The Youth

“Sweetly wild! sweetly wild!

Were the scenes that charm’d me when a child.

Rocks — grey rocks, with their tracery dark,

Leaping rills, like the diamond spark,

Torrent voices thundering by,

When the pride of the vernal floods swell’d high.

It was sweet to sit till the sun laid down
At the gate of the west nis golden crown.

Sweetly wild! sweetly wild! Were the scenes that charm’d me when a child.”

Mrs Sigourney.

row. look at the map of Asia,
you will see, to the north-west
& ‘. of Palestine, washed by the

blue waters of the Mediterranean, -the country of Asia Minor. In the south-east corner of it, running parallel with the coast, are the Alps of that region — the high mountain range of the Taurus. As the snow which covers their summits is melted by the sun’s heat, many rivulets flow down to water and refresh the thirsty plains below. A stream larger than the rest is seen to dash its way, first through the rocks and valleys of the upper regions, and then to wind its dark and sluggish*

* The name of the river now is “Kara Su,” or “Black water,” and it must have greatly changed its course, as it is now more than a mile from the modern Tarsoos. course through the rich level country bordering on the sea.

The name of the river is the Cydnus, and of the province Cilicia. You may try to form a picture to yourselves of the animated scenes on its banks at the time of which I am going to write. Women coming down to fetch water, with veils over their faces, and pitchers on their heads; shepherds playing on their reeds, with their flocks of goats and sheep browsing around them. Now and then, bands or caravans of merchants from distant parts, with camels bearing spices and wools, are glad to pause at mid-day, under the shade of the palm-trees which cast their beautiful reflection in the stream, and there get refreshment ere they pursue their journey.

Following this river in its course from the mountains, you come to the walls of the large town of Tarsus, which, at the same period, formed the capital or chief city of the country. It wras beautifully situated among luxuriant gardens; the houses wTere ranged in the form of a half-circle on either side of the river, giving it something of the shape of the wings of a bird. If you had gone inside its walls, you would have seen a great variety of faces and dress, and heard spoken many different languages. Sometimes you would meet wTith native Cilicians; at other times you could not mistake the features of Jews, or Greek merchants, or haughty Romans. Like the greater portion of the known world, Cilicia and Tarsus had fallen into the hands of the Emperor Csesar. Roman soldiers would be seen now and then pacing up and dowm its streets; Roman ships wrere sailing up the Cydnus into its harbour, and with Roman names and signs painted on them, filling its docks. It enjoyed privileges, however, peculiar to several Roman towns. It was one of those cities which was called Libera or free. It was ruled by its own magistrates, and had its own laws, just as is the case with some modern cities on the continent of Europe, such as Frankfort-on-the-Maine, Hamburg, Lubeck, Bremen, and others. These, for special reasons, while remaining under the protection of Prussia and Austria, have an independent government of their own, as Tarsus had under the broad shadow of imperial Rome.

In other and more important respects, Tarsus was “no mean city.” One of the three great universities, or seats of learning, in the world, at that time, was within its gates; those of Athens and Alexandria being the other two. Many of the young men trained at the Tarsus schools were found afterwards at Rome, tutors in the highest families of the state, and even in the palace of the emperor on the Palatine. Indeed, at this very time, a philosopher named Nestor, who had been tutor to Marcellus, the nephew of Augustus, was ruler of the city.

Along the banks of the Cydnus there was a lawn of grass, with shady trees similar to our modern parks. Aged philosophers and learned men, with their long beards, might be seen walking up and down engaged in deep thought or earnest discussion; while youths of the university, at their holiday hours, were busy practising those athletic games which were so famous among the Greeks. I daresay the young Tarsians would have among themselves their own trials of strength — running, leaping, wrestling, boxing. They would have their own mimic crowns of olive or laurel to put on the brow of youthful victors; and doubtless would often talk about the day when they would be able to go to Corinth, and take part in its well-known contests.’”

