HIS MISSIONARY TRAVELS
Paragraphs 70-114.
79-88. THE FIRST JOURNEY. 79, 80. His Companions.
81. Cyprus. Change of his Name. 82-87.
The Mainland of Asia Minor. 83. Desertion of Mark.
84. Antioch-in-Pisidia and Iconium. 86-87. Lystra
and Derbe. 88. Return.
89-108. THE SECOND JOURNEY. 90, 91. Separation
from Barnabas. 92, 93. Unrecorded Half of
the Journey. 94-96. Crossing to Europe. 97-108.
Greece. 97-101. Macedonia. 99. Women and the
Gospel. 100. Liberality of Churches. 102-108.
Achaia. 103-105. Athens. 106-108. Corinth.
109-114. THE THIRD JOURNEY. Ephesus, Polemic
against Superstition.
THE FIRST JOURNEY
79. Paul's Companions.--From the beginning it had been the wont of the
preachers of Christianity not to go alone on their expeditions, but two
by two. Paul improved on this practise by going generally with two
companions, one of them being a younger man, who perhaps took charge of
the traveling arrangements. On his first journey his comrades were
Barnabas and John Mark, the nephew of Barnabas.
80. We have already seen that Barnabas may be called the discoverer of
Paul; and, when they set out on this journey together, he was probably
in a position to act as Paul's patron; for he enjoyed much
consideration in the Christian community. Converted apparently on the
day of Pentecost, he had played a leading part in the subsequent
events. He was a man of high social position, a landed proprietor in
the island of Cyprus; and he sacrificed all to the new movement into
which he had been drawn. In the outburst of enthusiasm which led the
first Christians to share their property with one another, he sold his
estate and laid the money at the apostles' feet. He was constantly
employed thereafter in the work of preaching, and he had so remarkable
a gift of eloquence that he was called the Son of Exhortation. An
incident which occurred at a later stage of this journey gives us a
glimpse of the appearance of the two men. When the inhabitants of
Lystra mistook them for gods, they called Barnabas Jupiter and Paul
Mercury. Now, in ancient art Jupiter was always represented as a tall,
majestic and benignant figure, while Mercury was the small, swift
messenger of the father of gods and men. Probably it appeared,
therefore, that the large, gracious, paternal Barnabas was the head and
director of the expedition, while Paul, little and eager, was the
subordinate. The direction in which they set out, too, was the one
which Barnabas might naturally have been expected to choose. They went
first to Cyprus, the island where his property had been and many of his
friends still were. It lay eighty miles to the southwest of Seleucia,
the seaport of Antioch, and they might reach it on the very day they
left their headquarters.
81. Cyprus--Change of Name.--But, although Barnabas appeared to be the
leader, the good man probably knew already that the humble words of the
Baptist might be used by himself with reference to his companion, "He
must increase, but I must decrease." At all events, as soon as their
work began in earnest, this was shown to be the relation between them.
After going through the length of the island, from east to west,
evangelizing, they arrived at Paphos, its chief town, and there the
problems they had come out to face met them in the most concentrated
form.
Paphos was the seat of the worship of Venus, the goddess of love, who
was said to have been born of the foam of the sea at this very spot;
and her worship was carried on with the wildest licentiousness. It was
a picture in miniature of Greece sunk in moral decay. Paphos was also
the seat of the Roman government, and in the pro-consular chair sat a
man, Sergius Paulus, whose noble character but utter lack of certain
faith formed a companion picture of the inability of Rome at that epoch
to meet the deepest necessities of her best sons. In the proconsular
court, playing upon the inquirer's credulity, a Jewish sorcerer and
quack, named Elymas, was flourishing, whose arts were a picture of the
lowest depths to which the Jewish character could sink. The whole
scene was a kind of miniature of the world the evils of which the
missionaries had set forth to cure.
