"IN PERILS ON THE SEA." ACTS xxvii. 1-3; xxviii. 16. St. Paul as a Traveller and a Prisoner--Length of his Imprisonment--Blessed Results of his Captivity--"The Prisoner of the Lord"--Teaching of the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity--His Captivity Benefited--(_a_) His Personal Religion--(_b_) The Church at Cæsarea--(_c_) The Church at Rome--(_d_) The Universal Church-- Composition of St. Luke's Gospel--Technical Use of word Gospel--Testimony of Aristides and Irenæus--Epistles of the Captivity--Story of the Voyage to Rome--Roman Provincial Organisation--Writings of Mr. James Smith of Jordanhills--Church at Sidon--The Storm--Malta and Puteoli--Christianity at Pompeii--Christian Inscription there Discovered--St. Paul's Approach to Rome--Intense Humanity of the Apostle--Interview with the local Jewish Sanhedrin--Christianity at Rome-- Investigations of Harnack and Schürer 450-471 CHAPTER I. _THE TRAINING OF SAUL THE RABBI._ "A young man named Saul."--ACTS vii. 58. "I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city, at the feet of Gamaliel, instructed according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers, being zealous for God, even as ye all are this day."--ACTS xxii. 3. The appearance of St. Paul upon the stage of Christian history marks a period of new development and of more enlarged activity. The most casual reader of the Acts of the Apostles must see that a personality of vast power, force, individuality, has now entered the bounds of the Church, and that henceforth St. Paul, his teaching, methods, and actions, will throw all others into the shade. Modern German critics have seized upon this undoubted fact and made it the foundation on which they have built elaborate theories concerning St. Paul and the Acts of the Apostles. Some of them have made St. Paul the inventor of a new form of Christianity, more elaborate, artificial, and dogmatic than the simple religion of nature which, as they think, Jesus Christ taught. Others have seen in St. Paul the great rival and antagonist of St. Peter, and have seen in the Acts a deliberate attempt to reconcile the opposing factions of Peter and Paul by representing St. Paul's career as modelled upon that of Peter's.[1] These theories are, we believe, utterly groundless; but they show at the same time what an important event in early Church history St. Paul's conversion was, and how necessary a thorough comprehension of his life and training if we wish to understand the genesis of our holy religion.