It had not occurred to me before, while I was reading what Flaccus’s letter said incidentally about the inclusion of the Acts of the Apostles in my parcel, that this book would probably give me Luke’s account of the conversion of the apostle Paul, which had been so much in my thoughts, in my conjectures, and even in my dreams. Now, therefore, although barely a dozen lines of Scaurus’s letter remained to read, I immediately put them aside and took up the Acts. Here I found that I had been wrong in most of my wild anticipations about the circumstances of Paul’s conversion; but I had been right in supposing that the conversion took place near Damascus, and that the utterance of Christ would contain the words, “I am Jesus.” Moreover the words, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” accorded (not indeed exactly but as to their general sense) with my dream about the Christian martyrs—how they looked at me, as though saying, Why didst thou rack me? Why didst thou torture me?; and how they blessed me, and looked up to heaven; and how they made me fear lest I, too, should be compelled to look up and see what they saw. Now therefore once more I was seized with a kind of fellow-feeling for Paul as he journeyed to Damascus. I began again to imagine his efforts to prevent himself from thinking of Stephen, and from seeing Stephen’s face looking up to heaven, and from hearing Stephen’s blessing. It seemed to me that I, too, should have rebelled as Paul rebelled at first, striving against my conscience, like the bullock that kicks against the goad. Then I asked, “Should I have done what Paul did afterwards? Should I, too, have been ‘overcome’ as Paul was, being brought under the yoke?” I thought I might have been.