When the proper time had come Jesus met him on the road to Damascus with converting power, and all his superior education and endowments were thenceforth consecrated to the work of preaching the faith which once he destroyed, especially to the Gentile world.  But in this matter he felt and acted as a Jew.  He did not separate himself abruptly from his countrymen.  Cherishing towards them the tenderest affection, they were everywhere the first objects of his Christian effort.  Into whatever city he went, he first sought the Jewish synagogue, and there he “reasoned with them out of the Scriptures,” Acts 13:14; 14:1; 17:2, 10; 18:4; 19:8.  It was only when they persisted in opposing and blaspheming, that he desisted from further effort among them and turned to the Gentiles.  Acts 13:45-47; 18:6; 19:9.  Wherever he went he encountered the bitterest persecution on the part of his own countrymen, because of the prominence which he gave to the great evangelical principles above considered—­that men have justification not wholly or in part through the Mosaic law, but simply through faith in Christ, and that in him the distinction between Jews and Gentiles is abolished.  Even the believing Jews found it hard to apprehend these truths in their fullness.  In the narrowness of their Jewish prejudices they were anxious to impose on the Gentile converts the yoke of the Mosaic law.  This, Paul steadfastly resisted, and it is to his defence of Gentile liberty that we owe, in great measure, those masterly discussions on the ground of justification, and the unity of Jews and Gentiles in Christ, which are so prominent in his epistles.  Yet with his uncompromising firmness of principle he united remarkable flexibility in regard to the means of success.  To those who would impose circumcision on the Gentiles he “gave place by subjection, no, not for an hour.”  Gal. 2:5.  But where no great principle was concerned, he was willing to circumcise Timothy, out of regard to the feelings of the Jews; thus becoming, in his own words, “all things to all men.” 1 Cor. 9:22.

4.  The peculiar character of the apostle’s style is obvious to every reader.  It is in an eminent degree argumentative.  He “reasoned with them,” says Luke, “out of the Scriptures.”  These words describe accurately the character of both his epistles and his addresses to the Jews as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.  In addressing a Gentile audience at Athens, he still “reasoned with them;” but it was now from the inscription on one of their altars, from certain of their own poets, and from the manifestations in nature of God’s power and Godhead.  His reasoning takes occasionally the form of an argument within an argument.  He pauses by the way to expand some thought, and does not return again to complete in grammatical form the sentence which he had begun; so that his style sometimes becomes complex and obscure.  The versatility of the apostle’s mind, which made him equally at home in discussing