PAUL, ST., originally called Saul, the great Apostle of the Gentiles, born at Tarsus, in Cilicia, by birth a Jew and a Roman citizen; trained to severity by Gamaliel at Jerusalem in the Jewish faith, and for a time the bitter persecutor of the Christians, till, on his way to Damascus, in the prosecution of his hostile purposes, the overpowering conviction flashed upon him that he was fighting against the cause that, as a Jew, he should have embraced, and which he was at once smitten with zeal to further, as the one cause on which hinged the salvation, not of the Jews only, but of the whole world.  He did more for the extension, if not the exposition, of the Christian faith at its first promulgation than any of the Apostles, and perhaps all of them together, and it is questionable if but for him it would have become, as it has become, the professed religion of the most civilised section of the world.

PAUL I., Czar of Russia, son of the Empress Catharine II., and her successor in 1796; was a despotic and arbitrary ruler; fought with the allies against France, but entered into an alliance with Napoleon in 1799; was murdered by certain of his nobles as he was being forced to abdicate (1734-1801).

PAUL AND VIRGINIA, a celebrated novel by Saint-Pierre, written on the eve of the French Revolution, in which “there rises melodiously, as it were, the wail of a moribund world:  everywhere wholesome Nature in unequal conflict with diseased, perfidious art; cannot escape from it in the lowest hut, in the remotest island of the sea”; it records the fate of a child of nature corrupted by the false, artificial sentimentality that prevailed at the time among the upper classes of France.

PAUL SAMOSATA, so called as born at Samosata, on the Euphrates, a heresiarch who denied the doctrine of three persons in one God, was bishop of Antioch, under the sway of Zenobia, but deposed on her defeat by Aurelian in 272.

PAULDING, American writer, born in New York State; author of “History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan,” and the novels “The Dutchman’s Fireside” and “Westward Ho” (1779-1860).

PAULI, REINHOLD, German historian of England, born in Berlin; studied much in England, and became professor of History at Goettingen; wrote “Life of King Alfred,” “History of England from the Accession of Henry II. to the Death of Henry VII.,” “Pictures of Old England,” and “Simon de Montfort” (1823-1882).

PAULICIANS, a heretical sect founded by Constantine of Mananalis about A.D. 660 in Armenia, and persisting in spite of severe persecution, were transferred to Thrace in 970, where remnants were found as late as the 13th century; they held that an evil spirit was the creator and god of this world, and that God was the ruler of the next; they refused to ascribe divinity to Christ, to worship Mary, to reverence the cross, or observe the sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist; their name was derived from the special regard in which they held the writings of St. Paul, from which they professed to derive their tenets; they were charged with Manichaeism, but they indignantly repudiated the imputation.