their bloody work was visible to them, he saw the eternal gates lifted up, and looked full on immortality.

Acts ix. 1-18, xxii. 6-16, xxvi. 12-18. We have here three different accounts given of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, one by Luke, and two by Paul himself. They are variant, but being compared, and all the facts brought together, their consistence is admirable and complete. The order of events is clearly this.

Damascus, a city of Syria, is about one hundred and thirty-six miles from Jerusalem, and by the ancient methods of travelling was about six days' journey. It is skirted on all sides by sandy plains, that burn and glister under an orient sun, but the city itself stands on a little oasis, watered by a single stream, that divides into many threads, which wind through the streets and fill it with the low murmurs of rills. It is the Syrian capital, is embowered in trees, and thus rises like a green islet out of the wide sea of scorching sand. It contained a Jewish synagogue, some of whose members had apostatized from the Jewish faith and become Christians.

Saul is a young man and a bigoted Jew, educated in the best Jewish school of theology, and learned in all its lore. He is fresh from his studies, and full of zeal and endowed with high

intellectual energies. He brings the case of the Syrian apostates before the Sanhedrim at Jerusalem, obtains from them letters of authority and an armed police, and starts for Damascus for the purpose of arresting the heretics, and probably putting them to death. He has come within sight of Damascus. It is high noon, and they can see the city away through the hot and stifling air, and they feel sure of their prey.

The noon is blazing down upon the Syrian plain, and we appreciate the force of the language when it is said that a brightness greater than that of a Syrian noon now surrounds the travellers and overpowers them. And please observe the difference in the impressions made on the minds of the company. They all witness a sudden and intolerable brightness. They all hear a sound, resembling probably that of thunder, rolling down out of a clear sky.* Damascus, the green oasis, suddenly disappears from their sight; they perceive only the blaze that involves them; they cannot bear it, and they fall prone. But one of the company perceives something more than a blaze of light, and hears something more than a rumbling sound. Within that blaze there is a person, and within that sound there are Hebrew words, and he hears his own name

* Compare with John xii. 29.

articulated aloud, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" "Who art thou, Lord?" "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. Rise and stand. Go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou shalt do." The light pales away and disappears; they rise and stand, but all is a blank now to Saul. He is blind. The intolerable blaze is followed by midnight blackness, but his attendants see again, and the green city looms up in the distance as before. They lead the blind and stricken man into it, and he now inspires pity rather than terror. They conduct him to the house of a friendly Jew, where he betakes himself to contrition and prayer. Though all is dark without, light begins to dawn from within. For, behold, as he is praying, a sweet and kindly face seen in vision melts through the gloom, until the form of a man stands before him and lays his hand upon him in blessing. knows not the benevolent face, but it is the presage of heavenly mercy. Three days pass away, and a footstep enters his apartment. A hand is laid upon his head, and a voice tells him to open his eyes. His eyes are opened, and lo! he looks up into the same face that came before him in vision. It is the face of Ananias, a converted Jew, one of those persons whom he came from Jerusalem to imprison and slay. He rises and is baptized into the faith he so lately hated and persecuted.

He

The word again rendered "vision" in the Scripture narrative of Saul's conversion is oπTaσía,

a word specially used to designate the sight of objects which are not within the sphere of the natural senses.

The Apocalypse. This is the only book of the New Testament which is prophetical throughout; that is, in which all the scenery is strictly and entirely extra-natural. The reader will note carefully the expression of the writer at the beginning, "I was in spirit," - Év πVEÚμATI, an expression specially appropriated to describe a change in the inner mind produced by quickening and elevating that sense which becomes cognizant of the objects of a higher sphere. It does not denote a sharpening of the natural sight to discern things more subtile or remote, but just the reverse. It denotes a closing up of the natural sight, and the opening of a new eye to a light that never strikes our fleshly eyeballs. From this state the prophet of Patmos gives us the vast and solemn panorama of what he

saw.

It comes not within our scope to expound the Apocalypse. Abstine manus, improbe,—Keep off profane hands. It has been constantly expounded as if it represented natural things by natural things, and, following this method, Dr. Cum

mings finds in these chapters cholera, potato-rot, influenzas, Napoleon Bonaparte, and so forth. Not till we purge ourselves of this vice in theologizing will the expositors be able to open the book and loose the seals thereof. What we here indicate is the fact of extra-natural scenery, spread out in such wise as to body forth a life so much more intense than aught we experience here, that even the prophet could not bear the sudden blazon, and fell as one dead under the too ardent effulgence. Let Lord Monboddo, and the scholiast of Cudworth, put their eye here for a moment where the prophet has so poised his telescope as to sweep the higher heavens and bring them near, and then let them say whether God is beholden to dull matter alone in the creation of worlds, and whether the phenomena of form, color, extension, distance, motion, may not be produced otherwise than under the combinations of natural law, and in a sunlight so much more warm and full, that the earth in comparison seems to suffer eclipse, and to hang like a corpse in the shadows.