Originally called Saul, the great Apostle of the Gentiles, born at Tarsus, in Cilicia, by birth a Jew and a Roman citizen; trained to severity by Gamaliel at Jerusalem in the Jewish faith, and for a time the bitter persecutor of the Christians, till, on his way to Damascus, in the prosecution of his hostile purposes, the overpowering conviction flashed upon him that he was fighting against the cause that, as a Jew, he should have embraced, and which he was at once smitten with zeal to further, as the one cause on which hinged the salvation, not of the Jews only, but of the whole world. He did more for the extension, if not the exposition, of the Christian faith at its first promulgation than any of the Apostles, and perhaps all of them together, and it is questionable if but for him it would have become, as it has become, the professed religion of the most civilized section of the world.