It was in a house in this Cilician city that “Saul of Tarsus” was born. People go to a great distance to visit the birthplaces of famous men. There are spots on the earth’s surface which will be ever memorable as being the scenes of the childhood of Cassar and Alexander, Luther and Melancthon, Howard and Wilberforce. We shall find afterwards, that the little reedthatched cottage, where Romulus the founder of Rome was born, was preserved sacred and untouched among the splendid palaces on the Palatine. What an interest must gather around the birthplace of one who, in the highest spiritual sense, was hero, scholar, philanthropist, all in one, — the greatest of those “great men” who have left their “footprints on the sands of time!”

I remember looking down several years ago in Switzerland on the little rill flowing out of that vast wall of ice, “the Rhone glacier.” What interest was connected with it as the commencement of that giant river which sweeps past the walls of Lyons and Avignon, and waters the most fertile provinces of France! From Tarsus and its snow-capped Taurus, we watch the first tiny rill of a more glorious river, “the streams whereof,” in every land and under every clime, have “made glad the city of God.”

I cannot tell you the exact year in which Saul’s birth took place. It was, however, at a most memorable era of the world’s history. When he was lying

* Sec Strabo, the geographer, who lived in the same age of which we write. — Bonk xiv., vol. ii. an infant in his cradle in Tarsus, there were other little children training up by God in other places for great duties and great services.* On the banks of a solitary lake in the land of Judea, there were a number of youths about that same time going out day after day with their fathers fishing in their boats, or helping them to mend their nets on the beach. These were afterwards to become the apostles of Christianity. There was a little child who was recently born in the old city of Hebron, a son of a priest, who was ere long to appear as a great preacher to prepare the way of the Lord, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand;” and more interesting and solemn still, while Saul lfas an infant boy at Tarsus, there was a wondrous Being in an infant’s form growing up at Nazareth, — it was the holy child Jesus, the promised Messiah! Little did the proud world know the worth that was contained in these two distant homes — two helpless children unknown to one another; but the one was the Son of the eternal God, the Redeemer of mankind; the other, His greatest minister and apostle. As regards even the political history of the world, the period of Saul’s birth was an eventful one. Augustus, the greatest of the Roman emperors, was on the throne of the Caesars; his vast dominion extended over a large portion of the human race; the wealth of his capital was unbounded; its temples were filled with the spoils of conquered nations; the ruins of vast buildings, aqueducts, arches, bridges, and harbours, remain to this day, to tell the grandeur of what was called by the poets “the golden age.” Alas! it was but a painted glory; like the whited sepulchres of the

* Howson and Conybeare, vol. i. p. 68.

prophets, “within was full of corruption and wickedness.” God seemed to read mankind a lesson what a poor world this would be, with all the power and wealth of Rome, and all the learning and wisdom of Greece, if it had not the gospel of Jesus to make men holy and happy. “The world by wisdom,” the boasted wisdom of this its greatest and wisest epoch, “knew not God;” the religion of Rome, such as it was, had become a mere form; the palaces of the nobles were filled with vice and crime; the simple morals of her common people were gone; and thousands of slaves from her conquered provinces were pining in the hardest drudgery. It was at this mournful period, when the grossest spiritual gloom had settled over the nations, that the great Sun of Righteousness, and His brightest attendant star, arose.

You would doubtless like to know all about Paul’s parents — what his father’s trade was, and whether he was a rich man or a poor man. We are not told. Most probably he was neither the one nor the other, but a respectable merchant or trader, engaged like other Jews in traffic with the cities on the coast of the Mediterranean. We may conclude, however, that he could not have’ been in straitened circumstances, from his being able to bestow on his son an education at Jerusalem. In this respect, young Saul was placed in a more favourable position than other three apostolic men who lived 1500 years after him, and who, both in their mission and character, most nearly resembled him of any since his time. We read that “the Reformer Zuingle issued from the cabin of a shepherd of the Alps; Melancthon, the theologian of the Reformation, from the shop of an armourer; and Luther from the hut of a poor miner.”“” This last (the great German Reformer) is perhaps the individual who, of all others, is most worthy to be placed side by side with the Apostle of the Gentiles, and Ave shall have more than once occasion to compare them together.

