Mars Hill, Athens 122 Ephesus 129 Temple of Diana 137 ST. PAUL THE HERO I THE BOY OF TEN YEARS “Father, who made the mountains that reach clear up into the sky over there where the sun goes down in the west?” “It was God, my dear little boy. Don’t you remember the psalm we read in the synagogue last week: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord who made the heavens and the earth’? God made the Taurus Mountains on the west of our dear city and He made those peaks of the Amanus you see off there in the East, over which the storks fly in the autumn, and He made this wonderful river, the Cydnus, which dashes through the cleft in the mountains and makes those great waterfalls which you love and which rushes headlong through the city on its way to the blue sea.” “Well, Father, He must be wonderful if He did that! But I don’t see how He ever could spread out this great blue tent of a sky over all these fields and over all the city and over both the mountain ranges and as far as men have ever been. All the way to holy Jerusalem it goes—and farther, to Alexandria where the man lives, who wrote the book you read to me yesterday. Is there any end to that tent and what is it made of? Nobody in all our province of Cilicia can weave tent-cloth like that!” “No, my son, nobody has ever found an end to the tent of the sky. It covers the whole world. It is harder to get to the end of it than it is to go to the end of the rainbow, which you tried to find a few days ago. But, my dear boy, God has made something more wonderful than the mountains, more wonderful than the river, more wonderful even than the blue canopy of the sky, that covers the world.” [Illustration: FALLS OF THE CYDNUS] “What can it be, Father, that is more wonderful than these things? Do you mean the sea, which you sail over when you go as a pilgrim to holy Jerusalem, to the passover?” “No, not the sea, though that _is_ wonderful and dreadful. I mean the law which God wrote with His own finger and gave to our great prophet Moses. That is God’s greatest gift to our race. I want my little boy to love the beauty of the mountains and the river and the sky and the sea. But beyond all things, I want him to love the holy law of God, to learn it by heart, to keep every word of it and to grow up and be one of Jehovah’s own men. My boy comes of the tribe of Benjamin, the favourite of all the sons of our father Jacob, and some day this little boy may become the leader and deliverer of God’s longsuffering people. Will little Saul promise to be Jehovah’s man, and will he always love and keep the whole law which our God gave to Moses?” “Will it be very hard to do, Father, and must I give up all the things I like to do?”