“Immortal Greece, dear land of glorious lays,
Lo, here the Unknown God of thine unconscious praise.”—KEBLE.
ATHENS!—with what a thrill of delight has many a modern traveller been filled as, for the first time, he stepped upon that classic land! With what an eager gaze has he scanned the scenery and outline of that city
———“on the Ægean shore,
Built nobly, pure the air, and light the soil,
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence.”
As he approached the Acropolis what a throng of brilliant scenes has passed across his memory; what processions of grand and heroic and beautiful figures have swept across the stage of his imagination! As he treads upon Attic ground he is in “the Holy Land of the Ideal;” he has reached the most sacred shrine of the “fair humanities” of Paganism. It was at Athens that the human form, sedulously trained, attained its most exquisite and winning beauty; there that human freedom put forth its most splendid power; there that human intellect displayed its utmost subtlety and grace; there that Art reached to its most consummate perfection; there that Poetry uttered alike its sweetest and its sublimest strains; there that Philosophy attuned to the most perfect music of human expression its loftiest and deepest thoughts. Had it been possible for the world by its own wisdom to know God; had it been in the power of man to turn into bread the stones of the wilderness; had permanent happiness lain within the grasp of sense, or been among the rewards of culture; had it been granted to man’s unaided power to win salvation by the gifts and qualities of his own nature, and to make for himself a new Paradise in lieu of that lost Eden, before whose gate still waves the fiery sword of the Cherubim,—then such ends would have been achieved at Athens in the day of her glory. No one who has been nurtured in the glorious lore of that gay and radiant city, and has owed some of his best training to the hours spent in reading the history and mastering the literature of its many noble sons, can ever visit it without deep emotions of gratitude, interest, and love.1
And St. Paul must have known at least something of the city in whose language he spoke, and with whose writers he was not wholly unfamiliar. The notion that he was a finished classical scholar is, indeed, as we have shown already, a mere delusion; and the absence from his Epistles of every historical reference proves that, like the vast mass of his countrymen, he was indifferent to the history of the heathen, though profoundly versed in the history of Israel. He was, indeed, no less liberal and cosmopolitan—nay, in the best sense, far more so—than the mostadvanced Hellenist, the most cultivated Hagadist of his day. Yet he looked at “the wisdom of Javan” as something altogether evanescent and subsidiary—an outcome of very partial enlightenment, far from pure, and yet graciously conceded to the ages of ignorance. It was with no thrill of rapture, no loyal recognition of grace and greatness, that Paul landed at Phalerum or Peiræus, and saw the crowning edifices of the Acropolis, as it towered over the wilderness of meaner temples, stand out in their white lustre against the clear blue sky. On the contrary, a feeling of depression, a fainting of the heart, an inward unrest and agitation, seems at once to have taken possession of his susceptible and ardent temperament; above all, a sense of loneliness which imperiously claimed the solace of that beloved companionship which alone rendered his labours possible, or sustained him amid the daily infirmities of his troubled life. As he bade farewell to the faithful Berœan brethren who had watched over his journey, and had been to him in the place of eyes, the one message that he impresses on them is urgently to enjoin Silas and Timotheus to come to him at once with all possible speed. In the words of St. Luke we still seem to catch an echo of the yearning earnestness which shows us that solitude2—and above all solitude in such a place—was the one trial which he found it the most difficult to bear.
