had been scales'.  Something of the character of this apostle can be gleaned

from the following extract of an able writer:

`It was, throughout life, Paul's unhappy fate to kindle the most

virulent animosities, because, though conciliatory and courteous by

temperament, he yet carried into his arguments that intensity and

downrightness that awakens dormant opposition.  A languid

controversialist will always meet with a languid tolerance, but any

controversialist whose honest belief in his own doctrines makes him

terribly in earnest, may count on a life embittered by the anger of

those on whom he has forced the disagreeable task of reconsidering

their own assumptions ... .  Out of their own Scriptures, by their own

methods of exegesis, in their own style of dialectics, by the

interpretation of prophecies of which they did not dispute the

validity, he simply confounded them.  He could now apply the same

principles which in the mouth of Stephen he had found it impossible to

Most students of Scripture have at some time or other used Conybeare

and Howson's Life and Epistles of St. Paul.  In the introduction to Vol. I,

there occurs one of the longest sentences to be met with in ordinary

literature -- a sentence containing more than 500 words.

The introduction opens as follows:

`The purpose of this work is to give a living picture of St. Paul

himself, and of the circumstances by which he was surrounded'.

Later on in the introduction we read:

`We must listen to his words, if we would learn to know him ... In his

case it is not too much to say that his letters are himself -- a portrait

painted by his own hand, of which every feature may be `known and read of all

`Here we see that fearless independence with which he `withstood Peter

to the face' -- that impetuosity which breaks out in his apostrophe to the

`foolish Galatians' -- that earnest indignation which bids his converts

`beware of dogs', `beware of the concision' and pours itself forth in the

emphatic `God forbid' which meets every Antinomian suggestion -- that fervid

patriotism which makes him `wish that he were himself accursed from Christ

for his brethren, his kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites' --

that generosity which looked for no other reward than `to preach the Glad

Tidings of Christ without charge' and made him feel that he would rather `die

than that any man should make this glorying void' -- that dread of officious

interference which led him to shrink from `building on another man's

foundation' -- that delicacy which shows itself in his appeal to Philemon,

whom he might have commanded, `yet for love's sake rather beseeching him,

being such an one as Paul the aged, and now also a prisoner of Jesus Christ'

and which is even more striking in some of his farewell greetings as (for

instance) when he bids the Romans salute Rufus, and `his mother who also is

mine' -- that scrupulous fear of evil appearance which `would not eat any

man's bread for nought, but wrought with labour and travail night and day,