Why Persecutest Thou Me?

And he fell upon the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?—Acts 9:4.

1. We do well to treasure up, whenever we can learn them, the facts that cluster round the turning-points in a great man’s life; the great critical moments which made him what he was, for good and evil, leaving an everlasting impress on his character. In proportion to the work which such a man has done in the world, as prophet, or lawgiver, or ruler, are we glad to know what were the inner sources of those great achievements; what forces were at work, directing, in the wonderful providence of God, the whole current of his being. The thoughts which rise unbidden in his heart; the words which are borne to his inward ear as from some human or Divine instructor; the account he himself gives us of the facts of the great change—all these have an interest for us far greater than that which attaches to any record of merely outward events, even than that which we find in the greatest actions of the man himself.

Looking to St. Paul as simply one of the great men who have stamped their minds and characters on the history of the world; seeing in him one whose influence has had a wider range, and lasted longer than that of any other man, however mighty or famous, the account which he gives of the process by which he became that which he actually was, might well attract us, as being of immense significance. The process was one of sudden and startling change; all the strength and intensity of his nature were transferred in a moment from one camp in the great battlefield of faith to the other; he who was before “a persecutor and a blasphemer, and injurious,” became a preacher of the faith he once destroyed. If the record of the conversion of St. Paul were simply that of an internal conflict, of growing and gathering convictions, of strange dreams and omens; if it were as perplexing and uncertain as are the stories of the conversion of Constantine, it would still be, for all to whom the history of the world is not a sealed book, a page in it which they may not lightly pass over. But if we believe that the change of belief and heart was not merely a human, but a Divine work; that the words which belong to it did not come by chance, but were spoken to his spirit by Him who is the Eternal Word; if we think of that which he beheld, not as one of the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, but as the revelation of the Son of man, then we are bound to study the whole history with a profounder reverence, and to examine into each single circumstance belonging to it, with the fullest conviction that there can be nothing idle or superfluous in it, nothing arbitrary or capricious.

Give thanks for heroes that have stirred

Earth with the wonder of a word.

But all thanksgiving for the breed

Who have bent destiny with deed—

Souls of the high, heroic birth

Souls sent to poise the shaken earth,

And then called back to God again

To make heaven possible for men.

2. The subject before us is St. Paul’s conversion. Before approaching the particular study of it let us give a thought to the meaning of a much misused word. Perhaps no term in theology has been more seriously misapplied than this word “conversion”; the place which it has filled in religious thought, and the interpretations which have been forced out of it by preachers within the last Century, have tended to make us revert from the word altogether, as one having no use for modern times. But, while we try to avoid the errors, let us not be afraid of the word. “Conversion,” if used in its true sense, does not mean some abnormal experience in the spiritual life of a man; far from this, it is a natural experience in the history of the religious life of every soul which seeks after God; an experience which not only enters into that life, but makes a permanent impression upon the character of the soul.

(1) First of all it is a crisis in a man’s experience. Nothing interests men more than the story of a critical and determining experience in the history of a soul. All the narratives that have deeply affected mankind have turned upon some crisis in spiritual fortunes. The interest of the crisis may have lain in tracing the chain of outward circumstances which prepared or seemed to prepare for it. Or it may, on the other hand, have lain solely in a close scrutiny of the gradual and hardly perceptible inner movements which led to that moment big with change and renewal. But without that moment the story would have been hardly a human story at all. So naturally do we look for the great transforming moment in a life which is to satisfy us of its real humanity. So little can we accept as really human the life which unconsciously and without an effort accepts itself, which has never needed to challenge itself and to wring from itself the satisfying and renewing answer to its own insistent questioning. It is this moment of self-challenge which is really the conversion of a soul. There the life comes to itself, feels that there is a self after which it must seek, which will not simply come to it without seeking, that there is a self which it must make, which will not fall to it ready-made.

I read in the newspaper the other day of a wonderful invention to be used in war. It was a bomb, with such materials inside the shell, and so contrived as to explode at the touch of a ray of light! The bomb might be placed anywhere and do no harm; but let a ray of light fall upon it in particular, and on the instant, at the summons of the light, the thing would awake and burst.1 [Note: John A. Hutton, Guidance from Robert Browning in Matters of Faith, 47.]