In the presence of these exigencies Paul unfolded for the first time
the mighty powers which lay in him. An access of the Spirit seizing
him and enabling him to overcome all obstacles, he covered the Jewish
magician with disgrace, converted the Roman governor, and founded in
the town a Christian church in opposition to the Greek shrine. From
that hour Barnabas sank into the second place and Paul took his natural
position as the head of the mission. We no longer read, as heretofore,
of "Barnabas and Saul," but always of "Paul and Barnabas." The
subordinate had become the leader; and, as if to mark that he had
become a new man and taken a new place, he was no longer called by the
Jewish name of Saul, which up to this point he had borne, but by the
name of Paul, which has ever since been his designation among
Christians.
82. The Mainland of Asia.--The next move was as obviously the choice
of the new leader as the first one had been due to Barnabas. They
struck across the sea to Perga, a town near the middle of the southern
coast of Asia Minor, then right up, a hundred miles, into the mainland,
and thence eastward to a point almost straight north of Tarsus. This
route carried them in a kind of half circuit through the districts of
Pamphylia, Pisidia and Lycaonia, which border, to the west and north,
on Cilicia, Paul's native province; so that, if it be the case that he
had evangelized Cilicia already, he was now merely extending his labors
to the nearest surrounding regions.
83. At Perga, the starting-point of this second half of the journey, a
misfortune befell the expedition: John Mark deserted his companions and
sailed for home. It may be that the new position assumed by Paul had
given him offense, though his generous uncle felt no such grudge at
that which was the ordinance of nature and of God. But it is more
likely that the cause of his withdrawal was dismay at the dangers upon
which they were about to enter. These were such as might well strike
terror even into resolute hearts. Behind Perga rose the snow-clad
peaks of the Taurus Mountains, which had to be penetrated through
narrow passes, where crazy bridges spanned the rushing torrents, and
the castles of robbers, who watched for passing travelers to pounce
upon, were hidden in positions so inaccessible that even the Roman army
had not been able to exterminate them. When these preliminary dangers
were surmounted, the prospect beyond was anything but inviting: the
country to the north of the Taurus was a vast tableland, more elevated
than the summits of the highest mountains in this country, and
scattered over with solitary lakes, irregular mountain masses and
tracts of desert, where the population was rude and spoke an almost
endless variety of dialects. These things terrified Mark, and he drew
back. But his companions took their lives in their hand and went
forward. To them it was enough that there were multitudes of perishing
souls there, needing the salvation of which they were the heralds; and
Paul knew that there were scattered handfuls of his own people in these
remote regions of the heathen.
84. Can we conceive what their procedure was like in the towns they
visited? It is difficult, indeed, to picture it to ourselves. As we
try to see them with the mind's eye entering any place, we naturally
think of them as the most important personages in it; to us their entry
is as august as if they had been carried on a car of victory. Very
different, however, was the reality. They entered a town as quietly
and as unnoticed as any two strangers who may walk into one of our
towns any morning. Their first care was to get a lodging; and then
they had to seek for employment, for they worked at their trade
wherever they went. Nothing could be more commonplace. Who could
dream that this travel-stained man, going from one tentmaker's door to
another, seeking for work, was carrying the future of the world beneath
his robe!
When the Sabbath came round, they would cease from toil, like the other
Jews in the place, and repair to the synagogue. They joined in the
psalms and prayers with the other worshipers and listened to the
reading of the Scriptures. After this the presiding elder might ask if
any one present had a word of exhortation to deliver. This was Paul's
opportunity. He would rise and, with outstretched hand, begin to
speak. At once the audience recognized the accents of the cultivated
rabbi: and the strange voice won their attention. Taking up the
passages which had been read, he would soon be moving forward on the
stream of Jewish history, till he led up to the astounding announcement
that the Messiah hoped for by their fathers and promised by their
prophets had come; and he had been sent among them as His apostle.