But even if his two friends were able instantly to set out for Athens, a full week must, at the lowest computation, inevitably elapse before Silas could reach him from Berœa, and a still longer period before Timothy could come from Thessalonica; and during those days of weary and restless longing there was little that he could do. It is probable that, when first he was guided by his friends to his humble lodging, he would have had little heart to notice the sights and sounds of those heathen streets, though, as he walked through the ruins of the long walls of Themistocles to the Peiraic gate, one of the brethren, more quick–eyed than himself, may have pointed out to him the altars bearing the inscription, ἈΓΝΩΣΤΟΙΣ ΘΕΟΙΣ,3 which about the same time attracted the notice of Apollonius of Tyana, and were observed fifty years afterwards by the traveller Pausanias, as he followed the same road.4 But when the brethren had left him—having no opportunity during that brief stay to labour with his own hands—he relieved his melancholy tedium by wandering hither and thither, with a curiosity5 largely mingled with grief and indignation.6
The country had been desolated by the Roman dominion, but the city still retained some of its ancient glories. No Secundus Carinas had as yet laid his greedy and tainted hand on the unrivalled statues of the Athens of Phidias. It was the multitude of these statues in a city where, as Petronius says,7 it was more easy to meet a god than a man, which chiefly absorbed St. Paul’s attention. He might glance with passing interest at the long colonnades of shops glittering with wares from every port in the Ægean; but similar scenes had not been unfamiliar to him in Tarsus, and Antioch, and Thessalonica. He might stroll into the Stoa Pœcile, and there peer at the paintings, still bright and fresh, of Homeric councils of which he probably knew nothing, and of those Athenian battles about which, not even excepting Marathon,8 there is no evidence that he felt any interest. The vast enlargement of his spiritualhorizon would not have brought with it any increase of secular knowledge, and if Paul stood in these respects on the level of even the Gamaliels of his day, he knew little or nothing of Hellenic story.9 And for the same reason he would have been indifferent to the innumerable busts of Greeks of every degree of eminence, from Solon and Epimenides down to recent Sophists and Cosmetae, and still more indifferent to the venal intrusions which Athenian servility had conceded to Roman self–importance. A glance would have been more than enough for Greek statues decapitated to furnish figures for Roman heads, or pedestals from which the original hero had been displaced to make room for the portly bulk and bloated physiognomy of some modern Proconsul. Some Jew might take a certain pride in pointing out to him the statues of Hyrcanus, the Asmonæan High Priest, and of that beautiful Berenice before whom he little thought that he should one day plead his cause.10 But his chief notice would be directed to the bewildering multiplicity of temples, and to the numberless “idols” which rose on every side. Athens was the city of statues. There were statues of Phidias, and Myron, and Lysicles, and statues without number of the tasteless and mechanical copyists of that dead period of the Empire; statues of antiquity as venerable as the olive–wood Athênê which had fallen from heaven, and statues of yesterday; statues colossal and diminutive; statues equestrian, and erect, and seated; statues agonistic and contemplative, solitary and combined, plain and coloured; statues of wood, and earthenware, and stone, and marble, and bronze, and ivory and gold, in every attitude, and in all possible combinations; stautes starting from every cave, and standing like lines of sentinels in every street.11 There were more statues in Athens, says Pausanias, than in all the rest of Greece put together, and their number would be all the more startling, and even shocking, to St. Paul, because, during the long youthful years of his study at Jerusalem, he had never seen so much as one representation of the human form, and had been trained to regard it as apostasy to give the faintest sanction to such violations of God’s express command. His earlier Hellenistic training, his natural large–heartedness, his subsequent familiarity with Gentile life, above all, the entire change of his views respecting the universality and permanence of the Mosaic Law, had indeed indefinitely widened for him the shrunken horizon of Jewish intolerance. But any sense of the dignity and beauty of Pagan art was impossible to one who had been trained in the schools of the Rabbis.12 There was nothing in his education which enabled him to admire the simple grandeur of the Propylæa, the severe beauty of the Parthenon, the massive proportions of the Theseum, the exquisite elegance of the Temple of the Wingless Victory. From the nude grace and sinewy strength of the youthful processions portrayed on frieze or entablature, he would have turned away with something of impatience, if not with something even of disgust. When the tutor of Charles the Fifth, the good Cardinal of Tortosa, ascended the Papal throne under the title of Adrian the Sixth, and his attendants conducted him to the Vatican to show him its splendid treasures of matchless statuary, his sole remark, in those uncouth accents which excited so much hatred and ridicule in his worthless subjects, was
“SUNT IDOLA ANTIQUORUM!”13