(2) But, in the second place, this crisis is a part of the soul’s own growth. Conversion is a universal human need. But we have confused ourselves by confining the term to a particular kind of religious experience which is by no means common to all men, or even possible for all men, which is indeed, and perhaps fortunately, possible only for a few exceptional natures. And it is just this kind of conversion which is very often least worthy of the name. It is the effect of a momentary emotion, and is induced most readily in the most superficial natures. It is true that the appeals which produce such an emotion may sometimes find their way into the deep and silent nature and there leave the permanent lesson which will continue to do its work while life endures. But they are too often addressed to all that is most obviously of the surface stuff of feeling. Too often they are so ignorant of the nature of the will in us and of the means of stirring it into action that it seems almost an accident if occasionally they do reach it. The secret of conversion lies in the character to which the appeal is addressed, and not in some conventional type of religious appeal. It is the inner history that matters. And nothing is of such slow growth as the trouble of the heart, the dissatisfaction with self. To force it is almost certainly to mar its efficaciousness, to rob it of its true value. Appeals from without may awaken it into activity for the first time, or they may bring it to a head and give it complete consciousness of itself. But it is in its slow working that the Spirit of God is wrestling with a soul. It is not in the message of a moment, but in the gradual lesson of an obscure and laborious effort, that the Divine Spirit comes to us. And yet that moment must not be denied its place in the spiritual life. It appears and reappears in the history of great souls.

This is the story of one of those profoundly significant events in history on which the whole complexion of future thought and the course of future progress turn. St. Paul is one of those Titanic figures of the past about whom everything was on the large scale, both for himself and for the world. Intellectually, his views of truth have become a fundamental statement of the creed of nineteen centuries; practically, he is the master empire-builder of the kingdom of God in the world. He laid hold upon the largest conceptions of his time—the Hebrew religion and the Roman Empire—and he transformed them into the Christian Church. But it was not by the natural development of his genius that he did this. Up to a certain moment in his career his powers were running to waste, spending themselves in the most futile ways. At that moment something occurred which revolutionized his whole life, an upheaval of the very foundations of the man. But the greatness of this man’s nature ensured the thoroughness of the change in him. Such a man’s conversion is a tremendous affair.1 [Note: J. Kelman.]

We may well question whether there was ever a conversion which could be rightly called instantaneous. There is often a sudden shock, a flash of light, a conscience smitten as with an arrow, a deciding moment; but hundreds of forgotten things have been preparing for it. That blaze of lightning which bursts out of a thunder-cloud is instantaneous, but the atmospheric conditions which prepared it have been a long time gathering to form that thunder-cloud. Conversion, when it is most sudden, has behind it days and even years of passing religious thought, and conscience-pricking, and spirit-striving. It is only when the hands are on the hour that the clock strikes, but through the whole sixty minutes the whole machinery has been moving towards this very thing. The clock struck in this case on the way to Damascus, but the wheels had been going round a long time bringing it to this point. Christ’s unseen hand had been laid upon Saul more than once, and he had felt it and shaken it off, half in fear and half in anger.1 [Note: J. G. Greenhough.]

I was quick in the flesh, was warm, and the live heart shook my breast;

In the market I bought and sold, in the temple I bowed my head.

I had swathed me in shows and forms, and was honoured above the rest,

For the sake of the life I lived; nor did any esteem me dead.

But at last, when the hour was ripe—was it sudden-remembered word?

Was it sight of a bird that mounted, or sound of a strain that stole?—

I was ’ware of a spell that snapped, of an inward strength that stirred,

Of a Presence that filled that place; and it shone, and I knew my soul.

And the dream I had called my life was a garment about my feet,

For the web of the years was rent with the throe of a yearning strong,

With a sweep as of winds in heaven, with a rush as of flames that meet,

The Flesh and the Spirit clasped; and I cried, “Was I dead so long?”

I had glimpse of the Secret, flashed through the symbol obscure and mean,

And I felt as a fire what erst I repeated with lips of clay;

And I knew for the things eternal the things eye hath not seen;

Yea, the heavens and the earth shall pass, but they never shall pass away.2 [Note: Helen Gray Cone.]

