Of that flourishing condition, Paul, under his original name of Saul, had all along been a witness. While carrying on against it that persecution, in which, if not the original instigator, he had been a most active instrument, persecuting, if he himself, in what he is made to say, in Acts xxii. 4, is to be believed,--"persecuting unto the death, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women;"--while thus occupied, he could not in the course of such his disastrous employment, have failed to obtain a considerable insight into the state of their worldly affairs. Samaria--the field of the exploits and renown of the great sorcerer Simon, distinguished in those times by the name of _Magus_--Samaria, the near neighbour and constant rival, not to say enemy, of Jerusalem;--is not more than about five and forty miles distant from it. To Paul's alert and busy mind,--the offer, made by the sorcerer, to purchase of the Apostles a share in the government of the church, could not have been a secret. At the hands of those rulers of the Christian Church, this offer had not found acceptance. Shares in the direction of their affairs were not, like those in the government of the British Empire in these our days, objects of sale. The nine rulers would not come into any such bargain; their disciples were not as cattle in their eyes: by those disciples themselves no such bargain would have been endured; they were not as cattle in their own eyes. But, though the bargain proposed by the sorcerer did not take place, this evidence, which the offer of it so clearly affords,--this evidence, of the value of a situation of that sort in a commercial point of view, could not naturally either have remained a secret to Paul, or failed to engage his attention, and present to his avidity and ambition a ground of speculation--an inviting field of enterprise. From the time when he took that leading part, in the condemnation and execution, of the too flamingly zealous manager, of the temporal concerns of the associated disciples of that disastrous orator, by whom the preaching and spiritual functions might, with so much happier an issue, have been left in the hands of the Apostles--from that time, down to that in which we find him, with letters in his pocket, from the rulers of the Jews in their own country, to the rulers of the same nation under the government of the neighbouring state of Damascus, he continued, according to the Acts ix. 1; "yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord." Of these letters, the object was--the employing the influence of the authorities from which they came, viz. the High Priest and the Elders, to the purpose of engaging those to whom they were addressed, to enable him to bring in bonds, to Jerusalem from Damascus, all such converts to the religion of Jesus, as should have been found in the place last mentioned.