Then would follow the story of Jesus; it was true, He had been rejected
by the authorities of Jerusalem and crucified, but this could be shown
to have taken place in accordance with prophecy; and His resurrection
from the dead was an infallible proof that He had been sent of God: now
He was exalted a Prince and a Saviour to give repentance unto Israel
and the remission of sins.
We can easily imagine the sensation produced by such a sermon from such
a preacher and the buzz of conversation which would arise among the
congregation after the dismissal of the synagogue. During the week it
would become the talk of the town: and Paul was willing to converse at
his work or in the leisure of the evening with any who might desire
further information. Next Sabbath the synagogue would be crowded, not
with Jews only, but Gentiles also, who were curious to see the
strangers; and Paul now unfolded the secret that salvation by Jesus
Christ was as free to Gentiles as to Jews. This was generally the
signal for the Jews to contradict and blaspheme; and, turning his back
on them, Paul addressed himself to the Gentiles. But meantime the
fanaticism of the Jews was roused, who either stirred up the mob or
secured the interest of the authorities against the strangers; and in a
storm of popular tumult or by the breath of authority the messengers of
the gospel were swept out of the town. This was what happened at
Antioch in Pisidia, their first halting-place in the interior of Asia
Minor; and it was repeated in a hundred instances in Paul's subsequent
life.
85. Sometimes they did not get off so easily. At Lystra, for example,
they found themselves in a population of rude heathens, who were at
first so charmed with Paul's winning words and impressed with the
appearance of the preachers that they took them for gods and were on
the point of offering sacrifice to them. This filled the missionaries
with horror, and they rejected the intentions of the crowd with
unceremonious haste. A sudden revolution in the popular sentiment
ensued, and Paul was stoned and cast out of the city apparently dead.
86. Such were the scenes of excitement and peril through which they
had to pass in this remote region. But their enthusiasm never flagged;
they never thought of turning back, but, when they were driven out of
one city, moved forward to another. And, total as their discomfitures
sometimes appeared, they quitted no city without leaving behind them a
little band of converts--perhaps a few Jews, a few more proselytes, and
a number of Gentiles. The gospel found those for whom it was
intended--penitents burdened with sin, souls dissatisfied with the
world and their ancestral religion, hearts yearning for divine sympathy
and love; "as many as were ordained to eternal life believed;" and
these formed in every city the nucleus of a Christian church. Even at
Lystra, where the defeat seemed so utter, a little group of faithful
hearts gathered round the mangled body of the apostle outside the city
gates; Eunice and Lois were there with tender womanly ministrations;
and young Timothy, as he looked down on the pale and bleeding face,
felt his heart forever knit to the hero who had courage to suffer to
the death for his faith.
87. In the intense love of such hearts Paul received compensation for
suffering and injustice. If, as some suppose, the people of this
region formed part of the Galatian churches, we see from his Epistle to
them the kind of love they gave him. They received him, he says, as an
angel of God, nay, as Jesus Christ Himself; they were ready to have
plucked out their eyes and given them to him. They were people of rude
kindness and headlong impulses; their native religion was one of
excitement and demonstrativeness, and they carried these
characteristics into the new faith they had adopted. They were filled
with joy and the Holy Ghost, and the revival spread on every hand with
great rapidity, till the word, sounding out from the little Christian
communities, was heard all along the slopes of Taurus and down the
glens of the Cestrus and Halys.
Paul's warm heart could not but enjoy such an outburst of affection.
He responded to it by giving in return his own deep love. The towns
mentioned in their itinerary are the Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra,
and Derbe; but, when at the last of them he had finished his course and
the way lay open to him to descend by the Cilician Gates to Tarsus and
thence get back to Antioch, he preferred to return by the way he had
come. In spite of the most imminent danger he revisited all these
places to see his dear converts again and cheer them in face of
persecution; and he ordained elders in every city to watch over the
churches in his absence.