With regard to Saul’s father, we know, from the letters his son afterwards wrote, that he was very strict in his religion. Though he had changed his native country, he had not changed his creed. He still remained a strict Pharisee, and brought up his little boy as such. You know that the Pharisees were the most rigid of all the sects among the Jews. They wore long dresses, and used long prayers; they fasted, and made a great show about religion; they loved to be seen of men, and to get the praise of men more than the praise of God. Many of them, however, I believe, were good people — tried to be good and to do good, and brought up their children in the way of truth. I would be inclined to think that Saul’s father was of this number. He tells us afterwards that “he served God from his forefathers.1” This would seem to imply that not only his father but his grandfather, and farther back still, were strict Pharisees, serving the God of Israel in their synagogue, in the midst of that Gentile city. We are led to infer, too, that one of these ancestors of his had been a brave man, and was rewarded for his courage; for they had received in some way the honour of Roman citizens, which Paul himself inherited, and which we shall afterwards find proved on many occasions very serviceable to him. It has been a question with many how this citizenship was

* D’Aubigne’s Reformation, book ii. chap. i.

obtained.’ I have just told you that the great houses and palaces at Rome were supplied with numerous slaves, and these we know, moreover, were principally obtained from the coasts of Asia Minor. It is possible that Saul’s father or grandfather may have been in this way purchased, during their youth, by some Roman. Their master may further have taken a fancy to them, and as a reward, perhaps, of good conduct, have bestowed upon one or other their freedom. I by no means venture to say that this is the accurate explanation. I merely state it as one of the more likely of the suppositions which learned writers have made regarding the possession of this family privilege.

We have spoken of Saul’s father — who was his mother? Most children who, on growing up to manhood, have become good and great, have owed very much to their mothers. And it would have been interesting to know who Saul’s was. But there is -nothing in any place said about her. Perhaps she may have been taken early away from him, and he left in his infancy a motherless little orphan; or, perhaps the tears may have fallen fast from her eyes when she heard, in future years, that her son had deserted his sect and his creed, and become a disciple of Jesus; or who can tell (may we not speak of the barely possible hope?) that, before he became “Paul the aged,” he was allowed to sit by his mother’s dying pillow, and point her sinking eye to the “Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world?”

He had, at least, one sister.* We may picture to ourselves in thought the two little ones in their early years, seated on their father’s, or, it may be, their

* Acts xxiii. 16.

THE YOUTH. J I

mother’s knee, hearing from their lips about all the wondrous deeds of their ancestors. Sometimes their young minds would be turned to the story of Moses in the ark of bulrushes, and the awful plagues of Egypt; at other times, to the passage through the Red Sea, and how Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in its waves. At others, they would love to listen to the

tale of the wanderings of their fathers in the desert

the arrival in Canaan — and the glories of David and Solomon. We may imagine them hushed to sleep, night after night, with some of the sweet songs of Zion which the great Psalmist King had played upon his harp, or the poor captives had sung by the rivers of Baby] on. The Jews were strictly enjoined by Moses, in the 6th and 11th chapters of Deuteronomy, to teach their children the law of God. Five was the age when they generally began to read the law. We have every reason to think that Saul’s parents were not slow either in obeying the divine command, or following the usual practice of their countrymen, making their little boy “from a child to know the Holy Scriptures,’’ which were afterwards (in a way they never dreamt of) to “make him wise unto salvation.”

