The Life of St. Paul | Page 9

of taking up every subject--first displayed themselves in this
school, and excited, we may well believe, the warm interest of his
teacher.
26. He himself learned much here which was of great moment in his
subsequent career. Although he was to be specially the missionary of
the Gentiles, he was also a great missionary to his own people. In every

city he visited where there were Jews he made his first public
appearance in the synagogue. There his training as a rabbi secured him
an opportunity of speaking, and his familiarity with Jewish modes of
thought and reasoning enabled him to address his audiences in the way
best fitted to secure their attention. His knowledge of the Scriptures
enabled him to adduce proofs from an authority which his hearers
acknowledged to be supreme.
Besides, he was destined to be the great theologian of Christianity and
the principal writer of the New Testament. Now the New grew out of
the Old; the one is in all its parts the prophecy and the other the
fulfillment. But it required a mind saturated not only with Christianity,
but with the Old Testament, to bring this out; and, at the age when the
memory is most retentive, Paul acquired such a knowledge of the Old
Testament that everything it contains was at his command: its
phraseology became the language of his thinking; he literally writes in
quotations, and he quotes from all parts with equal facility--from the
Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. Thus was the warrior equipped with
the armor and the weapons of the Spirit before he knew in what cause
he was to use them.
27. His Religious Life.--Meantime what was his moral and religious
state? He was learning to be a religious teacher; was he himself
religious? Not all who are sent to college by their parents to prepare for
the sacred office are so, and in every city of the world the path of youth
is beset with temptations which may ruin life at its very beginning.
Some of the greatest teachers of the Church, such as St. Augustine,
have had to look back on half their life blotted and scarred with vice or
crime. No such fall defaced Paul's early years. Whatever struggles with
passion may have raged in his own breast, his conduct was always pure.
Jerusalem was no very favorable place, in that age, for virtue. It was the
Jerusalem against whose external sanctity, but internal depravity, our
Lord a few years afterward hurled such withering invectives; it was the
very seat of hypocrisy, where an able youth might easily have learned
how to win the rewards of religion, while escaping its burdens. But
Paul was preserved amidst these perils, and could afterward claim that
he had lived in Jerusalem from the first in all good conscience.

28. He had brought with him from home the conviction, which forms
the basis of a religious life, that the one prize which makes life worth
living is the love and favor of God. This conviction grew into a
passionate longing as he advanced in years, and he asked his teachers
how the prize was to be won. Their answer was ready--By the keeping
of the law. It was a terrible answer; for the Law meant not only what
we understand by the term, but also the ceremonial law of Moses and
the thousand and one rules added to it by the Jewish teachers, the
observance of which made life a purgatory to a tender conscience.
But Paul was not the man to shrink from difficulties. He had set his
heart upon winning God's favor, without which this life appeared to
him a blank and eternity the blackness of darkness; and, if this was the
way to the goal, he was willing to tread it. Not only, however, were his
personal hopes involved in this, the hopes of his nation depended on it
too; for it was the universal belief of his people that the Messiah would
only come to a nation keeping the law, and it was even said that, if one
man kept it perfectly for a single day, his merit would bring to the earth
the King for whom they were waiting. Paul's rabbinical training, then,
culminated in the desire to win this prize of righteousness, and he left
the halls of sacred learning with this as the purpose of his life. The
lonely student's resolution was momentous for the world; for he was
first to prove amidst secret agonies that this way of salvation was false,
and then to teach his discovery to mankind.
29. At Jerusalem.--We cannot tell in what year Paul's education at the
college of Jerusalem was finished or where he went immediately
afterward. The young rabbis, after completing their studies, scattered in
the