88. The Return.--At length the missionaries descended again from these
uplands to the southern coast and sailed back to Antioch, from which
they had set out. Worn with toil and suffering, but flushed with the
joy of success, they appeared among those who had sent them forth and
had doubtless been following them with their prayers; and, like
discoverers returned from the finding of a new country, they related
the miracles of grace they had witnessed in the strange world of the
heathen.
THE SECOND JOURNEY
89. In his first journey Paul may be said to have been only trying his
wings; for his course, adventurous though it was, only swept in a
limited circle round his native province. In his second journey he
performed a far more distant and perilous flight. Indeed, this journey
was not only the greatest he achieved but perhaps the most momentous
recorded in the annals of the human race. In its issues it far
outrivaled the expedition of Alexander the Great, when he carried the
arms and civilization of Greece into the heart of Asia, or that of
Caesar, when he landed on the shores of Britain, or even the voyage of
Columbus, when he discovered a new world. Yet, when he set out on it,
he had no idea of the magnitude which it was to assume or even the
direction which it was to take. After enjoying a short rest at the
close of the first journey, he said to his fellow-missionary, "Let us
go again and visit our brethren in every city where we have preached
the word of the Lord and see how they do." It was the parental longing
to see his spiritual children which was drawing him; but God had far
more extensive designs, which opened up before him as he went forward.
90. Separation from Barnabas.--Unfortunately the beginning of this
journey was marred by a dispute between the two friends who meant to
perform it together. The occasion of their difference was the offer of
John Mark to accompany them. No doubt when this young man saw Paul and
Barnabas returning safe and sound from the undertaking which he had
deserted, he recognized what a mistake he had made; and he now wished
to retrieve his error by rejoining them. Barnabas naturally wished to
take his nephew, but Paul absolutely refused. The one missionary, a
man of easy kindliness, urged the duty of forgiveness and the effect
which a rebuff might have on a beginner; while the other, full of zeal
for God, represented the danger of making so sacred a work in any way
dependent on one who could not be relied upon, for "confidence in an
unfaithful man in time of trouble is like a broken tooth or a foot out
of joint."
We cannot now tell which of them was in the right or if both were
partly wrong. Both of them, at all events, suffered for it: Paul had
to part in anger from the man to whom he probably owed more than to any
other human being; and Barnabas was separated from the grandest spirit
of the age.
91. They never met again. This was not due, however, to an
unchristian continuation of the quarrel; for the heat of passion soon
cooled down and the old love returned. Paul mentions Barnabas with
honor in his writings, and in the very last of his Epistles he sends
for Mark to come to him at Rome, expressly adding that he is profitable
to him for ministry--the very thing he had disbelieved about him
before. In the meantime, however, their difference separated them.
They agreed to divide between them the region they had evangelized
together. Barnabas and Mark went away to Cyprus; and Paul undertook to
visit the churches on the mainland. As companion he took with him
Silas, or Silvanus, in the place of Barnabas; and he had not proceeded
far on his new journey when he met with one to take the place of Mark.
This was Timothy, a convert he had made at Lystra in his first journey;
he was youthful and gentle; and he continued a faithful companion and a
constant comfort to the apostle to the end of his life.
92. Unrecorded Work.--In pursuance of the purpose with which he had
set out, Paul began this journey by revisiting the churches in the
founding of which he had taken part. Beginning at Antioch and
proceeding in a northwesterly direction, he did this work in Syria,
Cilicia and other parts, till he reached the center of Asia Minor,
where the primary object of his journey was completed. But, when a man
is on the right road, all sorts of opportunities open up before him.
When he had passed through the provinces which he had visited before,
new desires to penetrate still farther began to fire his mind, and
Providence opened up the way.
He still went forward in the same direction through Phrygia and
Galatia. Bithynia, a large province lying along the shore of the Black
Sea, and Asia, a densely populated province in the west of Asia Minor,
seemed to invite him and he wished to enter them. But the Spirit who
guided his footsteps indicated, by some means unknown to us, that these
provinces were shut to him in the meantime; and, pushing onward in the
direction in which his divine Guide permitted him to go, he found
himself at Troas, a town on the northwest coast of Asia Minor.
