The Apologetic Value of Paul’s Epistles 91 righteousness seemed unattainable. That was a great step towards Christianity. He had been trying to satisfy the hun ger of his soul with legal ordinances; he found them chaff, not wheat, and so he sought for true nourishment. Eventually he became a convert to Christianity,. The Pauline letters give no detailed account of the memorable event like the nar ratives contained in the Book of the Acts. The main feature of the story is referred to in 1 Cor. 15:8 where' the Apostle enumerates the different appearances of the risen Christ: “Last of all He was seen of me also.” Paul’s conversion is one of the hard problems for those who undertake to give a purely naturalistic solution of the origins of Christianity. All attempts to explain it without recognizing the hand of God in it must be futile. He himself says devoutly concerning i t : “I t was the good pleasure of God . . . to reveal His Son in me.” This argues that Christianity is a supernatural religion. When a religious crisis comes to a man of Paul’s type it possesses deep significance. For him to become a Christian meant everything. I t meant to leap into a large cosmopolitan idea of Christianity, its nature and destination. He saw that all was over with Judaism and its legal righteousness, all over with the law itself as a way of salvation; that salvation must come to man through the grace of God, and that it might come through that channel to all men alike on equal terms, and that therefore the Jewish prerogative was at an end. These consequences are all borne out in the biographical notice in the first chapters of Galatians. It can easily be seen that if the accounts of Paul’s con version in the epistles be accepted, they lend support and give value to the accounts in the Acts of the Apostles; that the consequences of that conversion as previously indicated are in entire harmony with the teaching of the latter part of the Acts, and so we must come to the conclusion that the con tents of that book are trustworthy whether Luke be the author
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