t, in dress, food, religion and
many other particulars remained a peculiar people. As a rule, indeed,
they were less rigid in their religious views and more tolerant of
foreign customs than those Jews who remained in Palestine. But Paul's
father was not one who had given way to laxity. He belonged to the
straitest sect of his religion. It is probable that he had not left
Palestine long before his son's birth, for Paul calls himself a Hebrew
of the Hebrews--a name which seems to have belonged only to the
Palestinian Jews and to those whose connection with Palestine had
continued very close.

Of his mother we hear absolutely nothing, but everything seems to
indicate that the home in which he was brought up was one of those out
of which nearly all eminent religious teachers have sprung--a home of
piety, of character, perhaps of somewhat stern principle, and of strong
attachment to the peculiarities of a religious people. He was imbued
with its spirit. Although he could not but receive innumerable and
imperishable impressions from the city he was born in, the land and the
city of his heart were Palestine and Jerusalem; and the heroes of his
young imagination were not Curtius and Horatius, Hercules and Achilles,
but Abraham and Joseph, Moses and David and Ezra. As he looked back on
the past, it was not over the confused annals of Cilicia that he cast
his eyes, but he gazed up the clear stream of Jewish history to its
sources in Ur of the Chaldees; and, when he thought of the future, the
vision which rose on him was the kingdom of the Messiah, enthroned in
Jerusalem and ruling the nations with a rod of iron.

18. The feeling of belonging to a spiritual aristocracy, elevated
above the majority of those among whom he lived, would be deepened in
him by what he saw of the religion of the surrounding population.
Tarsus was the center of a species of Baal-worship of an imposing but
unspeakably degrading character, and at certain seasons of the year it
was the scene of festivals, which were frequented by the whole
population of the neighboring regions, and were accompanied with orgies
of a degree of moral abominableness happily beyond the reach even of
our imaginations. Of course a boy could not see the depths of this
mystery of iniquity, but he could see enough to make him turn from
idolatry with the scorn peculiar to his nation, and to make him regard
the little synagogue where his family worshiped the Holy One of Isra