the way of salvation,--sadder still to see him blindly prejudiced against it; but the saddest, most ignoble, and most hopeless of all conditions, is to be indifferent to it. St. Paul was another type of man. He was an earnest one. He believed the Jewish religion to be the true and only true one, and therefore he loved it with all his soul, and was zealous for it. When the scales fell from his eyes, and the Christian faith was revealed to him in all its truth and beauty, he embraced it, and clung to it, and abandoned himself to it, with all the energies of that same earnest soul. {14} Had he been a "liberal" Jew, we should have far more reason to wonder at his conversion; it is still less probable that God would have selected him for the Apostle of the Gentiles. An earnest lover of truth, even before his conversion, it followed as a natural consequence, that St. Paul hated error; and for this reason he opposed the Christian religion with all his might, and with his whole soul, because he believed it to be false and dangerous. "_You have heard_," said he, writing to the Christians of Galatia, "_of my conversation in time past in the Jews religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the Church of God, and laid it waste._" But he tells us elsewhere: "_I obtained mercy of God, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief_." In the same proportion that the earnest man loves what is good and true, he hates what is false and evil, or what he thinks so, and opposes it too. St. Paul opposed the Christian faith with all his power, because he believed it to be false. He was wrong there: it was an error of judgment. {15} He persecuted it too violently, "beyond measure," forgetting the rules of charity. There he was wrong again; it was an error of the heart. But in all this he was in earnest, hating false doctrine; and there he was right. I do not sympathize with his delusion, but I love him for his earnestness.