he sought opportunities of being alone. He parted from his converts as
a dying man, telling them that they would see his face no more. But,
when they entreated him to turn back and avoid the threatened danger,
he gently pushed aside their loving arms, and said, "What mean ye to
weep and to break my heart? for I am ready not to be bound only, but
also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus."

164. We do not know what business he had on hand which so peremptorily
demanded his presence in Jerusalem. He had to deliver up to the
apostles a collection on behalf of their poor saints, which he had been
exerting himself to gather in the Gentile churches; and it may have
been of importance that he should discharge this service in person. Or
he may have been solicitous to procure from the apostles a message for
his Gentile churches, giving an authoritative contradiction to the
insinuations of his enemies as to the unapostolic character of his
gospel. At all events there was some imperative call of duty summoning
him, and, in spite of the fear of death and the tears of friends, he
went forward to his fate.

165. Paul's Arrest.--It was the feast of Pentecost when he arrived in
the city of his fathers, and, as usual at such seasons, Jerusalem was
crowded with hundreds of thousands of pilgrim Jews from all parts of
the world. Among these there could not but be many who had seen him at
the work of evangelization in the cities of the heathen and come into
collision with him there. Their rage against him had been checked in
foreign lands by the interposition of Gentile authority; but might they
not, if they met with him in the Jewish capital, wreak on him their
vengeance with the support of the whole population?

166. This was actually the danger into which he fell. Certain Jews
from Ephesus, the principal scene of his labors during his third
journey, recognized him in the temple and, crying out that here was the
heretic who blasphemed the Jewish nation, law and temple, brought about
him in an instant a raging sea of fanaticism. It is a wonder he was
not torn limb from limb on the spot; but superstition prevented his
assailants from defiling with blood the court of the Jews, in which he
was caught, and, before they got him hustled into the court of the
Gentiles, where they would soon have despatched him, the Roman guard,
whose sentries were pacing the castle-ramparts which overlooked the
temple-courts, ru