eternal Son Himself was trained amid years and years of darkness and
secrecy, and even after His baptism the day of His manifestation unto
Israel was delayed yet a little. Jesus Christ was no novice when He
came preaching. And Saul of Tarsus was no novice in the Christian life
when he appeared as the Christian advocate in the synagogue of
Damascus. Well would it have been for many a soul had this Divine
example been more closely copied. Again and again have the young and
ignorant and inexperienced been encouraged to stand up as public
teachers immediately after they have been seriously impressed. They
have yielded to the unwise solicitation. The vanity of the human heart
has seconded the foolish advice given to them, and they have tried to
declare the deep things of God when as yet they have need of learning
the very first principles of the doctrine of Christ. Is it any wonder
that such persons oftentimes make shipwreck of faith and a sound
conscience? Truth is very large and wide and spacious, and requires
much time and thought if it is to be assimilated; and even when truth
is grasped in all its mighty fulness, then there are spiritual enemies
within and without and spiritual pitfalls to be avoided which can be
known only by experience. Woe is then to that man who is not assisted
by grace and guided by Divine experience, and who knows not God and
the powers of the world to come, and the devious paths of his own
heart, as these things can only be known and learned as Saul of Tarsus
knew and learned them in the deserts of Arabia. There was marvellous
wisdom contained in the brief apostolic law enacted for candidates for
holy orders in words gathered from St. Paul's own personal history,
"Not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the
condemnation of the devil."