But this was not destined to be the most important occupation of
Saul’s life. Even his parents had nobler objects in view for him,
and evidently devoted him to this handicraft, only in conformity with
those ancient Jewish usages which had the force of law on every true
Israelite, whether rich or poor; and accordingly he was sent, while yet
in his youth, away from his home in Tarsus, to Jerusalem, the fountain
of religious and legal knowledge to all the race of Judah and Benjamin,
throughout the world. To what extent his general education had been
carried in Tarsus, is little known; but he had acquired that fluency
in the Greek, which is displayed in his writings, though contaminated
with many of the provincialisms of Cilicia, and more especially with
the barbarisms of Hebrew usage. Living in daily intercourse, both in
the way of business and friendship, with the active Grecians of that
thriving city, and led, no doubt, by his own intellectual character and
tastes, to the occasional cultivation of those classics which were the
delight of his Gentile acquaintances, he acquired a readiness and power
in the use of the Greek language, and a familiarity with the favorite
writers of the Asian Hellenes, that in the providence of God most
eminently fitted him for the sphere to which he was afterwards devoted,
and was the true ground of his wonderful acceptability to the highly
literary people among whom his greatest and most successful labors
were performed, and to whom all of his epistles, but two, were written.
All these writings show proofs of such an acquaintance with Greek, as
is here inferred from his opportunities in education. His well-known
quotations also from Menander and Epimenides, and more especially his
happy impromptu reference in his discourse at Athens, to the line
from his own fellow-Cilician, Aratus, are instances of a very great
familiarity with the classics, and are thrown out in such an unstudied,
off-hand way, as to imply a ready knowledge of these writers. But all
these were, no doubt, learned in the mere occasional manner already
alluded to in connection with the reputation and literary character of
Tarsus. He was devoted by all the considerations of ancestral pride and
religious zeal to the study of “a classic, the best the world has ever
seen,――the noblest that has ever honored and dignified the language of
mortals.”