equent 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 Jer