Concerning Christ’s manifestation to St. Paul I have said enough in my last letter—if anything needed to be said—to shew that it must have been of the nature of a vision, and (in a sense) “subjective.” But it differs from the rest in that it was made to an enemy while the other manifestations were made to devoted disciples. Love, remorse, faith, affection, stimulated the Apostles to cry, “He cannot have died,” and prepared their souls to see the image of Jesus risen; but where, it may be asked, was the spiritual preparation in the heart of St. Paul to receive such a vision? You may trace it in the words which St. Paul heard from Jesus: “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” They shew that the future Apostle had been struggling, and struggling hard, against the compunctions of conscience. Being a lover of truth from his childhood, he was prepared to give up all for its sake; but recent events had made him ask whether he was not fighting against the truth instead of for the truth. He had been persecuting the Christians; but their faith and patience had made him doubt whether they might not be right and he wrong. When the first martyr Stephen looked up to heaven and there saw Jesus seated at the right hand of God, then or soon afterwards, the question must have arisen in the mind of the persecutor, “What if the follower of the Nazarene was speaking truth? What if the crucified Jesus whom I am now persecuting was really exalted to God’s throne?” Such was the struggle through which Saul’s mind was passing when the Spirit of Jesus, acting indirectly through the constancy and faith of His persecuted disciples, having first insensibly permeated and undermined the barriers of Pharisaic training and education, now swept all obstacles before it in an instantaneous deluge of conviction that this persecuted Jesus was the Messiah. At that same moment the Messiah Himself (who during these last months and weeks of spiritual conflict had been bending down closer and closer to the predestined Apostle from His throne in heaven) now burst upon the convert’s sight on earth. But I think I hear you saying, “All this sounds well; but he has repeatedly described these visions of the risen Saviour as subjective: how then can he call them real? What is real?” Let me refer you to the paper of Definitions which I enclosed in a previous letter.[30] 1. _Absolute reality cannot be comprehended by men, and can only be apprehended as God, or in God, by Faith._ 2. _Among objects of sensation, those are (relatively) real which present similar sensations in similar circumstances._