Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/483

 with the idea of his principles of rigid Judaism, and is rendered rather improbable by the great want of Grecian elegance and accuracy in his writings; which are so decidedly characterized by an unrhetorical style, and by irregular logic, that they never could have been the production of a scholar, in the most eminent philosophical institutions of Asia. But a mere birth and residence in such a city, and the incidental but constant familiarity with those so absorbed in these pursuits, as very many of his fellow-*citizens were, would have the unavoidable effect of familiarizing him also with the great subjects of conversation, and the grand objects of pursuit, so as ever after to prove an advantage to him in his intercourse with the refined and educated among the Greeks and Romans. The knowledge thus acquired, too, is ever found to be of the most readily available kind, always suggesting itself upon occasions when needed, according to the simple principle of association, and thus more easily applied to ordinary use than that which is more regularly attained, and is arranged in the mind only according to formal systems. Thus was it, with most evident wisdom, ordained by God, that in this great seat of heathen learning, that apostle should be born, who was to be the first messenger of grace to the Grecian world, and whose words of warning, even Rome should one day hear and believe.

HIS FAMILY AND BIRTH.

The parents of Saul were Jews, and his father at least, was of the tribe of Benjamin. In some of those numerous emigrations from Judea which took place either by compulsion or by the voluntary enterprise of the people, at various times after the Assyrian conquest, the ancestors of Saul had left their father-land, for the fertile plains of Cilicia, where, under the patronizing government of some of the Syro-Macedonian kings, they found a much more profitable home than in the comparatively uncommercial land of Israel. On some one of these occasions, probably during the emigration under Antiochus the Great, the ancestors of Saul had settled in Tarsus, and during the period intervening between this emigration and the birth of Saul, the family seems to have maintained or acquired a very respectable rank, and some property. From the distinct information which we have that Saul was a free-born Roman citizen, it is manifest that his parents must also have possessed that right; for it has already been abundantly shown that it was not common to the citizens of Tarsus, but must have been a peculiar privilege of his family. After the sub