Story of the Life of St. Paul, the Apostle

https://archive.org/details/StoryOfTheLifeOfStPaul_201502/page/n15/mode/2up





To The Fathers Of The Sacred Heart For Foreign Missions, Who, Obeying Their Vocation, Are Devoting Their Lives To The Apostleship of Heathen People, This Story Of The Life Of The Great Apostle Of Nations Is Dedicated


Of all the Christians that have ever lived, there is, perhaps, not one whose life is invested with a greater interest than that of St. Paul the Apostle. A Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, of the strictest sect of the Pharisees, highly educated, and brought up under the eye of the chief doctor and teacher of that time, a man of position among the Jews, he must necessarily have been one of the most conspicuous of the early converts to Christianity; even had his conversion not been miraculous. But to us Gentile Christians, St. Paul, the Hebrew of the Hebrews, stands in a very special relation; for he, as the Apostle of the Gentiles, reminds us that we have a claim to the promises which God made to Abraham—promises which the parenthetical dispensation of the Law could in no way disannul. It is in his writings especially that we read of the liberty of Christians, and of the necessity, power, and abundance of the grace of God; of the personal relation to God in which all true religion consists; of conscience, which makes the just man a law to himself; and of a simple interior godliness which he speaks of as Christ being formed in us.

But while he insists on our spiritual freedom, he dwells no less strongly on our duties—on the sincere charity that we owe one to another; the care we should take to avoid scandal; the interior preparation with which we should approach the holy sacraments; and the truth and reality that should pervade our lives.