This return to his native city was probably the first visit which
he had made to it, since the day when he departed from his father’s
house, to go to Jerusalem as a student of Jewish theology. It must
therefore have been the occasion of many interesting reflections and
reminiscences. What changes had the events of that interval wrought in
him,――in his faith, his hopes, his views, his purposes for life and for
death! The objects which were then to him as idols,――the aims and ends
of his being,――had now no place in his reverence or his affection; but
in their stead was now placed a name and a theme, of which he could
hardly have heard before he first left Tarsus,――and a cause whose
triumph would be the overthrow of all those traditions of the Fathers,
of which he had been taught to be so exceeding zealous. To this new
cause he now devoted himself, and probably at this time labored “in
the regions of Cilicia,” until a new apostolic summons called him to a
distant field. He was yet “personally unknown to the churches of Judea,
which were in Christ; and they had only heard, that he who persecuted
them in times past, now preached the faith which once he destroyed;
they therefore glorified God on his account.” The very beginnings
of his apostolic duties were therefore in a foreign field, and not
within the original premises of the lost sheep of the house of Israel,
where indeed he was not even known but by fame, except to a few in
Jerusalem. In this he showed the great scope and direction of his
future labors,――among the Gentiles, not among the Jews; leaving the
latter to the sole care of the original apostles, while he turned to
a vast field for which they were in no way fitted, by nature, or by
apostolic education, nor were destined in the great scheme of salvation.