for the religion of works, himself had been reborn into
the religion of the Spirit. It was Paul who had liberated that message
of rebirth, which the world has been so long in grasping, from the
narrow bounds of Palestine and sent it ringing down the ages to the
democracies of the twentieth century.

And even Paul, though not consciously inconsistent, could not rid
himself completely of that ancient, automatic, conception of religion
which the Master condemned, but had on occasions attempted fruitlessly
to unite the new with the old. And thus, for a long time, Christianity
had been wrongly conceived as history, beginning with what to Paul and
the Jews was an historical event, the allegory of the Garden of
Eden, the fall of Adam, and ending with the Jewish conception of the
Atonement. This was a rationalistic and not a spiritual religion.

The miracle was not the vision, whatever its nature, which Saul beheld
on the road to Damascus. The miracle was the result of that vision, the
man reborn. Saul, the persecutor of Christians, become Paul, who spent
the rest of his days, in spite of persecution and bodily infirmities,
journeying tirelessly up and down the Roman Empire, preaching the
risen Christ, and labouring more abundantly than they all! There was no
miracle in the New Testament more wonderful than this.

The risen Christ! Let us not trouble ourselves about the psychological
problems involved, problems which the first century interpreted in its
own simple way. Modern, science has taught us this much, at least,
that we have by no means fathomed the limits even of a transcendent
personality. If proofs of the Resurrection and Ascension were demanded,
let them be spiritual proofs, and there could be none more convincing
than the life of the transformed Saul, who had given to the modern,
western world the message of salvation....

That afternoon, as Alison sat motionless on a distant hillside of the
Park, gazing across the tree-dotted, rolling country to the westward,
she recalled the breathless silence in the church when he had reached
this point and paused, looking down at the congregation. By the subtle
transmission of thought, of feeling which is characteristic at dramatic
moments of bodies of people, she knew that he had already contrived
to stir them to the quick. It was not so much that these opening words
might have been startling to the strictly orthodox, but the added fact
that Hodder had uttered them. The sen