I began to read on, but soon desisted. The words that followed took no hold of my mind. I tried, and tried again, but was irresistibly dragged back to “resurrection of the dead,” and “power,” and “spirit of holiness,” and “defined”—especially to “resurrection.” What kind of “resurrection”? During my childhood I had heard my father tell a story or legend how, just before the battle of Philippi, the spirit of the great Julius appeared to Brutus, saying “Thou shalt see me at Philippi.” There Brutus slew himself. And Scaurus had remarked that a similar fate had overtaken others of the conspirators; so that some might declare that Julius had power to rise from the grave and turn the swords of his assassins against themselves. That, if true, was an instance of the power of a man, or a man-god, rising from the dead in a spirit of vengeance. But Paul spoke of “resurrection of the dead,” and “power,” in connexion with a “spirit of holiness.” Paul (I knew that already from the epistles) had been an enemy of Christ, as Brutus had been of Cæsar. Comparing the two conquests, I asked whether more “power” might not be claimed for Christ’s “spirit of holiness” than for Cæsar’s spirit of vengeance. For Paul, instead of being killed by Christ, had been made a willing and profitable “slave.” Brutus had been forced to turn his sword against himself; Paul had been constrained by love to turn his new sword, “the sword of the spirit,” against the enemies of his new Master. What light did this passage throw on the causes of Paul’s conversion? I read it over again. Christ, he said, “came into being,” or was born, “of the seed of David according to the flesh.” Well, that might be one cause. A Jew would be more likely to accept as king a descendant of the house of David. And besides, Jews might think that such a birth fulfilled the prophecy above mentioned about “the root of Jesse.” But there might be many born “of the seed of David according to the flesh.” That which “defined” Christ to be “the Son of God” was “the resurrection of the dead”; and the “defining” was “in power” and “according to the spirit of holiness.” By these last words, Paul seemed to separate Christ’s resurrection from any such apparition as that of Julius, or other ghosts and phantasms; which may appear to this man or to that, and then vanish, either caused by evil magic, and doing an evil and magical work, or doing no work at all; whereas the rising again of Christ was caused by a holy power and resulted in a work of abiding power and “holiness.”