The Conversion of St. Paul.

JANUARY 25.

Whose is that sword-that voice and eye of flame-
That heart of inextinguishable ire ?

Who bears the dungeon keys, and bonds, and fire?
Along his dark and withering path he came-

Death in his looks, and terror in his name,
Tempting the might of Heaven's eternal Sire.

Lo! the Light shone !-the Sun's veiled beams expire—

A Saviour's self a Saviour's lips proclaim!

Whose is yon form, stretched on the earth's cold bed,
With smitten soul and tears of agony

Mourning the past? Bowed is the lofty head-
Rayless the orbs that flashed with victory.

Over the raging waves of human will

The Saviour's spirit walked-and all was still.

Thomas Roscoe.

IT has been the custom of the Church to celebrate the anniversaries of the Saints on the days on which they severally achieved, by martyrdom or otherwise, their Nativity into the glad world of Paradise. In the case of the great Apostle of the Gentiles, however, an exception has been made; and his Conversion is the surpassing fact in his history which it has seemed good to commemorate. For this exception three definite reasons are alleged by Durandus :-" (1) For the sake of the example of St. Paul's conversion; lest any sinner should despair of pardon, when, after such offences

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as those of which he had been guilty, St. Paul was chosen to be a vessel of mercy. (2) For the sake of giving expression to a special gladness; for as the Church suffered the greatest of grief in the season of his persecuting fury, so she had the utmost cause for joy in his conversion. (3) For the sake of the miracle which the Lord showed in him, seeing that from having been the most cruel of persecutors, St. Paul was made the most faithful of preachers."*

These points are substantially presented in the following poem by George Wither, in whose volume of "Hymns and Songs of the Church," it bears the title of the "Conversion of St. Paul."

A blest conversion and a strange

Was that when Saul a Paul became ;
And, Lord, for making such a change,
We praise and glorify Thy name;
For whilst he went from place to place
To persecute Thy truth and Thee,
And running to perdition was,

By powerful grace called back was he.
When from the truth we go astray,
Or wrong it through our pointed zeal,
Oh, come and stop us in the way,

And then Thy will to us reveal.
The brightness show us from above,
Which proves the sensual eyesight blind;
And from our eyes those scales remove
That hinder us Thy ways to find.

And as Thy blessed servant Paul,
When he a convert once became,
Exceeded Thy apostles all

In painful preaching of Thy name;
So grant that those who have in sin
Exceeded others heretofore,

The start of them in faith may win

Love, serve, and honour Thee the more.

*Rationale Divinorum Officiorum.

The conversion of St. Paul is believed to have taken place within the same ecclesiastical year as the Crucifixion of our Lord, and the stoning of Stephen, the Protomartyr ; but the institution of a day in its honour cannot be accurately traced further back than the time of Innocent III., who wished it to be made, what it had not yet become, a festival of universal obligation. The proof of this statement is easy and conclusive; for an Epistle of Innocent III., dated March, 1198, is yet extant, in which, addressing the Bishop of Worms, the Pontiff complains that "the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul was not celebrated in the diocese of Worms, although the anniversary of his Passion was there solemnly observed."* On vaguer evidence, Cardinal Baronius contends that the festival had been observed so early as the time of St. Augustine, and that after the ninth century it had gradually grown into disuse. But it is contrary to all we know of the vitality of festivals once established, to suppose that a commemoration of so illustrious a Christian teacher as St. Paul should ever have lapsed through the lukewarmness of Christendom to his memory. In the thirteenth century the festival was in a fair way to be generally observed, as appears from the twenty-first decree of the Council of Cognac (A.D. 1254); whilst in England its celebration had already been ordained in the eighth statute of the Council of Oxford, which met at the summons of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, A.D. 1222.

The fortunes of the day in our own calendar-together with those of the festival of St. Barnabas, the other extraordinary member of the Apostolic College-form the subject of a lengthy and interesting note in Wheatly, which is as follows:-"St. Paul and St. Barnabas were neither of them inserted in the table of holy-days prefixed to the calendar, till the Scotch Liturgy was compiled, from whence they were taken into our own at the last review; nor were

*Decretales: Lib. I; Epistola XLIV.

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they reckoned up among the days that were appointed by the Act, in the fifth and sixth year of King Edward VI., to be observed as holy-days; though it is there expressly enacted that no other day but what is therein mentioned shall be kept, or commanded to be kept, holy. However, the names of each of them were inserted in the calendar itself, and proper services were appointed for them in all the Common Prayer Books that have been since the Reformation. And in the first book of King Edward they are both red-letter holy-days: though in the second book (in which the other holy-days are also printed in red letters) the conversion of St. Paul is put down in black, and St. Barnabas is omitted. But this last seems to have been done through the carelessness of the printer, and not through design; proper second Lessons being added in the calendar against the day. The reason of their being left out of the table of holy-days was, because if they fell upon any week-day, they were not to be observed as days of obligation, or by ceasing from labour, nor to be bid in the church. Their proper offices might be used, so they were not used solemnly, nor by ringing to the same, after the manner used on high-holy-days. The reason why they were not high-holy-days, I suppose, was, because the Conversion of St. Paul did always, and St. Barnabas did often, fall in termtime; during which time and the time of harvest, i. e. from the first of July to the twenty-ninth of September, it was ordained in Convocation by the authority of King Henry VIII., in 1536, that no days should be observed as holy-days except the feast of the Apostles, of our Blessed Lady, and St. George, and such feasts as the King's judges did not use to sit in judgment in Westminster-hall. The days in the terms in which the judges did not use to sit were the feasts of the Ascension, of St. John the Baptist, of All Saints, and of the Purification. By the feasts of the Apostles, I suppose, the twelve only were meant; and therefore, St. Paul and St. Barnabas were excluded. But

as they are inserted now in the table of holy-days, which, with the whole Liturgy, is confirmed by the Act of Uniformity, they are both of them days of equal obligation with the rest."*

The book of the Acts of the Apostles enters so fully into the Christian activity of St. Paul, and he himself is so frequent in autobiographic passages throughout his various Epistles, that it is well to leave almost utterly untouched a life which is at once so accessible and so little susceptible of treatment at anything like a medium length.

After the events recorded in the inspired narrative, it is related that St. Paul, having been restored to liberty at the end of his two years' imprisonment at Rome, prepared for the execution, in its widest sense, of his commission as the Apostle of the Gentiles. Whither he at first directed his course, has not been made absolutely certain. During the interval of eight years which elapsed between his two appearances at Rome, he is said to have "extended his labours to the utmost bounds of the Western world," which would naturally include our own island. "There is very good and sufficient evidence, built on the testimony of ancient and credible writers, with a concurrent probability of circumstances, that there was a Christian Church planted in Britain during the Apostles' times. Eusebius, a learned and inquisitive person, affirms, in his third book of Evangelical Demonstration, that some of the Apostles preached the Gospel in the British Islands. Theodoret, another learned and judicious historian, expressly names the Britons among the nations converted by the Apostles; and says, in another place, that St. Paul brought salvation to the islands that lie in the ocean (Tom. i. in Psal. 116). St. Jerome testifies, that St. Paul, after his imprisonments, preached the Gospel in the Western parts (Hierom in Amos; c. 5); by which the British Islands were especially understood; as will appear by the following testimony of *Wheatly: Rational Introduction to the Book of Common Prayer.