It was made a scoff and a jest against him, and doubtless, in a Pontiff of the sixteenth century, it shows an intensity of the Hebraising spirit singularly unsoftened by any tinge of Hellenic culture. But, as has been admitted even by writers of the most refined æsthetic sympathies, the old German Pope was more than half right. At any rate, the sort of repugnance which dictated his disparaging remark would have been not only natural, but inevitable, in a Pharisee in the capital of Judaism and under the very shadow of the Temple of the Most High. We who have learnt to see God in all that is refined and beautiful; whom His love has lifted above the perils of an extinct paganism; whom His own word has taught to recognise sunbeams from the Fountain of Light in every grace of true art and every glow of poetic inspiration, may thankfully admire the exquisite creations of ancient genius;—but had Paul done so he could not have been the Paul he was. “The prejudices of the iconoclastic Jew,” says Renan, with bitter injustice, “blinded him; he took these incomparable images for idols. ‘His spirit,’ says his biographer, ‘was embittered within him when he saw the city filledwithidols.’ Ah, beautiful and chaste images; true gods and true goddesses, tremble! See the man who will raise the hammer against you. The fatal word has been pronounced: you are idols. The mistake of this ugly little Jew will be your death–warrant.”14
Yes, their death–warrant as false gods and false goddesses, as “gods of the heathen” which “are but idols,”15 but not their death–warrant to us as works of art; not their death–warrant as the imaginative creations of a divinely given faculty; not their death–warrant as echoes from within of that outward beauty which is a gift of God; not in any sense their death–warrant as standing for anything which is valuable to mankind. Christianity only discouraged Art so long as Art was the handmaid of idolatry and vice; the moment this danger ceased she inspired and ennobled Art. It is all very well for sentimentalists to sigh over “the beauty that was Greece, and the glory that was Rome;” but Paganism had a very ragged edge, and it was thisthat Paul daily witnessed. Paganism, at its best, was a form assumed by natural religion, and had a power and life of its own; but, alas! it had not in it enough salt of solid morality to save its own power and life from corruption. St. Paul needed no mere historical induction to convince him that the loftiest heights of culture are compatible with the lowest abysses of depravity, and that a shrine of consummate beauty could be a sink of utter infamy. Nay, more, he knew by personal observation, what we may only be led to conjecture by thoughtful comparison, that there was no slight connexion between the superficial brightness and the hidden putrescence; that the flowers which yielded the intoxicating honey of ancient art were poisoned flowers; that the perfectness of sculpture might have been impossible without the nude athleticism which ministered to vice. For one who placed the sublime of manhood in perfect obedience to the moral law, for one to whom purity and self–control were elements of the only supreme ideal, it was, in that age, impossible to love, impossible to regard even with complacence, an Art which was avowedly the handmaid of Idolatry, and covertly the patroness of shame. Our regret for the extinguished brilliancy of Athens will be less keen when we bear in mind that, more than any other city, she has been the corruptress of the world. She kindled the altars of her genius with unhallowed incense, and fed them with strange fires. Better by far the sacred Philistinism—if Philistinism it were—for which this beautiful harlot had no interest, and no charm, than the veiled apostasy which longs to recall her witchcraft and to replenish the cup of her abomination. Better the uncompromising Hebraism which asks what concord hath Christ with Belial and the Temple of God with idols, than the corrupt Hellenism which under pretence of artistic sensibility or archæological information, has left its deep taint on modern literature, and seems to be never happy unless it is raking amid the embers of forgotten lusts.
Nor was Paul likely to be overpowered by the sense of Athenian greatness. Even if his knowledge of past history were more profound than we imagine it to have been, yet the Greece that he now saw was but a shadow and a corpse—“Greece, but living Greece no more.”16 She was but trading on the memory of achievements not her own; she was but repeating with dead lips the echo of old philosophies which had never been sufficient to satisfy the yearnings of the world. Her splendour was no longer an innate effulgence, but a lingering reflex. Centuries had elapsed since all that was grand and heroic in her history had “gone glimmering down the dream of things that were;” and now she was the weak and contemptuously tolerated dependent of an alien barbarism,17 puffed up by the empty recollection of a fame to which she contributed nothing, and retaining no heritage of the past except its monuments, its decrepitude, and its corruption. Among the things which he saw at Athens there were few which Paul could naturally admire. He would indeed have read with interest the moral inscriptions on the Hermæ which were presented to her citizens by the tyrant Hipparchus,18 and would have looked with something of sympathy on such altars as those to Modesty and to Piety. But, among the many altars visible in every street, there was one by which he lingered with special attention, and of which he read with the deepest emotion the ancient inscription—
ΑΓΝΩΣΤΩΙΘΕΩΙ.
