Hiram Parks Bell: St. Paul
The following is Chapter 27 from Hiram Parks Bell’s Men and Things, published 1907.
“The circumstances under which St. Paul makes his first appearance on the stage of history indicate the decided and important part he is destined to act in its drama. The Prince of Peace had announced, before the crucifixion, that His kingdom was not of this world; and that those whom He had selected to establish it should indeed drink the bitter cup that the world had pressed to His reluctant lips. The powers of earth and hell resisted, at the threshold, the establishment of His spiritual kingdom. Stephen was awarded the honor of wearing the first Christian martyr’s crown. At his execution, St. Paul, although a young man, was more than a disinterested spectator. He was not only a witness, but a party to the transaction. His presence on this occasion, the interest he took in it, his age considered, and the consequences likely to result from it, evince, at once, a decided character as well as an inclination to impress that character upon the history of his race by identifying himself prominently with its most important events. Nature was prodigal in the bestowing of her favors upon him. He possessed a mind of surpassing comprehension, clearness and power. His aspirations were elevated, his prejudices high, his impulses strong, his affections ardent, and his will invincible. He was by lineage a Jew, and by profession, a Pharisee. He was born and reared among the culminating splendors of the Augustan age---the most intellectual, perhaps, of the world, the present excepted. At Athens, Hesiod and Thucydides had written, Demosthenes and Pericles had spoken, Pindar and Homer had sung. The marble was breathing under the polishing touches of Phidias and Praxiteles. Apelles had mingled the light of immortality with the colors of his pencil, and the canvas blushed in the trophies of his genius.
“At Rome, great names illustrated the annals of painting and statuary, poetry and eloquence. Rome was the proud mistress of the world----there was none to dispute her empire or measure arms with her prowess. The wisdom of Gamaliel was the exponent of Rabbinical learning at Jerusalem. Mythology had enrolled her multitudinous divinities in the Pantheon, until every interest, secular and sacred, was under the protection of its peculiar deity. The greater portion of the intellect of this highly intellectual age was devoted to religion and the arts and sciences. The claims of rival systems of philosophy was the subject of constant disputation among the schoolmen. Vice and virtue, good and evil, the character and attributes of the human soul---all claimed their full share of consideration. In all these systems of philosophy, cultivated intellect was struggling with its own weakness; and the human soul was attesting its own immortality, and gasping for that light which divine revelation alone sheds upon its hope and destiny. The Gentiles were idolaters---were heathens. The Jews were the custodians of the Sacred Oracle of the true God, but had subordinated the mighty matters of the law---judgment and mercy---to the tithing of anise and mint; and had substituted for the doctrines of Revelation the commandments of men. St. Paul---equal to any and surpassed by none in his natural endowments, and these developed and embellished by every contribution that could be levied upon Roman, Grecian, Chaldean, and Hebrew literature---burned with restless ambition to win a name and the honors and emoluments which merit confers on position. Brought up at the feet of her mightiest master, he was profoundly learned and deeply skilled in the abstrusities of the Mosaic Law, both as it was truly written and as it was perverted by the traditions of the scribes and elders.
“Entering into the schemes and identifying himself with the fortunes of the Pharisees, he sought to distinguish himself in the effort to crush and strangle the infant Church. Hence, soon after the martyrdom of Stephen, he is found on his way to Damascus, breathing threatenings and slaughter, with a warrant from the High Priest, authorizing him to arrest and carry bound to Jerusalem any disciples of either sex that might be found in that city. On his way to accomplish this mission of persecution and blood, he was converted by a miracle. With characteristic promptitude he inquires, ‘Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?’ Notified that he was called to turn the Gentiles from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to the power of God---receiving the royal investiture---he rose, mailed from Heaven’s armory; and bounded into the arena of moral gladiatorship with the world, a true knight of the Cross, floating a flag and bearing a shield emblazoned with Jesus and the Resurrection. The wealth and power, passion and prejudice of the world, were in hostile array against the religion whose championship he assumed. Its founder, humanly speaking, was an obscure Galilean, who had been crucified for alleged sedition against the great and powerful government of Rome. Some of his few and scattered disciples had fallen victims to the malice of the Jews, while the remainder were fugitives from their cruelty.
