Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE SEEKER AETER GOD. CHAPTER VI. Saui- The Patriot. The Fight For The Law. The outlook on the universe which the youthful Saul inherited from his fathers, and learned from his teachers, has been presented to us. Even now, there are thousands of people who consider such an outlook the Christian one, who are unable to imagine for themselves any other setting for their Christian faith than the one which the old mythologies have woven around earth, heaven, good and evil, the present and the future. Yet this whole view of things is, after all, only setting, just like any other " views" from that time to our own: a setting for the real life, for inmost personal religion. How little this theology really has to do with the essential life of the spirit, is clear, when we consider that thousands of Paul's contemporaries had the same training, yet one alone, Saul of Tarsus, had his Damascus. Where are those others, the thousands? They lived and died happily, doing their daily work, pious Jews after the pattern of their fathers; many of them followed perchance in the footsteps of their great fellow-countryman, after he had shown the way. Why did Paul become a pioneer ? Why did not hissoul, too, remain on the beaten track that was traced for him by his origin and by his education ? It is certainly not ours to fathom the mystery that every new-born human soul brings with it. Yet if we know a man's outward environment and the leading traits of his nature, we may venture to penetrate a little further into the life of his soul, and none may gainsay when we refuse to stop short at the outward and visible life as it appears in the man's words. Those who pretend that the higher task of sympathising with and revealing the inner life is the poet's function, and that to meddle with such ...