Our young readers, then, may imagine “little Saul” in his Hebrew home. Many a league separated him from the city of Jerusalem; but he was not the less brought up “an Hebrew of the Hebrews.” As was the custom with Jewish children, he had been “circumcised the eighth day” after his birth, and then received the name of Saul You will not wonder at this being a favourite name in the tribe of Benjamin, to which he belonged, when you remember that the first king whom the Jewish people chose was “Saul the Benjamite.” Some indeed have thought he was called “Saul,” because the Hebrew word for Saul literally means u the desired” or “prayed for” and that he was named so from being the first-born child of his parents, and given to them in answer to prayer.* Be this as it may, let us think of him in his infancy, a little boy playing, perhaps, as Timothy did, around the feet of another “grandmother Lois and mother Eunice,” and they delighting to watch the progress of his mind as his infant lips began the first attempts at speech. What did he speak 1 What was his language 1 We have reason to believe, from what is told us in the Acts of the Apostles, that he was taught to speak both in Greek and in Hebrew. The Greek was probably the tongue he was most in the habit of using. It was very much then what French is now, the language known more than any other among the nations of Europe. It is worth observing, that when at any time he refers in after life to the Old Testament, he quotes the Septuagint,+ or Greek version of it, and not the Hebrew. But at the same time, he was far from ignorant of Hebrew — the language of his fathers. Though Greek was chiefly spoken in Tarsus, the Jews there never forgot to teach their children their native tongue. They generally had many friends and kinsfolk in Palestino who came from time to time to visit them (Paul, for instance, had himself a nephew at Jerusalem J), and with these they could converse only in Hebrew.

It was the practice always among the Jews to in-

* Neander’s Planting oftlie Christian Church, p SO.

t This is the oldest translation of the Old Testament. It was so called from its having- been translated by 70 learned meu. I Acts xxiii. 10, struct their sons in early youth in some trade. This was not the case among the very poor only, but with those of a better class. It was a common proverb among them — “If a man does not teach his son a trade, he teaches him to steal;” and we know that several learned Rabbis, whose writings have come down to us, were brought up with the knowledge of some common business. “We have an instance of a great and eminent critic who was a carpenter, another an ironfounder, with many similar examples.“* The custom was a wise and prudent one. It was to prevent them ever falling into idleness, and to enable them, if they ever were in straits, to have the means of earning their bread. Saul’s father chose for him a very natural occupation. He taught him, or sent him to learn, to make “tents.” This would seem to have been a favourite trade in Cilicia; indeed the material of which these tents were made was called Cilicium, from the name of the province. The goat was an animal that was common there, as in many other parts of the East, and from its hair, which was long and beautiful, these tents were constructed. Occasionally it would seem that they were made of the hides as well as the hair; and hence an old father of the Church, in speaking of Saul’s occupation, calls him sometimes a tent-stitcher, and sometimes a worker in leather, t We shall, by and by, find how fortunate it was that the young Jew of Tarsus had thus early learned this useful trade. It relieved him, for many years of his after life, from a state of poverty and dependence. Many a midnight hour found him hard at work at his web of goats’ hair, for he “laboured night and day, that he might be

* Blunt’s Scrinons on St Paul. f See Olshausen on Acts.

chargeable to no man.“*” I may just add, that this hair-cloth, which was a thick stuff like felt, seems to have had the property, if not of keeping out wet, at all events of not rotting soon under the influence of damp or moisture. It served very much the purposes which our modern gutta percha and oilcloth do. It was employed in making coats and coverings for those who were much exposed to the variable weather in these mountain districts. Sailors used it, too, for bad weather at sea, and when we come, long after this, to describe Paul tossed for fourteen days and nights, amid black skies and rain-torrents, we may think of the sailors and crew around him, plying the pumps and reefing the sails with their Cilician haircoats on.

Very possibly this manufacture formed the greater part of the merchandise of his father in the market towns around; and it is striking to hear from travellers who have visited these countries in our own times, that at present, during harvest, the rich corn fields may be seen dotted with the very same goats’-hair tents, the peasants and reapers living in them till the harvest work is over.t

We may imagine, then, the young apostle, when he was the age of many of my readers, spending his happy boyhood in his Tarsus home. We are apt always to think of Paul as the grown-up man — an apostle — not perhaps advanced in life, but still with the marks of hard toil, and “the care of all the churches” on his furrowed brow; but we must remember he had once a boyhood like ourselves, his boyish amusements, and occupations, and pleasures.