“In addition to the opposition before him and the difficulties around him, he must encounter the odium that treason attaches to party. But Paul’s was not the spirit to flinch at difficulties, or quail at opposition. His was a spirit that panted for glorious strife and rejoiced in foemen worthy of his steel.
“His moral nature changed; his learning and great powers of logic and eloquence, sanctified by the power of the Holy Ghost; his whole conduct, brought under the disciplinary control of the gospel; his heart burning and melting with sympathy for his ruined race, and burdened with the value of immortal souls, and a commission bearing the signet of the King of Kings, he enters upon a glorious career of trial and triumph that presents him as the grandest character of all time and history.
“The idolatry of the Gentiles, taught in the schools, practiced in the temples, patronized by the multitudes, and protected by the State, was to be assailed on the one hand. On the other, degenerate Judaism, with its exclusive claims to divine favor, its boasted heraldry, its hereditary prejudices, its formulary of types and shadows, priests and blood, altar and victim---the fossil remains of an antiquated and exploded system---consecrated, however, by the hopes and faith of generation after generation, and hoary with the seal of ages, but perverted by apostates to the purposes of pride and partyism. The religion of Christianity was opposed to both of these, and proposed to recruit its army from them; hence its movements were aggressive and its object conquest. Vicissitude, temptation, trial, persecution, and suffering in all its forms were to be met and endured by those who embraced its faith, raised its standard and supported its cause. Paul was advised of all this. To use a favorite figure of his own, he knew he was to enter upon a ‘fight.’ But he was undismayed at the prospect before him. He was prepared for any and for every emergency. As might have been expected, from his first entrance upon his high embassy, he was assailed from every quarter, from Jewish synagogue and heathen temple, from fierce rabble and cruel power.
“Persecutions dogged his footsteps from city to city, from kingdom to kingdom, from country to country. Like a personified ubiquity, it met him at every step. It had gorged its hellish appetite with the blood of the incarnate Master, yet it panted with peculiar thirst for that of His greatest apostle. Bonds, imprisonments, stonings and scourgings were the responses he received for his messages of love and peace. Humanity weeps at his own simple recital of his sufferings. Nor did he ever repine at the probable honors he sacrificed as a Roman Proconsul or a member of the Sanhedrin, in embracing the religion of the despised Nazarene. He never complained at the hardness of his lot, the burden of his labors, the severity of his afflictions, the intensity of his sufferings. He never faltered in his purpose. If he exclaimed in reference to the magnitude of the duties before him, ‘who is sufficient for these things?’ the reply was, ‘I can do all things through Christ strengthening me.’ He conferred not with flesh and blood. In the midst of affliction, suffering, trial and persecution, he gloried in tribulation and felt, in response to a sublime faith, that ‘this light affliction, which was but for a moment, would work out for him a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.’ Greatness is developed either in doing or suffering. Paul displays it in both. These two grand achievements of virtue are exemplified in every act and circumstance of his Christian life. What a grand and glorious conception he had of the philosophy of the religion of Christ, when he exclaimed, ‘I take pleasure in persecution, in reproaches, in necessities, in distresses for Christ’s sake, for when I am weak, then I am strong.’ Adversity shows the moral manhood that is in us. It is not difficult to be great in prosperity, brave in the absence of the enemy, and fearless when we are out of danger. It is the fire that discovers the pure gold. If he had been a mere time-server, he would have cowered before the insane yell of the maddened devotees of Diana at Ephesus, the clamorous rabble at Jerusalem, and the infuriated mob at Thessalonica. But thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his mission and the importance of his message, he is, everywhere and under all circumstances, the same peerless herald of the Cross. He vindicates the claims of his Master to the Messiahship, from the authority of the prophets upon the steps of the castle at Jerusalem, to the confusion of the Jews, and in the judgment hall at Caesarea, to the astonishment of Festus. He proclaimed to the Areopagus in the midst of Mars’ Hill at Athens the unknown God whom the Athenians ignorantly worshipped. He stood in the shadow of the Pantheon, upon the scenes of the triumphs of Demosthenes; and with the arm of Hercules, hurled the thunderbolts of a greater than Jupiter against the idolatry of the Gentiles. And yet with the humility of a servant, he gathered sticks at Melita to warm his shipwrecked companions. He unrolled the flag of the Cross by the Fane of Venus at Corinth, totius Greciae lumen, among her thronging thousands, and yet he plied the lowly trade of the humble tent maker around the quiet fireside of Aquila and Priscilla. He could wish himself accursed for Christ for the salvation of the Jews, and yet he pronounced the bitter malison: ‘God shall smite thee, thou whited wall,’ upon Ananias, their high priest. He was not a whit behind the very chiefest of the apostles, and yet he was less than the least of the saints. He was the storm-god of the tempest, and the genius of the zephyrs. These antitheses were not antagonisms, were not contradictions, but the extremes of a perfect character, at once both unique and harmonious. They doubtless conspired to impress the multitude with widely different views respecting this remarkable man. Regarded as the tutelary divinity of eloquence at Lystra, he was denounced as a babbler at Athens. Supposed by the barbarians on the island to be a murderer, when the viper fastened its fangs in his hand, they thought him a god when he shook it unharmed into the fire.
“He was as abundant in labors as he was in suffering. His travels, sermons, debates, defenses, speeches, and writings are everlasting monuments of his labors. Every Sabbath bell proclaims, and every church spire attests throughout Christendom, the glorious results of his life and labors. We look through the dust and moss of 18 centuries and behold him in the closing scene of his life. The wisdom of the Senate had rejected the suggestion of Caesar to enroll the name of Jesus among the divinities of the Pantheon. Still the banner of the Cross floated by his eagles even in Rome. But its bravest knight, although a victor, was a captive. Contemplate him in this his last hour of conflict and triumph; in chains and in prison, condemned to die and awaiting the hour of his execution; sitting upon the straw of his dungeon, with the meager remnants of his stationery lying upon the stone, on which he had just written his last letter. There he sits, of diminutive stature and slightly deformed person, scarred with the terrible conflicts of life’s great battle; his brow calm, his countenance placid, the Christian’s deathless hope sparkling from his eye and the martyr’s smile of triumph playing upon his lips. He is uninterested in the high debates of the Senate, the inflammatory harangues of the forum, or the wild shouts of the populace as they welcome the returning victor, who bears to the feet of Caesar the crowns of subjugated kingdoms. He surveyed the present, forecast the future, and retrospected the past. In looking over the fields of his conflicts and triumphs, he beheld no trampled vineyards, no desolated gardens, no sacked cities, no burnt villages, no smouldering ruins nor blood-dyed battlefields. He heard no widow’s wail nor orphan’s cry, nor shriek of violated virtue. Oh! no, none of these for the weapons of his warfare were not carnal; but every field was strewn with the scattered wreck of decaying Judaism and piled with the ruins of the Empire of Sin. The dismantled fortress of Idolatry had disgorged its captive thousands, to breathe the air of truth with which Christ made them free indeed. Joy and peace, and hope, and light, and life and love were the monuments that marked the spots where his victories were won.
“He bequeathed to his race this magnificent autobiography, unapproached and unapproachable by anything in history, sacred or profane.
“‘For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the Righteous Judge, shall give me at that day.’
“The trial is past, the fight is ended, and the guerdon won.
“He sealed his discipleship with the blood of martyrdom, and dying, left a name that, like the gorgeous splendors of a summer’s sunset, pours upon the horizon of history a stream of posthumous glory, that makes the world radiant with the light of a deathless hero.”