“To the unknown God.”19 The better–known altars, of which the inscriptions were in the plural, and which merely bore witness to the catholicity of Paganism, would have had less interest for him. It is merely one of the self–confident assertions which are too characteristic of Jerome20 that St. Paul misquoted the singular for the plural. The inscription to which he called attention on the Areopagus was evidently an ancient one, and one which he had observed on a single altar.21 Whether that altar was one of those which Epimenides had advised the Athenians to build to whatever god it might be—τῷ προσήκοντι θεῷ—wherever the black and white sheep lay down, which he told them to loose from the Areopagus; or one dedicated to some god whose name had in course of time become obliterated and forgotten;22 or one which the Athenians had erected under some visitation of which they could not identify the source23—was to St. Paul a matter of indifference. It is not in the least likely that he supposed the altar to have been intended as a recognition of that Jehovah24 who seemed so mysterious to the Gentile world. He regarded it as a proof of the confessed inadequacy, the unsatisfied aspirations, of heathendom. He saw in it, or liked to read into it, the acknowledgment of some divinity after whom they yearned, but to the knowledge of whom they had been unable to attain; and this was He whom he felt it to be his own mission to make known. It was with this thought that he consoled his restless loneliness in that uncongenial city; it was this thought which rekindled his natural ardour as he wandered through its idol–crowded streets.25
His work among the Jews was slight. He discoursed,26 indeed, not unfrequently with them and their proselytes in the synagogue or meeting–room27 which they frequented; but it is probable that they were few in number, and we find no traces either of the teaching which he addressed to them or of the manner in which they received it. It was in the market–place of Athens—the very Agora in which Socrates had adopted the same conversational method of instruction four centuries28 before him—that he displayed his chief activity in a manner which he seems nowhere else to have adopted, by conversing daily and publicly with all comers. His presence and his message soon attracted attention. Athens had been in all ages a city of idlers, and even in her prime her citizens had been nicknamed Gapenians,29 from the mixture of eager curiosity and inveterate loquacity which even then had been their conspicuous characteristics. Their greatest orator had hurled at them the reproach that, instead of flinging themselves into timely and vigorous action in defence of their endangered liberties, they were for ever gadding about asking for the very latest news;30 and St. Luke—every incidental allusion of whose brief narrative bears the mark of truthfulness and knowledge—repeats the same characteristic under the altered circumstances of their present adversity. Even the foreign residents caught the infection, and the Agora buzzed with inquiring chatter at this late and decadent epoch no less loudly than in the days of Pericles or of Plato.
Among the throng of curious listeners, some of the Athenian philosophers were sure, sooner or later, to be seen. The Stoa Pœcile, which Zeno had made his school, and from which the Stoics derived their name, ran along one side of the Agora, and not far distant were the gardens of Epicurus. Besides the adherents of these two philosophical schools, there were Academics who followed Plato, and Peripatetics who claimed the authority of Aristotle, and Eclectics of every shade.31 The whole city, indeed, was not unlike one of our University towns at the deadest and least productive epochs of their past. It was full of professors, rhetors, tutors, arguers, discoursers, lecturers, grammarians, pedagogues, and gymnasts of every description; and among all these Sophists and Sophronists there was not one who displayed the least particle of originality or force. Conforming sceptics lived in hypocritical union with atheist priests, and there was not even sufficient earnestness to arouse any antagonism between the empty negations of a verbal philosophy and the hollow profession of a dead religion.32 And of this undistinguished throng of dilettanti pretenders to wisdom, not a single name emerges out of the obscurity. Their so–called philosophy had become little better than a jingle of phrases33—the languid repetition of effete watchwords—the unintelligent echo of empty formulæ. It was in a condition of even deeper decadence than it had been when Cicero, on visiting Athens, declared its philosophy to be all a mere chaos—ἄνω κάτω—upside down.34 Epicureans there were, still maintaining the dictum of their master that the highest good was pleasure; and Stoics asserting that the highest good was virtue; but of these Epicureans some had forgotten the belief that the best source of pleasure lay in virtue, and of these Stoics some contented themselves with their theoretic opinion with little care for its practical illustration. With the better side of both systems Paul would have felt much sympathy, but the defects and degeneracies of the two systems rose from the two evil sources to which all man’s sins and miseries are mainly due—namely, sensuality and pride. It is true indeed that—
“When Epicurus to the world had taught
That pleasure was the chiefest good,
His life he to his doctrines brought,
And in a garden’s shade that sovran pleasure sought;
Whoever a true Epicure would be,
May there find cheap and virtuous luxury.”
