He believed, too, and he thought his books proved it, that he and others who were willing to work for it, could hurry up this great day and make it come sooner. This is the way you could do it. It couldn’t come until there were a great many persons who were good enough to start the new world and the perfect city. The king, Messiah, would not come until he could find a large number of people all ready for him and as near perfect as you could be. Now to be perfect you must keep all the law and do everything that God commanded in the Old Testament and in the traditions of the Rabbis. If you broke one single commandment, it was as bad as though you broke them all, for if you broke _one_, then you had not kept the whole law. Now my reader will see, I hope, what a hero this young Saul was. He had decided to be one of the men who would be ready for this mighty king and he was resolved to live the kind of life that would help bring him soon. He was going to live as though the perfect city had come already. He would not do one thing that would seem like disobeying God—even the littlest. Gamaliel had one student who was trying with all his might to be perfect, and that meant, to be a hero. V TENT-MAKING IN TARSUS Like winged birds, the time flew by, just as it does now for school-boys and school-girls and Saul’s years at the feet of Gamaliel were over. He had changed very much while he had been in Jerusalem. Soft hair was growing on his face now. His forehead was broader and fuller, but his shoulders were bowed over and he walked with a stoop because he had bent over his books so long and had taken very little exercise in these years of eager study. His hands were soft as a woman’s and he seemed thin and worn with the strain of his thoughts. But the same fire was in his dark eyes and the same fine beautiful light shone on his face. He wondered as he came up the river Cydnus from Messina to Tarsus (for he returned by sea), whether his mother would know him. The news had spread that the boat was coming and the whole family in the home at Tarsus were on the watch for the returning scholar. He did not have much time to wonder whether his mother would know him, for he soon felt her arms around his neck and he found himself once more in the dear home with everybody looking him over and asking him questions until he needed three or four tongues to answer them all. His mother did not like the stoop in his shoulders but everything else pleased her. The father was too proud of his splendid son and too much moved with joy to say much, though he had already given a brief prayer of thanksgiving to Jehovah for the safe return, and for the wonderful gift of such a man-child as this. Meantime a servant was killing the fattest of all the full-grown kids for the feast of joy which all the household joined in preparing, and the whole day was given up to rejoicing.