“Yes, my dear boy, it will often be very hard and you will have to give up some things you like to do. But if you keep the whole law of God and make yourself perfect and do everything God asks you to do in the holy law, all the people of our race forever will call you blessed, and you will be the hero of the tribe of Benjamin, and you will help to bring the Messiah for whom we long and pray, and Jehovah will give you eternal life in His kingdom.”
“Oh, Father, I don’t care how hard it is, I will do it. I will let my pet stork out of his cage, so that he can fly off with the other storks over the mountains. I will not do one single thing on the holy Sabbath that is wrong. I will not play by the river any more with little Gentile boys. I will learn every word of Moses’ law and say it all to mother when she puts me to bed. I will be ready to serve my race when God calls for some one to do the great deed, as David did in the book we read.”
His father patted his boy on the head and smiled, as they walked home along the banks of the rushing Cydnus and looked off at the sun-lit tops of the Taurus Mountains.
Little Saul had had ten birth-days and he had already caught the spirit of his race which was very strong in his father and mother who kept feeding him on the stories of the past and waking in him the desire to be the hero of his tribe. Tarsus, a beautiful city of the province of Cilicia, was his home. The city was twelve miles from the Mediterranean Sea and ships came up the river to the great wharves on either bank. Not far away to the south was the great island of Cyprus and through a pass in the Amanus Mountains a road went to Jerusalem and the land of his fathers. He had been often ill and weak during the ten years he had lived and often he had lain by the window and looked out on the world and wondered. More than once he had seen an army go marching up the street, carrying the Roman eagles and flashing Damascus blades in the sun. He wondered where they were going and what they would do with these terrible swords.
He had an older sister who was too old to play games with him, but she took him on walks by the river and like everybody else she told him Hebrew stories about the heroes he loved. She would picture to him often a city on a great hill, with valleys running round it, with a gorgeous temple in it, and she would say, “Some day you and I will go there to live and that will be our home and we shall be where we can see the temple of God every day!”
Saul’s father was proud of many things. He had married a wise and beautiful woman, of his own tribe, who made his home a very happy one. He was proud of his wife. He was proud of this strange boy who pondered and wondered and who promised to become some day a great Rabbi and leader. He was proud of his tribe and of his race. He was still more proud to be a Pharisee and to be classed among those who strictly kept the law and worshipped every least letter of it, and then he was proud that he was a Roman citizen. He had done some service to the empire and the great honour of being enrolled a citizen had been conferred upon him, so that little Saul had been born a Roman citizen and had received a double name, one for his home people—Saul, and one for Roman citizens to call him by, Paul, which meant, “the little one.”
This was the boy who talked with his father by the shore of the Cydnus, one evening about twenty years after Christ was born in Bethlehem.
II
HIS HEROES
Months passed by and the little boy of Tarsus grew stronger and more eager and earnest. His father had sailed from the port of Messina for Tyre and Ptolemais and Cæsarea, on his way to Jerusalem to keep the Passover in the Holy Land. Little Saul had begged to be taken with him that he might see the Temple and stand on the very ground over which the great heroes of his race had walked, but he was told that he must wait until he was a few years older and then he should go to Jerusalem to study with a great Rabbi who could answer all his questions. For a long time he had gazed at the sky where the sun had gone down over the Taurus. He was really not looking at anything—he was just gazing off into space and wondering. He wondered whether he would ever see the world beyond those mountains, the world he had heard men talk about, the world of Asia and Greece and Rome. Then he turned to look toward the dim, yet shimmering peaks in the East and he wondered whether he would some day climb those ranges and go through the pass into Syria and on into the land he loved best—the real world of his own race.
He had not yet read any of the stories of Greece. He had dimly heard of the Trojan war, but it was only a name of little meaning. Theseus and Jason and Achilles and Ulysses were not his heroes. They were never mentioned in his home, though he sometimes heard the boys in the street speak of them. His heroes had all lived over the other mountains. Their names he heard almost every day. They were household words. He sometimes made believe that he was David and he would run with a little hand sling and kill again the mighty Philistine giant that threatened his people. When he climbed a high hill-top he imagined himself Moses on Nebo, looking over Jordan on the wonderful land of promise, and every peak covered with a cloud that looked like smoke seemed to him once more Sinai, with the Lord above giving the law in the darkness and the thunder. He wished he could see the Seraphim as Isaiah did, with two wings over their faces, and two wings all the way down to their feet and two wings moving like a bird’s to carry them wherever the Lord willed them to go. And still more he wished that he could see that wonderful figure which Ezekiel saw by the river Chebar—a living creature with the face of a man, and a calf and a lion and an eagle, all woven in and out with wings and all full of eyes, flashing like lightning, whirling like wheels, and moving wherever the Spirit of God carried the strange living creature. He thrilled whenever he heard the story of Daniel and he wondered whether he himself would have dared to pray to Jehovah and go to the lions for it. He had seen a lion once who was being carried to Ephesus in a cage, to be let out in the amphitheatre. The lion roared and shook his cage and showed his terrible teeth. Then little Saul thought of calm, brave Daniel going down into a den full of beasts like that.