But the famous garden where Epicurus himself lived in modest abstinence35 soon degenerated into a scene of profligacy, and his definition of pleasure, as consisting in the absence of physical pain or mental perturbation (ἀταραξία), had led to an ideal of life which was at once effeminate and selfish. He had misplaced the centre of gravity of the moral system, and his degenerate followers, while they agreed with him in avowing that pleasure should be the aim of mortal existence, selected the nearer and coarser pleasures of the senses in preference to the pleasures of the intellect or the approval of the conscience. The sterner and loftier Epicureans of the type of Lucretius and Cassius were rare; the school was more commonly represented by the base and vulgar Hedonists who took as their motto, “Let us eat and drink, for to–morrow we die.”36 On the other hand, their great Stoic rivals had little reason to boast the efficacy of their nobler theory. Aiming at the attainment of a complete supremacy not only over their passions, but even over their circumstances—professing a fictitious indifference to every influence of pain or sorrow,37 standing proudly alone in their unaided independence and self–asserted strength, the Stoics, with their vaunted apathy, had stretched the power of the will until it cracked and shrivelled under the unnatural strain; and this gave to their lives a consciousness of insincerity which, in the worse sort of them, degraded their philosophy into a cloak for every form of ambition and iniquity, and which made the nobler souls among them melancholy with a morbid egotism and an intense despair. In their worst degeneracies Stoicism became the apotheosis of suicide, and Epicureanism the glorification of lust.38
How Paul dealt with the views and arguments of these rival sects—respectively the Pharisees and the Sadducees of the pagan world39—we do not know. Perhaps these philosophers considered it useless to discuss philosophical distinctions with one whose formal logic was as unlike that of Aristotle as it is possible to imagine—who had not the least acquaintance with the technicalities of philosophy, and whom they would despise as a mere barbarous and untrained Jew. Perhaps he was himself so eager to introduce to their notice the good news of the Kingdom of Heaven, that with him all questions as to the moral standpoint were subordinate to the religious truth from which he was convinced that morality alone could spring. They may have wanted to argue about the summum bonum; but he wanted to preach Christ. At any rate, when he came to address them he makes no allusion to the more popularly known points of contrast between the schools of philosophy, but is entirely occupied with the differences between their views and his own as to the nature and attributes of the Divine. Even to the philosophers who talked with him in the market–place40 the subject–matter of his conversation had been neither pleasure nor virtue, but Jesus and the Resurrection.41 The only result had been to create a certain amount of curiosity—a desire to hear a more connected statement of what he had to say. But this curiosity barely emerged beyond the stage of contempt. To some he was “apparently a proclaimer of strange deities;”42 to others he was a mere “sparrow,” a mere “seed–pecker”43—a “picker–up of learning’s crumbs,” a victim of unoriginal hallucinations, a retailer of second–hand scraps. The view of the majority of these frivolous sciolists respecting one whose significance for the world transcended that of all their schools would have coincided nearly with that of
“Cleon the poet from the sprinkled isles,” which our poet gives in the following words:—
“And for the rest
I cannot tell thy messenger aright,
Where to deliver what he bears of thine,
To one called Paulus—we have heard his fame
Indeed, if Christus be not one with him—
I know not nor am troubled much to know.
Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew,
As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised,
Hath access to a secret shut from us?
Thou wrongest our philosophy, O King,
In stooping to enquire of such an one,
As if his answer could impose at all.
He writeth, doth he? well, and he may write!
O, the Jew findeth scholars! certain slaves,
Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ;
And (as I gathered from a bystander)
Their doctrines could be held by no sane man.”44
With some hearers, however, amusement and curiosity won the day. So far as they could understand him he seemed to be announcing a new religion. The crowd on the level space of the Agora rendered it difficult for all to hear him, and as the Areopagus would both furnish a convenient area for an harangue, and as it was there that the court met which had the cognizance of all matters affecting the State religion, it was perhaps with some sense of burlesque that they led him up the rock–hewn steps—which still exist—to the level summit, and placed him on the “Stone of Impudence,” from which the defendants before the Areopagus were wont to plead their cause.45 Then, with a politeness that sounds ironical, and was, perhaps, meant by the volatile ringleaders of the scene as a sort of parody of the judicial preliminaries, they began to question him as in old days their ancestors had tried and condemned Anaxagoras, Diagoras, Protagoras, and Socrates, on similar accusations.46 They said to him, “May we ascertain from you what is this new doctrine about which you have teen talking? You are introducing some strange topic to our hearing. We should like, then, to ascertain what these things might mean?” And so the audience, keenly curious, but brimming over with ill–suppressed contempt and mirth, arranged themselves on the stone steps, and wherever they could best hear what sort of novelties could be announced by this strange preacher of a new faith.
