Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 2? LECTURE II. Acts ix. 16.
FOR I WILL SHOW HIM HOW GREAT THINGS HE MUST SUFFER FOR MY NAME’S SAKE. We concluded the former discourse before we had reached the close of the wondrous circumstances which attended the conversion of St. Paul. The last point upon which we dwelt, was, as you will remember, that most affecting remonstrance of our Lord,
Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? We commence, therefore, the present discourse, with the answer of the terrified and convicted Saul to this voice from heaven:
And he said, Who art thou, Lord 1 It is impossible not to be struckwith a reply so different from anything we could have previously anticipated. Is this Saul, the blasphemer and the persecutor, who had made havoc of the Church, and defied the power and contemned the name of Jesus 1 Is this the proud, self- righteous Pharisee, who now, fallen to the earth, humbled in the very dust, seeks the knowledge of Him whom he had so long despised; and seeks it from the Saviour himself, with every evidence of respect and fear
Who art thou, Lord? and then, immediately upon the reply on which we have already commented, asks, with every feeling of humility and contrition,
Lord, what wilt thou have me to do ?
How astonishing a change, how wonderful an evidence of the mighty power, possessed over the human heart by the almighty Saviour ! How easily can that voice from heaven break the hardest heart, or soften the most obdurate feelings! Whether it speak in anger, or in mercy;whether it come into the heart, as in the case of the apostate Emperor Julian, upon the arrow of his enemy, obliging him, after a life of deepest enmity to the doctrine and person of the Crucified, to cry aloud with dying breath,
O Galilean, thou hast conquered; or as in the case befo…