I

The Preparation

1. It is worth our while in the first place to inquire into the events which led up to the change. For it is evident that it was sudden only in its climax, as we may gather even from the words “it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks” (Acts 9:5). This inference is borne out by the altogether excessive zeal of the voluntary inquisitor. When we think what humble folk these early Christians were—slaves, women who earned their livelihood by trade, odds and ends of the below-stairs life of the great Empire—and when we remember how Saul rushed from house to house after them, and how everything was at its harshest and most violent, we can see the unnaturalness of it all. No one likes this sort of work for its own sake, and this fiery crusade, self-imposed, is certainly suspicious.

Who lights the faggot?

Not the full faith; no, but the lurking doubt.

On the other hand, we know from himself that he had already been arrested by the discovery of the sinfulness of coveting, and the inward nature of morality. Pharisaic Judaism could do nothing to help him in that, but it was a first principle of Jesus’ teaching. And there was much else in the new faith that must have strongly attracted him. The character of Jesus, and of His followers, was after all inexplicably beautiful, whatever one might think about their principles. Those women with the Madonna-like faces, those young men whose eyes were full of spiritual light—undoubtedly they had some secret of gladness and serenity hidden from the ancient world. Thus he was already more or less consciously dissatisfied with Judaism and tempted towards Christianity.

Yet such a change meant too much for him to make it possible that he should lightly capitulate. On the one hand, it was unthinkable to his proud spirit that simple people like the Christians had been right, while he and all thinkers whom he respected had been wrong. And then, if by any chance it should be true, the ghastly alternative was that he and his friends had seen their own Messiah, and crucified Him. No wonder that he felt “the anguish of a constant misgiving.” It was the clash of two consciences within him. It was impossible to go on for long with this hunting of such small and defenceless game without a pang; and yet a sorer pang threatened him if for a moment he admitted the possibility of his nation’s crime, and the falsehood of her fixed convictions.

It was characteristic of the man to seek to settle the conflict by a blind and furious dash for one side. But the journey gave him much enforced leisure when he was not in a mood that could bear to be still. Whatever route he chose, he could not escape daily memories of Jesus and His doings. He was no longer backed by public opinion, and the solitary ride only gave freer course to his uncertain thoughts. By the time he had drawn near to Damascus, he must have been growing feverish. No Eastern travels at high noon except upon compulsion. Then in the still hot air, while the merciless sun beat on him and his unwilling and sullen companions, the city burst upon his view.

2. “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” In our land we rarely see oxen yoked to the plough. Obedient horses do that work in our fields. But in the lands of the Bible, oxen were employed in the task, and they did not take kindly to it until they were broken in. They were often in rebellious mood, and flung their heels back in angry protest against the beam or shaft of the ploughshare. They stood and kicked instead of moving on. To stop this a somewhat cruel device was used. The beam was faced with small, sharp iron spikes, and when those rebellious limbs of theirs were flung furiously back it was only to have them pricked and sorely wounded. The most stubborn oxen speedily got tired of that self-inflicted torture; settled down to the yoke and the labour, and submissively went whither the ploughman drove. It is a curious figure to apply to a man, but distinctly forcible; and this was the figure which our glorified Lord used to that haughty and headstrong man, Saul of Tarsus. Here he was, entrusted with a most important mission, armed with letters and credentials from the most imposing authorities in his nation, lifted up with the intoxication of rage and assurance, resolved to destroy at a blow this new pernicious sect of Christians which had sprung up, and doubtless expecting to win great glory in doing it. And Christ appeared and knocked down his pride with this little word: told him that he was like one of those stupid oxen which, in refusing to do what they were ordered to do, only inflicted suffering upon themselves. Now, how did the figure apply to him? What was the resemblance between this man, driving forward on his mission of persecution, and the ox refusing to be driven, and wounding himself in sheer wrath and obstinacy? Saul understood it quickly. It meant that God had laid hold of him and yoked him to higher service, and that all this furious zeal against Jesus and the saints was just an effort to escape the yoke, to resist the power that was driving him, an effort which was bound to fail, for like the oxen he was bound to go submissively when he had abandoned kicking against the pricks. Yes, he was already yoked. A Master’s hand was upon him, and he was trying to fling it off and could not.

