As to the place of conversion, however, some light was afforded by the words “I turned back to Damascus,” shewing that he had been near Damascus when it happened. And the epistle to the Corinthians said that he had been let down in a basket from Damascus so as to escape the Jews. It appeared that he was persecuting the Christians up to the time of his conversion; that he was doing this in or near Damascus when he was converted; and that the Jews living in that city turned against him after his conversion, so that he had to escape from them. Hereupon I tried to imagine Paul the persecutor, in his course of “persecuting the church,” suddenly stopped by an apparition of Christ. In respect of his acts, Paul—though he could not possibly have been so cruel—might be compared to Nero, who also persecuted the Christians. But in respect of righteousness and truth and fervour, Paul was like Epictetus. Then I recalled the story recently told me by Scaurus, how he and his father had come suddenly upon the young Epictetus, in the Neronian gardens, staring upon the Christians in their torments, and how Scaurus had remarked upon the ineffaceableness of the impression produced on his own mind and (as he believed) on that of my future Teacher. That I could well understand. But Scaurus and Epictetus were merely passive spectators. Paul was a perpetrator. “How much deeper,” I said, “and all the more deep and terrible in proportion to his sense of justice and truth, must have been the impression on Paul’s mind, when he suddenly woke up to the fact that he had been persecuting the followers of Truth, the disciples of the Suffering Servant of God, predicted by the prophets!”