The effect of what he wrote, at all events about Judaism, has been to inflict what Jews feel to be a cruel injustice on their religion. To Paul himself, I imagine, it can only have appeared to be the obvious and necessary statement of the result of his changed position in religion. He has left it on record that, through his conversion, he became a new man in Christ (2 Cor. v. 17). And one of the implications of that fact is that he should no longer be able accurately to reproduce in his mind what the "old man" had felt and thought and believed; he would retain only the distant memory of discarded things. If he wrote of the religion he had left, it would be, not of what once had been his, but of what he could only judge as an external thing, variously defective when seen in the light of his present religion. Beyond the fact, then, that by his own account Paul had been before his conversion a zealous and consistent Pharisee, we do not know what his earlier opinion had been upon any subject whatever. He does not become known to us until after his conversion; and the writings from which we gain the knowledge of him were not composed till twenty years or more had elapsed since that event. Of his conversion he says very little; not enough to enable us to understand precisely what took place. It may well be, indeed, that he himself could never have stated in words, at any time, precisely what took place, or what, if anything, led up to the change. This much, however, is beyond question, that as a result of his conversion Christ became to him the central element in his religion. All his spiritual life depended on Christ. All his thought was conditioned by his idea of Christ. All the energy of soul which was his to give for the fulfilling of his ministry he ascribed to the immediate personal influence of Christ upon him. Christ was the all and everything of his religious life; and the lines upon which his subsequent career was laid out, so that he became the Apostle of the Gentiles, were marked out by his conception of the relation in which he believed himself to stand towards Christ. In some marvellous way, it seemed that Christ had entered and taken possession of him; with the result that he became the Paul whom we know.