3. It has been said that the martyrdom of Stephen converted Saul. That is overstating it; but the blood-drops of that sufferer were the seed-grain of Saul’s changed life. He had heard the courageous testimony, watched and seen the face which in its dying agony was as the face of an angel; seen with what absolute fearlessness a Christian could suffer and die. It had preached to him through his obstinately closed ears; it had pricked his heart and left a sense of pain. He had crushed it down many a time, but it rose again. It was like a fire that still burned and would not be quenched. It grew fiercer, indeed, the more he tried to quench it. He fanned his hatred against the Christian sect; he followed them, hunted them, laid fierce hands upon them, dragged them off to prison, got them scourged and stoned and slain. What of that? It only brought him face to face with them. Through every one of them Christ spoke and pleaded. He saw their patient heroism, serenity in suffering, cheerfulness in dying. He could not help asking himself the secret of it. What was it that nerved and inspired these men? There was something here which he had never found in his own orthodox Pharisaism, and what was it? Could Christ be true? Was the Nazarene, indeed, the Son of God? and in slaying these people was he murdering the saints of God? Such thoughts as these had searched the heart of Saul of Tarsus, and it was face to face with himself that he was prepared for the vision of the Son of God.

We can be born thus more than once; and each birth brings us a little nearer to our God. But most of us are content to wait till an event, charged with almost irresistible radiance, intrudes itself violently upon our darkness, and enlightens us, in our own despite. We await I know not what happy coincidence, when it may so come about that the eyes of our soul shall be open at the very moment that something extraordinary takes place. But in everything that happens there is light; and the greatness of the greatest men has but consisted in that they had trained their eyes to be open to every ray of this light.1 [Note: Maurice Maeterlinck.]

II

The Vision

1. We do not know the precise spot where the vision occurred, but tradition localizes it at Salahijeh, an outer spur of the Lebanon range, at the foot of huge limestone cliffs, where the traveller first catches sight of the boundless plain and the magnificent city of Damascus set in the midst of it. One moment the famished eye sees on every side nothing but the grey aridity of limestone rock, without a leaf to enliven it; and the next it gazes enraptured upon an ocean of infinitely varied foliage. For hours Saul had been passing through the dreariest mountain scenery, whose sterile crags, bleaching in the hot sunshine, fatigued body and mind; and now all at once there rushed upon his vision, prepared for it, as it were, by the obliteration of even the memory of any green thing, a scene so strangely fair that it seemed as if a new and radiant world had opened up before him—the world-old city of Damascus, embosomed in the brightest verdure and bloom, a pearl surrounded by emeralds, the “eye of all the East.” It pleases us to think that, with a poetic fitness, this was the place where Saul and his escort of soldiers were arrested by the supernatural vision.

2. The zealot of the Law, all the more a zealot because it can no longer satisfy him, is on his way to persecute the truth for which his soul is longing. There is something terrifying and terribly pathetic in the tumult of a soul which draws near the accomplishment of such an infamy, the infamy of a loyalty which is the supreme disloyalty. It was in the exhaustion of such a tumult that the lightning which rent the Syrian sky rent also once and for all the heart of St. Paul, and revealed to him the very face of the Saviour for whom he longed. It was through the thunder of the sudden midday storm that the authentic voice of Jesus reached him at last. How often he had heard it since that day of Stephen’s death, only to put it away from him as an impossible delusion. Now through the tumult without and within it strikes quite clear and definite. “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” That was the very question which had haunted him ever since, in an act of fierce determination, he had sought out the high priests and obtained their warrant and ridden immediately through the Damascus gate. And the whole drama of hesitation repeats itself again in a flash in his soul. “Who art thou, Lord?” “I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest!” “What wilt thou have me to do?” But at last there is peace, deliverance from the conflict of the past, an end to that stage of the conflict. The soul blinded with excess of light has found its true Master and yields itself henceforth to His direction.

3. Was Saul deceived? Was he the subject of hallucination? Was he so exhausted with the fatigues of the journey, which must have occupied five or six days, as to mistake the flaming of a torch, or the noontide splendour of an Oriental sun, for a supernatural revelation? A modern conclusion of a sceptical philosopher is that he was the subject of an epileptic fit! The suggestion is scarcely worthy of any serious notice. Those who suffer from this complaint are, for the time, unconscious, and on their recovery cannot recall anything that happened while the seizure lasted. Dazzled into blindness by the overpowering effulgence of the light, Saul of Tarsus continued in a state of misery for three days, but never lost consciousness, and could remember the minutest detail of what happened during those days of spiritual as well as physical darkness. Such a foolish hypothesis as the theory of epilepsy is an amusing specimen of the absurd lengths to which rationalistic speculation will go in its attempt to eliminate the supernatural dement from the Bible. It is impossible to account for this event satisfactorily without admitting it to be a miraculous manifestation.

