II

He had preached for an hour—­longer, perhaps.  Alison could not have said how long.  She had lost all sense of time.

No sooner had the text been spoken, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God,” than she seemed to catch a fleeting glimpse of an hitherto unimagined Personality.  Hundreds of times she had heard those words, and they had been as meaningless to her as to Nicodemus.  But now—­now something was brought home to her of the magnificent certainty with which they must first have been spoken, of the tone and bearing and authority of him who had uttered them.  Was Christ like that?  And could it be a Truth, after all, a truth only to be grasped by one who had experienced it?

It was in vain that man had tried to evade this, the supreme revelation of Jesus Christ, had sought to substitute ceremonies and sacrifices for spiritual rebirth.  It was in vain that the Church herself had, from time to time, been inclined to compromise.  St. Paul, once the strict Pharisee who had laboured for the religion of works, himself had been reborn into the religion of the Spirit.  It was Paul who had liberated that message of rebirth, which the world has been so long in grasping, from the narrow bounds of Palestine and sent it ringing down the ages to the democracies of the twentieth century.

And even Paul, though not consciously inconsistent, could not rid himself completely of that ancient, automatic, conception of religion which the Master condemned, but had on occasions attempted fruitlessly to unite the new with the old.  And thus, for a long time, Christianity had been wrongly conceived as history, beginning with what to Paul and the Jews was an historical event, the allegory of the Garden of Eden, the fall of Adam, and ending with the Jewish conception of the Atonement.  This was a rationalistic and not a spiritual religion.

The miracle was not the vision, whatever its nature, which Saul beheld on the road to Damascus.  The miracle was the result of that vision, the man reborn.  Saul, the persecutor of Christians, become Paul, who spent the rest of his days, in spite of persecution and bodily infirmities, journeying tirelessly up and down the Roman Empire, preaching the risen Christ, and labouring more abundantly than they all!  There was no miracle in the New Testament more wonderful than this.

The risen Christ!  Let us not trouble ourselves about the psychological problems involved, problems which the first century interpreted in its own simple way.  Modern, science has taught us this much, at least, that we have by no means fathomed the limits even of a transcendent personality.  If proofs of the Resurrection and Ascension were demanded, let them be spiritual proofs, and there could be none more convincing than the life of the transformed Saul, who had given to the modern, western world the message of salvation . . . .