Acts viii. 3. But Saul laid waste the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison.
Acts ix. 1, 2. But Saul, yet breathing threatening and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, and asked of him letters to Damascus unto the synagogues, that if he found any that were of the Way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.
Acts xxii. 4. And I persecuted this Way unto the death, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women.
Acts xxvi. 10, 11. And this I also did in Jerusalem: and I both shut up many of the saints in prisons, having received authority from the chief priests; and when they were put to death, I gave my vote against them. And punishing them oftentimes in all the synagogues, I strove to make them blaspheme; and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even unto foreign cities.
Galatians i. 13. For ye have heard of my manner of life in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and made havock of it.
1. Timothy i. 13. Though I was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: howbeit I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.
Gal. i. 16, 17. Immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went away into Arabia.
Says Canon Farrar in his “Life and Work of St. Paul,” “It is difficult to conceive of any change more total, any rift of difference more deep, than that which separated Saul the persecutor from Paul the Apostle; and we are sure that—like Moses, like Elijah, like our Lord Himself, like almost every great soul in ancient or modern times to whom has been intrusted the task of swaying the destinies by moulding the convictions of mankind,—like Sakya Mouni, like Mahomet in the cave of Hira, like St. Francis of Assisi in his sickness, like Luther in the monastery of Erfurdt—he would need a quiet period in which to elaborate his thoughts, to still the tumult of his emotions, to commune in secrecy and in silence with his own soul.... Even on grounds of historic probability, it seems unlikely that Saul should at once have been able to substitute a propaganda for an inquisition.... And so Saul went to Arabia—a word which must, I think, be understood in its popular and primary sense to mean the Sinaitic peninsula.”
The Biblical narrative repeatedly confirms the supposition that Paul was, by nature and experience, subject to trances and visions, or, as translated into modern parlance, he was a “psychic.” It is evident that this, in legitimate form, is not inconsistent with Apostolic devotion and spiritual attainment.
The recorded experience of Swedenborg’s departure from the body during a trance, and witnessing a large fire in Stockholm, three hundred miles distant, may be mentioned as an illustration in this line, among thousands with which history abounds. While in Gottenburg on the 19th of June, 1759, he saw and described in detail the progress and final control of the conflagration, which was afterwards completely verified.