What’s that which, ere I spake, was gone!

So joyful and intense a spark

That, whilst o’erhead the wonder shone,

The day, before but dull, grew dark?

I do not know; but this I know,

That, had the splendour lived a year,

The truth that I some heavenly show

Did see, could not be now more clear.

This know I too: might mortal breath

Express the passion then inspired,

Evil would die a natural death,

And nothing transient be desired:

And error from the soul would pass,

And leave the senses pure and strong

As sunbeams. But the best, alas,

Has neither memory nor tongue.1 [Note: Coventry Patmore.]

4. From the moment when Saul saw Jesus, his life became a transformed one. Such a transformation in itself bears witness to the reality of the heavenly vision, and all the more so because the struggle was not finished in that one stupendous moment. If the transformation had resulted from hallucination we might allow the possibility of the sudden change, but that the effect should be permanent and abiding, worked out with infinite patience in a life’s struggle, is incredible. We have only to read the seventh chapter of Romans to be convinced that St. Paul’s conquest which began at this moment was a real and abiding one.

5. There is yet another point. Here we have an illustration of the way in which the best and most can be made of a man. This man has no sooner been appealed to, no sooner has he seen that He whom he thought was an evil impostor is really the Lord of glory, he has no sooner recognized Jesus of Nazareth risen from the dead, and clothed in power and majesty, than he calls Him “Lord”; and the cry of the newly won life, of the newly subdued heart, is, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” And out from that as from a fountain comes the life of splendid devotion, of brave endurance, of glorious attempt, and even yet more glorious victory for the Lord Jesus. And is not St. Paul influencing the whole civilized world to-day?

Ofttimes when the days are bitter, and the pulse of life is low,

And the wheels of toil in their dusty course drive heavily and slow,

When the meaning of all is blurred, and the joy of seeking palls,

Ofttimes in my desert places a miracle befalls.

Is it a trick o’ the blood, a clearing dot in the brain?

Sudden the far-off shower unguessed has filled the choking stream;

Some rift in the grey horizon let through a crimson beam.

Once more for me the sky is blue; I quaff the wine of the air,

And taste the fierce tang of the sea, and find the wild rose fair;

Once more I walk the allotted round with unreluctant feet,

And daily bread has savour, and love and labour are sweet.

Oh, once in centuries olden, before Damascus Gate,

Journeyed one with holden eyes and a dreary heart of hate;

When a glory shone round about him, and in one wondrous hour

He had passed from death to life. Then knowledge and grace and power

And a new word filled his lips; and joy and courage and love

Were born henceforth in his heart, with the vision that fell from above.

And still, when the days are bitter, and life is clogged with care,

And the heart is salt with unshed tears and tender with despair,

An angel stirs the stagnant soul, and lo! there is healing there.

Once more my song is loosened, and the life and labour sweet;

Once more in the tangled weft the pattern shines complete;

And I know that the self-same grace on my soul has been outpoured.

My spirit, by Damascus Gate, has heard the voice of her Lord.

III

The Voice

“And he fell upon the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?”

1. The vision was accompanied by a voice. There is an apparent strangeness in the account which is given by himself, and by St. Luke, of the facts of St. Paul’s conversion. That strangeness, that startling simplicity and plainness, carries with it the evidence of its own truthfulness. The temptation to a dishonest, or even to a weak nature, would have been to raise all the circumstances of such a change to the height of what would seem to men stately, Divine, terrible. All familiar speech, all that drew its birth from the common experience of mankind, would have been carefully excluded. The tongue of men and of angels would have seemed too feeble for so high a theme. There would have been an attempt to soar “into the third heaven,” and to speak the words which it is not “lawful for a man to utter.” St. Paul’s language is, we know, very different. He uses here, as always, “great plainness of speech.” He tells us, indeed, of “the glory above the brightness of the sun” which shone round about him; tells us how in that brightness he saw a form which others did not see, and heard words which they did not hear, although the voice of Him that spake filled them with strange fears; and then we come to that Divine message from the Lord of glory to the soul of His servant, and we find it simply this, “I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”

