Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/498

 The distance from Jerusalem to this great Syrian city, can not be less than 250 or 300 miles, and the journey must therefore have occupied as many as ten or twelve days, according to the usual rate of traveling in those countries. On this long journey therefore, Saul had much season for reflection. There were indeed several persons in his company, but probably they were only persons of an inferior order, and merely the attendants necessary for his safety and speed in traveling. Among these therefore, he would not be likely to find any person with whom he could maintain any sympathy which could enable them to hold much conversation together, and he must therefore have been left through most of the time to the solitary enjoyment of his own thoughts. In the midst of the peculiar fatigues of an eastern journey, he must have had many seasons of bodily exhaustion and consequent mental depression, when the fire of his unholy and exterminating zeal would grow languid, and the painful doubts which always come in at such dark seasons, to chill the hopes of every great mind,—no matter what may be the character of the enterprise,—must have had the occasional effect of exciting repentant feelings in him. Why had he left the high and sacred pursuits of a literary and religious life, in the refined capital of Judaism, to endure the fatigues of a long journey over rugged mountains and sandy deserts, through rivers and under a burning sun, to a distant city, in a strange land, among those who were perfect strangers to him? It was for the sole object of carrying misery and anguish among those whose only crime was the belief of a doctrine which he hated, because it warred against that solemn system of forms and traditions to which he so zealously clung, with all the energy that early and inbred prejudice could inspire. But in these seasons of weariness and depression, would now occasionally arise some chilling doubt about the certain rectitude of the stern course which he had been pursuing, in a heat that seldom allowed him time for reflection on its possible character and tendency. Might not that faith against which he was warring with such devotedness, be true?—that faith which, amid blood and dying agonies, the martyr Stephen had witnessed with his very last breath? At these times of doubt and despondency would perhaps arise the remembrance of that horrible scene, when he had set by, a calm spectator, drinking in with delight the agonies of the martyr, and learning from the ferocity of the murderers, new lessons of cruelty. to be put in practice against others who should thus adhere to