Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/507

 *ny of the vision, as already a friend of those companions of Jesus, whom he had lately persecuted. He put his hands on him, in the usual form of invoking a blessing on any one, and said, "Brother Saul! the Lord Jesus, who appeared to thee in the way, as thou camest, has sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with a holy spirit." And immediately there fell from the eyes of the blinded persecutor, something like scales, and he saw now, in bodily, real presence, him who had already been in form revealed to his spirit, in a vision. At the same moment, fell from his inward sense, the obscuring film of prejudice and bigotry. Renewed in mental vision, he saw with the clear eye of confiding faith and eternal hope, that Jesus, who in the full revelation of his vindictive majesty having dazzled and blinded him in his murderous career, now appeared to his purified sense, in the tempered rays and mild effulgence of redeeming grace. Changed too, in the whole frame of his mind, he felt no more the promptings of that dark spirit of cruelty, but, filled with a holy spirit, before unknown to him, he began a new existence, replete with the energies of a divine influence. No longer fasting in token of distress, he now ate, by way of thanksgiving for his joyful restoration, and was strengthened thereby for the great task which he had undertaken. He was now admitted to the fellowship of the disciples of Jesus, and remained many days among them as a brother, mingling in the most friendly intercourse with those very persons, against whom he came to wage exterminating ruin. Nor did he confine his actions in his new character to the privacies of Christian intercourse. Going immediately into the synagogues, he there publicly proclaimed his belief in Jesus Christ, and boldly maintained him to be the Son of God. Great was the amazement of all who heard him. The fame of Saul of Tarsus, as a ferocious and determined persecutor of all who professed the faith of Jesus, had already pervaded Palestine, and spread into Syria; and what did this strange display now mean? They saw him, whom they had thus known by his dreadful reputation as a hater and exterminator of the Nazarene doctrine, now preaching it in the schools of the Jewish law and the houses of worship for the adherents of Mosaic forms, and with great power persuading others to a similar renunciation of all opposition to the name of Jesus; and they said, "Is not this he who destroyed them that called on this name in Jerusalem, and came hither, with the very purpose of taking them bound, to the Sanhedrim, for