* 1 Thcss. i. 9. f Beaufort’s Karamania, p. 263.

The youth of the Reformer Luther, which we have already spoken of in connexion with his, was formed amid much less beautiful scenery. The banks of the Wipper, and the plains of Mansfield in Saxony, were poor and tame compared with the snowy cliffs of the Taurus range, and the verdant banks of the Cydnus. Still more cheerless, in other respects, was the infancy of the young apostle of Germany. He tells us, that often he had to follow his father and mother to the forest to gather bundles of sticks, which they afterwards carried on their backs to the village and sold, to relieve them from their extreme poverty. Even at school he met with anything but kindness. His master beat him fifteen times successively in one day!

We are led to think of a sunnier morning of life in connexion with Saul. We love to follow him in thought in his boyish rambles amid the beautiful scenery in the midst of which his childhood was cast. We can imagine him gazing often and again on the noble hills which rose like wall above wall behind the city, their white tops sparkling in the rays of the sun. He and his sister would love to watch, from the flat roof of their house, the deep shadows chasing one another across the mountain sides, or, perhaps, on a longer holiday, they would go and climb part of their craggy slopes, and look down on the lovely plains beneath. Often, I daresay, they would like to wander up by the banks of the Cydnus, as you see them in the picture at the beginning of this chapter, to watch the leap of the waterfall a mile north from the town, which grew very large after the melting of the snows in the mountains.*

* “The extreme coldness of this celebrated river is said to have occa-We may think at other times of the Jewish boy, in company with his hardier playmates, going, on those greater holidays when all work in the city and schools was stopped, to the gymnasium to witness the runners and wrestlers in the athletic games. We cannot wonder if we should come afterwards, in reading some of Paul’s writings, to find these contests which his childhood had looked upon lingering in his memory. Or, to change the scene, we may imagine him, during the day, in some Jewish school near the Sanhedrim; the circle of black-eyed scholars, with their white cloaks, seated on the ground (as was the custom) round about their Jewish teacher, learning them to read and to write, and getting by heart portions of their sacred law.

We read of Martin Luther, when he was of a similar age, probably a little younger, that a young man of Mansfield, called Nicholas Emler, was in the habit of taking him to the house of George Emilius, and returned to fetch him thence. It would, in all likelihood, be the same with young Saul. A slave or servant would be employed to conduct him to school and wait to bring him safe home again; according to his own beautiful comparison, when he speaks, in one of his epistles, of “the law” being like “the slave who takes us to the school of Christ.”* Once more, we may picture him, at other times, perhaps at night, when the day’s duties were past, seated by a blazing fire at his father’s

sioned the death of Frederick Barbarossa, and to have proved neai-ly fatal to Alexander. We found the water undoubtedly cold, but not more so than that of the other rivers which carry down the melted snow of Mount Taurus, and we bathed hi it without feeling any pernicious effects.” — Beaufort, p. 266.

* Gal. iii. 24. See Conybeare and Howson, vol. i. p. 54. feet, giving his help to complete some goats’-hair tents they were wishful to have finished, either in good time for harvest, or in order that they might be able to leave as soon as possible, according to the universal custom, for their abode in the mountains, to escape the burning heat of the summer plains.

There would probably be several other schools in Tarsus, but they were Gentile ones. Saul would be brought up, not perhaps with a determined hatred to the youth attending these, as many young Israelites were, but at least with no friendly feeling. As it is with the Jews to this day all over the world, the children of Abraham would dwell in Tarsus “alone,” and not be “reckoned” among the rest of the citizens. The youngapostle would geb what other religious knowledge ho possessed from the reading of the law, Sabbath after Sabbath, in the synagogue; and with reference to his expectations regarding the Saviour promised to his fathers, he must have been taught, like others, to look for some great temporal sovereign who would drive the Romans out of Judea, and make it once more a glorious kingdom, as in the days of David and Solomon. Little did he think, at that very moment, the Messiah was toiling unknown and unnoticed as a carpenter in a workshop of Nazareth.