But it was in no answering mood of levity that St. Paul met their light inquiries. The “ugly little Jew,” who was the noblest of all Jews, was, perhaps, standing on the very stone where had once stood the ugly Greek who was the noblest of all Greeks, and was answering the very same charge. And Socrates could jest even in immediate peril of his life; but St. Paul, though secure in the tolerance of indifference, had all the solemnity of his race, and was little inclined to share in any jest. His was one of those temperaments which are too sad and too serious for light humour; one of those characters which are always and overwhelmingly in earnest. To meet badinage by badinage was for him a thing impossible. A modern writer is probably correct when he says that in ordinary society St. Paul would certainly not have been regarded as an interesting companion. On the other hand, he was too deeply convinced of his own position as one to which he had been called by the very voice and vision of his Saviour to be in the least wounded by frivolous innuendos or disdainful sneers. He was not overawed by the dignity of his judicial listeners, or by the reputation of his philosophic critics, or by the stern associations of the scene in the midst of which he stood. Above him, to the height of one hundred feet, towered the rock of the Acropolis like the vast altar of Hellas—that Acropolis which was to the Greek what Mount Sion was to the Hebrew, the splendid boss of the shield ringed by the concentric circles of Athens, Attica, Hellas, and the world.47 Beneath him was that temple of the awful goddesses whose presence was specially supposed to overshadow this solemn spot, and the dread of whose name had been sufficient to prevent Nero, stained as he was with the guilt of parricide, from setting foot within the famous city.48 But Paul was as little daunted by the terrors and splendour of Polytheism in the seat of its grandest memorials and the court of its most imposing jurisdiction, as he was by the fame of the intellectual philosophy by whose living representatives he was encompassed. He knew, and his listeners knew, that their faith in these gay idolatries had vanished.49 He knew, and his listeners knew, that their yearning after the unseen was not to be satisfied either by the foreign superstitions which looked for their votaries in the ignorance of the gynæceum, or by those hollow systems which wholly failed to give peace even to the few. He was standing under the blue dome of heaven,50 a vaster and diviner temple than any which man could rear. And, therefore, it was with the deepest seriousness, as well as with the most undaunted composure, that he addressed them: “Athenians!”51 he said, standing forth amongst them, with the earnest gaze and outstretched hand which was his attitude when addressing a multitude, “I observe that in every respect you are unusually religious.”52 Their attention would naturally be won, and even a certain amount of personal kindliness towards the orator be enlisted, by an exordium so courteous and so entirely in accordance with the favourable testimony which many writers had borne to their city as the common altar and shrine of Greece.53 “For,” he continued, “in wandering through your city, and gazing about me on the objects of your devotion,54 I found among them55 an altar on which had been carved an inscription, “To THE UNKNOWN GOD.”56 That, then, which ye unconsciously57 adore, that am I declaring unto you. The God who made the universe and all things in it, He being the natural58 Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands,59 nor is He in need of anything60 so as to receive service61 from human hands, seeing that He is Himself the giver to all of life and breath and all things; and He made of one blood62 every nation of men to dwell on the whole face of the earth, ordaining the immutable limits to the times and extents of their habitation,63 inspiring them thereby to seek God, if after all they might grope in their darkness and find Him, though, in reality,64 He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live, and move, and are, as some also of your own poets have said—
“(We need Him all,)
For we are e’en His offspring.”
