We need not fear to admit that a very strong conviction may suffice to produce considerable results, even though the conviction may be based upon a falsehood; but we may well question whether all the results here manifested, combined, could have been produced by mere belief in the resurrection of a man whose resurrection was not a fact. What was there in this belief, supposing it to have been based upon a lie, which could have wrought so powerfully and so generally on the minds of men as it did? Could such a belief have made them morally new, have made them willing to encounter shame and contempt, and endowed them with powers which rendered them the objects of envy to their fellow-believers? If we think it could, we must still confess that a combination of circumstances like these, taken all together, is so exceptional as to be virtually without a parallel in the history of the world. There is, however, another point in the Epistles of St. Paul which deserves our notice when estimating their value as evidence, and that is the witness they afford us of his own altered feelings with regard to Christ. He speaks, in his letter to the Galatians, of having been formerly a devoted Jew, and having persecuted the Church of God and laid it waste.[138] If we had no other evidence than this, it would be sufficient. There is no reason to doubt what the Apostle says. He had been a bitter enemy of Christ. But there is no evidence whatever that while he was thus hostile to Christ he had ever believed His death and His resurrection to have been an unreality. Had he disbelieved in these events as facts, it is more than probable that some trace of such disbelief would have escaped him in his writings. But it is not so. The death of Christ was manifestly a notorious fact which neither he nor any one cared to deny. The resurrection of Christ, though perhaps received more questioningly, was nevertheless put by or explained away rather than actually denied. The tradition mentioned at the end of St. Matthew's Gospel, as commonly reported among the Jews,[139] is probably a fair sample of the indolent spirit in which the story of Christ's resurrection was met by them, and, perhaps, regarded by Saul of Tarsus. In his own case it was not so much that he disbelieved these things as facts, as that he was ignorant of their power. The death of Christ was no more to him than the death of any one else. The resurrection of Christ was to him nothing more than an idle Christian tale. He disregarded both rather because of the principles associated with them than because of their intrinsic falsehood. But the time came when it was otherwise. "It pleased God, who separated him from his mother's womb, and called him by His grace to reveal His Son in him."[140] He then found that the man whose death he had known as a fact, though not as a power, was intimately connected with himself, that he had a share in His death, and had been crucified with Him, and the resurrection,