In this splendid seat of knowledge, Saul was born of purely Jewish
parents. “A Hebrew of the Hebrews,” he enjoyed from his earliest
infancy that minute religious instruction, which every Israelite was
in conscience bound to give his children; and with a minuteness and
attention so much the more careful, as a residence in a foreign land,
far away from the consecrated soil of Palestine and the Holy city of
his faith, might increase the liabilities of his children to forget
or neglect a religion of which they saw so few visible tokens around
them, to keep alive their devotion. Yet, though thus strictly educated
in the religion of his fathers, Saul was by no means cut off by this
circumstance from the enjoyment of many of the advantages in profaner
knowledge, afforded in such an eminent degree by Tarsus; but must,
almost without an effort, have daily imbibed into his ready and ever
active mind, much of the refining influence of Grecian philosophy.
There is no proof, indeed, that he ever formally entered the schools
of heathen science; such a supposition, is, perhaps, inconsistent with
the idea of his principles of rigid Judaism, and is rendered rather
improbable by the great want of Grecian elegance and accuracy in his
writings; which are so decidedly characterized by an unrhetorical style,
and by irregular logic, that they never could have been the production
of a scholar, in the most eminent philosophical institutions of Asia.
But a mere birth and residence in such a city, and the incidental but
constant familiarity with those so absorbed in these pursuits, as very
many of his fellow-citizens were, would have the unavoidable effect of
familiarizing him also with the great subjects of conversation, and the
grand objects of pursuit, so as ever after to prove an advantage to him
in his intercourse with the refined and educated among the Greeks and
Romans. The knowledge thus acquired, too, is ever found to be of the
most readily available kind, always suggesting itself upon occasions
when needed, according to the simple principle of association, and thus
more easily applied to ordinary use than that which is more regularly
attained, and is arranged in the mind only according to formal systems.
Thus was it, with most evident wisdom, ordained by God, that in this
great seat of heathen learning, that apostle should be born, who was to
be the first messenger of grace to the Grecian world, and whose words
of warning, even Rome should one day hear and believe.