Since, then, we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine is like gold or silver or brass, the graving of art and of man’s genius.”65
Condensed as this speech evidently is, let us pause for an instant, before we give its conclusion, to notice the consummate skill with which it was framed, the pregnant meanings infused into its noble and powerful sentences. Such skill was eminently necessary in addressing an audience which attached a primary importance to rhetoric, nor was it less necessary to utilise every moment during which he could hope to retain the fugitive attention of that versatile and superficial mob. To plunge into any statements of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity, or to deal in that sort of defiance which is the weapon of ignorant fanaticism, would have been to ensure instant failure; and since his sole desire was to win his listeners by reason and love, he aims at becoming as a heathen to the heathen, as one without law to them without law, and speaks at once with a large–hearted liberality which would have horrified the Jews, and a classic grace which charmed the Gentiles. In expressions markedly courteous, and with arguments exquisitely conciliatory, recognising their piety towards their gods, and enforcing his views by an appeal to their own poets, he yet manages, with the readiest power of adaptation, to indicate the fundamental errors of every class of his listeners. While seeming to dwell only on points of agreement, he yet practically rebukes in every direction their natural and intellectual self–complacency.66 The happy Providence— others, but not St. Paul, might have said the happy accident67—which had called his attention to the inscription on the nameless altar, enabled him at once to claim them as at least partial sharers in the opinions which he was striving to enunciate. His Epicurean auditors believed that the universe had resulted from a chance combination of atoms; he tells them that it was their Unknown God who by His fiat had created the universe and all therein. They believed that there were many gods, but that they sat far away beside their thunder, careless of mankind; he told them that there was but one God, Lord of heaven and earth. Around them arose a circle of temples as purely beautiful as hands could make them—yet there, under the very shadow of the Propylæa and the Parthenon, and with all those shrines of a hundred divinities in full view with their pillared vestibules and their Pentelic marble, he tells the multitude that this God who was One, not many, dwelt not in their toil–wrought temples,68 but in the eternal temple of His own creation. But while he thus denies the Polytheism of the multitude, his words tell with equal force against the Pantheism of the Stoic, and the practical Atheism of the Epicurean. While he thus de–consecrated, as it were, the countless temples, the Stoics would go thoroughly with him;69 when he said that God needeth not our ritualisms, the Epicurean would almost recognise the language of his own school;70 but, on the other hand, he laid the axe at the root of their most cherished convictions when he added that Matter was no eternal entity, and God no impersonal abstraction, and Providence no mere stream of tendency without us, which, like a flow of atoms, makes for this or that; but that He was at once the Creator and the Preserver, the living and loving Lord of the material universe, and of all His children in the great family of man, and of all the nations, alike Jew and Gentile, alike Greek and barbarian, which had received from His decrees the limits of their endurance and of their domains. In this one pregnant sentence he also showed the falsity of all autochthonous pretensions, and national self–glorifications, at the expense of others, as well as of all ancient notions about the local limitations of special deities. The afflicted Jew at whom they were scoffing belonged to a race as dear to Him as the beautiful Greek; and the barbarian was equally His care, as from His throne He beholds all the dwellers upon earth. And when he told them that God had given them the power to find Him, and that they had but dimly groped after Him in the darkness—and when he clenched by the well–known hemistich of Aratus and Cleanthes (perhaps familiar to them at their solemn festivals) the truth that we are near and dear to Him, the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand, they would be prepared for the conclusion that all these cunning effigies—at which he pointed as he spoke— all these carved and molten and fictile images, were not and could not be semblances of Him, and ought not to be worshipped71 were they even as venerable as the “heaven–fallen image”—the Διοπετὲς ἄγαλμα—of their patron–goddess, or glorious as the chryselephantine statue on which Phidias had expended his best genius and Athens her richest gifts.
