And does not the condition of our own times increase and intensify the interest which must always attach to the life of this great Apostle? The wide-spread structure of mediaeval Christendom is broken up, and public opinion is no longer on the side of right because right is the Will of God. Nations frame laws and constitutions which recognise neither the Church, nor the God Who founded it. As it was in the days of St. Paul, so is it now: material prosperity, luxury, and pleasure, are the ends for which men live. The Church, now as then, is a private community of believers, depending, after the grace of God, on the good-will of its members individually, and on no authority derived from civil governments; indeed, there is hardly a nation upon earth in which the Church is even free, unless it be ignored. {11} Those that are without look upon it now with much the same feelings of fear, wonder, hatred, or contempt as men regarded it in the days of the Apostles. Many a Gallio lives now indifferent to all religions; many a Demetrius who judges of religion simply by the gain it brings to the craftsmen; many an Agrippa who is all but a Christian; many a polished Nero ready to persecute. Meanwhile, we that are within are cheered by the same hopes, and tried by many of the same temptations, as were the lot of the early Christians. {12} May the great Apostle of the Gentiles guide and help us in times which are growing more and more like to his own, and obtain by his prayers that Christ may live in us by grace, and truth, and peace. W. J. B. R. _January_, 1877. {13} Story Of The Life Of St. Paul, The Apostle. Chapter I. A year had scarcely passed after the death of Christ, when a young man of honourable birth and great learning visited the city of Jerusalem at the time of the religious festivals, and there discovered that people of every rank were being attracted to a new faith--the faith which Jesus had taught from His own lips while He dwelt on earth, and which His Apostles were now preaching in the midst of danger, difficulty, and unbelief. {14} Saul was filled with the fiercest indignation. His father was a Pharisee who had carefully trained his son in their strict and austere rules. From his earliest years he had been instructed in the laws and traditions of the Jews by Gamaliel, the most noted teacher of that day, and he had far excelled his companions in the acquirement of that knowledge which was so highly valued by the sect to which he belonged; and now, in his first anger and hot zeal, the young man believed it his duty and his glory to root out the Christian truth which _he_ deemed heresy, and to destroy all who avowed themselves followers of Jesus of Nazareth. {15}