It is not strange that witnessing the temper of his nation, should
call these things to his remembrance--that the consideration should
affect him--that he should shudder at the prospect of the destruction
which hung over them, and at the recollection of that from which
himself had been "scarcely saved"--that he should exclaim, "God and my
conscience witness my great heaviness and continual sorrow, when I
look on my brethren the Jews, and consider the ruin coming upon them,
from which I have been saved, _so as by fire_! Lately I was even more
the enemy of Christ than they, and boasted greater enmity.. against
him! And should have brought on myself a more intolerable doom, had
not a miracle of power and mercy arrested me in my course!" That such
considerations and a recollection of the share which he had formerly
taken in strengthening the prejudices of his nation against the
truth, should deeply affect him, and draw such expression from him as
we find in the text and context, is not strange. They appear natural
for a person circumstanced as he was at that time; and especially to
one divinely forewarned of the devastation then coming on his place
and nation.

These we conceive to be the feelings and views expressed by the
apostle in the beginning of this chapter--but that he should wish to
be put into the place of Christ; or madly with evil to himself, from
which nobody could be benefited, cannot be suspected; unless with
Festus, we suppose him to have been "beside himself," and not to have
known what he wrote, when he expressed himself as in the text.

REFLECTIONS

I. In Paul's conversion how wonderfully apparent are the wisdom and