In that world of secret thoughts Paul discovered the harmonization of discordant speculations and the remedy for all existing evils. "The world must be regenerated by a new religion," was his great ideal. The ancient religions and the philosophies have produced the corruption which rages universally. They must be swept away. Society must be reconstructed on a new basis, and this basis is in the theology and ethics of Israel, separated and liberated from their climatical and national limitations, their peculiar Jewish garb. There was no hope left of saving the Jewish nationality and political organization from the hands of omnipotent Rome, which swallowed and neutralized kingdoms and nations with wonderful ease; nor was there any particular necessity for it if society at large was reconstructed on the new basis. The object of Jesus was to reconstruct the kingdom of heaven _in Israel_, and he was crucified. All Israel had the same object in view, and stood at the brink of dissolution. If the basis and principles of the kingdom of heaven became the postulate of society at large, Jesus is resurrected in the world, and Israel is saved, was Paul's main idea. The Pharisean rabbis hoped that this would come to pass at some future day, when, they maintained, all sacrifices and all laws would be abolished, and all the nations of the earth would be one family, with one God and one moral law. Paul seized upon the idea, and added to it the simple dogma of Peter, "The Messiah has come." That hoped-for future is now. God's promise to Abraham, "And there shall be blessed by thee, and by thy seed, all the families of the earth," is to be fulfilled at once. So he came forth from his mystical paradise an apostle of Jesus and a new redeemer of Israel. He argued exactly as the Pharisean doctors did who maintained that the Messiah would come when all mankind should be guilty or all righteous. In the estimation of Paul, at that particular time all mankind was corrupt and demoralized, and so that was the time for the Messiah to make his appearance. He went to work at once. He began to preach his new Christianity at Damascus about the year 51, and found out that the world was not prepared for his ideas. He had a narrow escape at Damascus, where the governor and soldiers pursued him. Like the spies at Jericho, he was let down in a basket over the city walls and made his escape. So _he_ narrates the story. The author of the Acts, true to his hostility to the Jews, of course brings them in as the persecutors. But Paul, in general, never speaks otherwise than with the highest regard and love of his kinsmen and his brothers according to the flesh.