Thus far, then, with a considerateness which avoided all offence, and a power of reasoning and eloquence to which they could not be insensible, he had demonstrated the errors of his listeners mainly by contrasting them with the counter–truths which it was his mission to announce.72 But lest the mere demonstration of error should end only in indifference or despair, he desired to teach the Stoic to substitute sympathy for apathy, and humility for pride, and the confession of a weakness that relied on God for the assertion of a self–dependence which denied all need of Him; and to lead the Epicurean to prefer a spiritual peace to a sensual pleasure, and a living Saviour to distant and indifferent gods. He proceeded, therefore, to tell them that during long centuries of their history God had overlooked or condoned73 this ignorance, but that now the kingdom of heaven had come to them—now He called them to repentance—now the day of judgment was proclaimed, a day in which the world should be judged in righteousness by One whom God had thereto appointed, even by that Jesus to whose work God had set His seal by raising Him from the dead——
That was enough. A burst of coarse derision interrupted his words.74 The Greeks, the philosophers themselves, could listen with pleasure, even with something of conviction, while he demonstrated the nullity of those gods of the Acropolis at which even their fathers, four centuries earlier, had not been afraid to jeer. But now that he had got to a point at which he mixed up mere Jewish matters and miracles with his predication—now that he began to tell them of that Cross which was to them foolishness, and of that Resurrection from the dead which was inconceivably alien to their habits of belief—all interest was for them at an end. It was as when a lunatic suddenly introduces a wild delusion into the midst of otherwise sane and sensible remarks. The “strange gods” whom they fancied that he was preaching became too fantastic even to justify any further inquiry. They did not deign to waste on such a topic the leisure which was important for less extraordinary gossip.75 They were not nearly serious enough in their own belief, nor did they consider this feeble wanderer a sufficiently important person to make them care to enforce against St. Paul that decree of the Areopagus which had brought Socrates to the hemlock draught in the prison almost in sight of them; but they instantly offered to the great missionary a contemptuous toleration more fatal to progress than any antagonism. As they began to stream away, some broke into open mockery, while others, with polite irony, feeling that such a speaker deserved at least a show of urbanity, said to him, “Enough for one day. Perhaps some other time we will listen to you again about Him.” But even if they were in earnest, the convenient season for their curiosity recurred no more to them than it did afterwards to Felix.76 On that hill of Ares, before that throng, Paul spoke no more. He went from the midst of them, sorry, it may be, for their jeers, seeing through their spiritual incapacity, but conscious that in that city his public work, at least, was over. He could brave opposition; he was discouraged by indifference. One dignified adherent, indeed, he found—but one only77—in Dionysius the Areopagite;78 and one more in a woman—possibly a Jewess—whose very name is uncertain:79 but at Athens he founded no church, to Athens he wrote no epistle, and in Athens, often as he passed its neighbourhood, he never set foot again. St. Luke has no pompous falsehoods to tell us. St. Paul was despised and ridiculed, and he does not for a moment attempt to represent it otherwise; St. Paul’s speech, so far as any immediate effects were concerned, was an all but total failure, and St. Luke does not conceal its ineffectiveness.80 He shows us that the Apostle was exposed to the ridicule of indifferentism, no less than to the persecutions of exasperated bigotry.
And yet his visit was not in vain. It had been to him a very sad one. Even when Timotheus had come to cheer his depression and brighten his solitude, he felt so deep a yearning for his true and tried converts at Thessalonica, that, since they were still obliged to face the storm of persecution, he had sacrificed his own feelings, and sent him back to support and comfort that struggling Church. He left, Athens as he had lived in it, a despised and lonely man. And yet, as I have said, his visit was not in vain. Many a deep thought in the Epistle to the Romans may have risen from the Apostle’s reflections over the apparent failure at Athens. The wave is flung back, and streams away in broken foam, but the tide advances with irresistible majesty and might. Little did those philosophers, in their self–satisfied superiority, suppose that the trivial incident in which they had condescended to take part was for them the beginning of the end.81 Xerxes and his Persians had encamped on the Areopagus, and devoted to the flames the temples on the Acropolis on the very grounds urged by St. Paul, “that the gods could not be shut within walls, and that the whole universe was their home and temple.”82 Yet the sword and fire of Xerxes, and all the millions of his vast host, have been utterly impotent in their effects, if we compare them to the results which followed from the apparent failure of this poor and insulted tent–maker. Of all who visit Athens, myriads connect it with the name of Paul who never so much as remember that, since the epoch of its glory, it has been trodden by the feet of poets and conquerors and kings. They think not of Cicero, or Virgil, or Grermanicus, but of the wandering tent–maker. In allhis seeming defeats lay the hidden germ of certain victory. He founded no church at Athens, but there—it may be under the fostering charge of the converted Areopagite—a church grew up. In the next century it furnished to the cause of Christianity its martyr bishops and its eloquent apologists. In the third century it flourished in peace and purity. In the fourth century it was represented at Nicaea, and the noble rhetoric of the two great Christian friends St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nazianzus was trained in its Christian schools. Nor were many centuries to elapse ere, unable to confront the pierced hands which held a wooden Cross, its myriads of deities had fled into the dimness of outworn creeds, and its tutelary goddess, in spite of the flashing eyes which Homer had commemorated, and the mighty spear which had been moulded out of the trophies of Marathon, resigned her maiden chamber to the honour of that meek Galilæan maiden who had lived under the roof of the carpenter of Nazareth—the virgin mother of the Lord.