Hearing this, they were no longer fearful, but welcomed Saul as one of their brethren, and gladly permitted him to share in their work, so that he at once began to labour for the conversion of the Grecian Jews in the city. But they remembered him as one of their own party, one whom they had honoured as a Pharisee, and who had been their leader in the work of persecution; and these facts made them so much the more bitter in their hatred, and they began to conspire against his life. {27} One day, while Saul prayed in the temple, he fell into that strange supernatural state of ecstasy in which the prophets of old, and the Apostles and Saints of later times, have received messages and revelations from Heaven. It was the Lord Jesus Christ Who thus in vision appeared to His servant, bidding him leave Jerusalem because the Jews there would not receive his words, and declaring it to be the Divine purpose that he should journey afar off--to the Gentiles. Doubtless, in the freshness and fervour of his newly-felt love, Saul would have chosen rather to remain in the city and give up his life for God, but with that great faith and ready submission of will which grace had implanted in his heart, he yielded without hesitation; and, going down to Cæsarea, entered a ship bound for Syria, and made his way to Tarsus, where he remained for many years. {28} During that time Saul's life was secluded, and very few positive records of it remain; but it was then he took short voyages to the different towns on the coast, and suffered the shipwrecks which are mentioned in his Epistles to the Corinthians. There, too, he endured some of that hunger and thirst, scourging and imprisonment, which he suffered for the sake of Christ, and received, as it is believed, many of those wonderful revelations which God granted as a help and consolation in his trials, as well as in preparation for the still greater difficulties which were hidden in the future. All this time the Jews, who were still unbelievers, pursued Saul with the deepest hatred and longing for revenge. {29} He had forfeited his patrimony on becoming one of the sect of Christians, and he had then no Gentile friends to help and to pity him, yet he was content; for, as he tells us in his Epistle to the Philippians, he esteemed "all things to be but loss for the excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ, my Lord." Meanwhile, St. Peter had visited the different towns and villages, and at length, reaching Joppa, took up his abode in the house of a man named Simon, by trade a tanner. There, one day at noontide, as he reclined in Eastern fashion upon the housetop, he turned his heart to God, and, forgetting all earthly things, became absorbed in contemplation. A feeling of intense, supernatural hunger came upon him then, and as his friends prepared food, he fell into a rapture, and saw the heavens open, and a sheet descend which contained animals of every description. {30}