2. The words came with a startling abruptness; they were themselves plain and familiar. The young Jew of Tarsus might have read them in Greek books, or heard the proverb quoted a hundred times among his Hebrew friends. They belonged to the widespread treasure of similitudes and proverbs drawn from the simplest forms of man’s life and work; and, as such, were not confined to any race or country. Those words St. Paul had probably had often in his thoughts, or on his lips. Never before, we may be sure, had they come to him as they came now; never before had he applied them to himself, and seen what they had to tell him of God’s dealings with him. We may be sure that they were the very words he needed; that none which we should have thought loftier and more solemn could have done their work so effectually. What an entirely new light those words would throw on the zeal and vehemence in which the persecutor had gloried; how utterly they would reverse the judgments which he had passed on them! They revealed to him that he, the pride of the schools of Jerusalem, the rigid and scrupulous Pharisee, was, like the brute beast in that proverbial speech, struggling against the guidance of one mightier and wiser than himself, and by that resistance bringing upon himself nothing but an increase of pain and confusion. He was himself “kicking against the pricks.” In his blindness and ignorance he did not, or would not, see the first promptings of the Almighty hand that marked out his true path for him. There had already been, as the words imply, signs and tokens of the will of God, goads that entered deep into his soul, and brought with them pain and misery; but he went on in spite of these, crushing all feelings of pity, doubt, remorse, and steeling himself into what seemed to him a noble and heroic hardness. These words bring before us a new phase in the mind of that persecutor.

3. It was a touching question to the infuriated man, whose great object was to obliterate every trace of the Christian religion and to harry and harass its adherents. It is not, “Why persecutest thou them?” but, “Why persecutest thou Me?” “God is angry with me,” said Luther one day to the good monk Staupitz. “No,” answered the venerable teacher, “you are angry with God.” Saul of Tarsus was mad as a demon with hatred to Christ. Christ was gentle and loving to him, and the expostulation was most pathetic. “Why persecutest thou Me?” Ineffably tender and close is the relationship between Him and all His disciples. Let the humblest member of His mystical body suffer, and at once the Head suffers, by the subtle yet potent influence of spiritual sympathy. He showed greater sensitiveness in regard to His mystical body than in regard to His physical body. He did not say anything like this to any of those who inflicted upon Him cruel and excruciating torture. He endured the pain and agony in the silence of patience. But when, after His ascension, His followers were being haled to prison, and condemned to undergo hardship and death for His sake, He said, “Why persecutest thou Me?”

Why persecutest thou Me? The enthroned Saviour is bound to every one of His subjects by ties of holy sympathy. Amid the glory of heaven He does not forget their needs.

He in the days of feeble flesh

Poured out His cries and tears;

And, though exalted, feels afresh

What every member bears.

Any act of kindness performed to His humblest follower is an act of kindness to Himself. “Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even the least, ye did it unto me.” Any act of cruelty to them is an act of cruelty to Him. “In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old.”1 [Note: E. Morgan.]

We have no tears Thou wilt not dry;

We have no wounds Thou wilt not heal;

No sorrows pierce our human hearts

That Thou, dear Saviour! dost not feel.

Thy pity, like the dew, distils;

And Thy compassion, like the light,

Our every morning overfills,

And crowns with stars our every night.

Let not the world’s rude conflict drown

The charmed music of Thy voice,

That calls the weary ones to rest

And bids all mourning souls rejoice.2 [Note: H. M. Kimball.]

Why Persecutest Thou Me?

Literature

Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, iv. 656.

Campbell (J. M.), Bible Questions, 93.

Greenhough (J. G.), The Mind of Christ in St. Paul, 250.

Kelman (J.), Ephemera Eternitatis, 27.

Lilley (A. L.), The Soul of St. Paul, 11.

Lock (W.), St. Paul the Master Builder.

Macmillan. (H.), Gleanings in Holy Fields, 101.

Matheson (G.), Spiritual Development of St. Paul, 45.

Morgan (E.), The Calls of God, 333.

Plumptre (E. H.), Theology and Life, 65.

Stanley (A. P.), Sermons in the East, 63.

Talmage (T. de Witt), Sermons, vi. 99.

Thorold (A. W.), Questions of Faith and Duty, 305.

Williams (H. C), Christ the Centre, 16.

Christian World Pulpit, liv. 22 (Gladstone).

Sermons for the People, 1st Ser., ii. 67 (Hutchings).