Not all at once did this scheme unfold itself before the apostle's vision. Gradually it came to him as he meditated alone, or experimented with it on listeners in remote places. Naturally, he avoided the associations of the people he had persecuted, and the teachers they looked up to. He had nothing to learn from them; he understood their system and was dissatisfied with it, in short, rejected it. Their Jewish Messiah, literal, national, hebraic, was not an attractive personage to his mind. The promise of felicity in a Jewish kingdom of heaven was not enchanting. The daily life of the believers in Jerusalem was formal, unnatural, repulsive to one who had "walked large" in foreign cities and realms of thought. The apostles, Peter, James, John, had nothing important to tell him that he did not know already. The earthly details of the life of Jesus might have interested him, but the interior character and the human significance of the Christ were the main thing, and these he may have thought himself more in the way of appreciating by a temporary retirement to the depths of his own consciousness. Having matured his thoughts, he did put himself in communication with the original disciples, with what result is frankly stated in his letter to the Galatians: "To those who seemed to be somewhat (what they were is no concern of mine, God accepteth no man's person), but who in conference added nothing to me, I did not give way, in subjection, no, not for an hour." So heated he becomes, as he remembers this interview, that he can scarcely write coherently about it. The two conceptions of the Christ and his office were so far apart, that he did not, to his dying day, form intimate relations with the teachers of the primitive gospel. They taught an uncongenial scheme. From the first, Paul's sphere of action was the Gentile world to which his message was adapted. If his first appeal was addressed to Jews, it was simply because Christianity, as he understood it, being an outgrowth from Jewish thought, a development of Jewish tradition, should naturally be more intelligible and more welcome to them than to people who had no historical or literary preparation for it. But he took the broad ground with them, and addressed his word to outsiders the moment stubbornly dogmatical Jews declined to receive it on his terms. The attempt made by the author of the "Acts of the Apostles," to show that Paul modified or qualified his scheme to bring it into harmony with the older scheme that he supplanted, fails from the circumstance that the writer discerns no peculiarity in his theory of the Christ, and consequently misses completely the ground of any antagonism.