l for
the highest rabbinical talent to gravitate in those times to Jerusalem
as it is for the highest literary and commercial talent to gravitate in
our day to the metropolis. He arrived in the capital of Judaism very
soon after the death of Jesus; and we can easily imagine the
representations of that event and of the career thereby terminated
which he would receive from his Pharisaic friends.

We have no reason to suppose that as yet he had any doubts about his
own religion. We gather, indeed, from his writings that he had already
passed through severe mental conflicts. Although the conviction still
stood fast in his mind that the blessedness of life was attainable only
in the favor of God, yet his efforts to reach this coveted position by
the observance of the law had not satisfied him. On the contrary, the
more he strove to keep the law the more active became the motions of
sin within him; his conscience was becoming more oppressed with the
sense of guilt, and the peace of a soul at rest in God was a prize
which eluded his grasp.

Still he did not question the teaching of the synagogue. To him as yet
this was of one piece with the history of the Old Testament, whence
looked down on him the figures of the saints and prophets, which were a
guarantee that the system they represented must be divine, and behind
which he saw the God of Israel revealing himself in the giving of the
law. The reason why he had not attained to peace and fellowship with
God was, he believed, because he had not struggled enough with the evil
of his nature or honored enough the precepts of the law. Was there no
service by which he could make up for all deficiencies and win that
grace at last in which the great of old had stood? This was the temper
of mind in which he returned to Jerusalem, and learned with
astonishment and indignation of the rise of a sect which believed that
Jesus who had been crucified was the Messiah of the Jewish people.

31. State of the Christian Church.--Christianity was as yet only two
or three years old, and was growing very quietly in Jerusalem.
Although those who had heard it preached at Pentecost had carried the
news of it to their homes in many quarters, its public representatives
had not yet left the city of its birth. At first the authorities had
been inclined to persecute it, and checked its teachers when they
appeared in public. But they had changed their minds and, acting under
the advice of Gama