93. Thus he had traveled from Antioch in the south-east to Troas in
the northwest of Asia Minor, a distance as far as from Land's End to
John O' Groat's, evangelizing all the way. It must have taken months,
perhaps even years. Yet of this long, laborious period we possess no
details whatever, except such features of his intercourse with the
Galatians as may be gathered from the Epistle to that church. The
truth is that, thrilling as are the notices of Paul's career given in
the Acts, this record is a very meager and imperfect one, and his life
was far fuller of adventure, of labors and sufferings for Christ, than
even Luke's narrative would lead us to suppose. The plan of the Acts
is to tell only what was most novel and characteristic in each journey,
while it passes over, for instance, all his repeated visits to the same
scenes. There are thus great blanks in the history, which were in
reality as full of interest as the portions of his life which are fully
described.
Of this there is a startling proof in an Epistle which he wrote within
the period covered by the Acts of the Apostles. His argument calling
upon him to enumerate some of his outstanding adventures, "Are they
ministers of Christ?" he asks, "I am more; in labors more abundant, in
stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft. Of the
Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten
with rods. Once was I stoned. Thrice I suffered shipwreck. A night
and a day have I been in the deep. In journeyings often, in perils of
water, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in
perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the
wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in
weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in
fastings often, in cold and nakedness."
Now, of the items of this extraordinary catalogue the book of Acts
mentions very few: of the five Jewish scourgings it notices not one, of
the three Roman beatings only one; the one stoning it records, but not
one of the three shipwrecks, for the shipwreck so fully detailed in the
Acts happened later. It was no part of the design of Luke to
exaggerate the figure of the hero he was painting; his brief and modest
narrative comes far short even of the reality; and, as we pass over the
few simple words into which he condenses the story of months or years,
our imagination requires to be busy, filling up the outline with toils
and pains at least equal to those the memory of which he has preserved.
94. Crossing to Europe.--It would appear that Paul reached Troas under
the direction of the guiding Spirit without being aware whither his
steps were next to be turned. But could he doubt what the divine
intention was when, gazing across the silver streak of the Hellespont,
he beheld the shores of Europe on the other side? He was now within
the charmed circle where for ages civilization had had her home; and he
could not be entirely ignorant of those stories of war and enterprise
and those legends of love and valor which have made it forever bright
and dear to the heart of mankind.
At only four miles' distance lay the Plain of Troy, where Europe and
Asia encountered each other in the struggle celebrated in Homer's
immortal song. Not far off Xerxes, sitting on a marble throne,
reviewed the three millions of Asiatics with which he meant to bring
Europe to his feet. On the other side of that narrow strait lay Greece
and Rome, the centers from which issued the learning, the commerce and
the armies which governed the world. Could his heart, so ambitious for
the glory of Christ, fail to be fired with the desire to cast himself
upon these strongholds, or could he doubt that the Spirit was leading
him forward to this enterprise? He knew that Greece, with all her
wisdom, lacked that knowledge which makes wise unto salvation, and that
the Romans, though they were the conquerors of this world, did not know
the way of winning an inheritance in the world that is to come; but in
his breast he carried the secret which they both required.
95. It may have been such thoughts, dimly moving in his mind, that
projected themselves into the vision which he saw at Troas; or was it
the vision which first awakened the idea of crossing to Europe? As he
lay asleep, with the murmur of the Aegean in his ears, he saw a man
standing on the opposite coast, on which he had been looking before he
went to rest, beckoning and crying, "Come over into Macedonia and help
us." That figure represented Europe, and its cry for help Europe's
need of Christ. Paul recognized in it a divine summons; and the very
next sunset which bathed the Hellespont in its golden light shone upon
his figure seated on the deck of a ship the prow of which was moving
toward the shore of Macedonia.
96. In this passage of Paul, from Asia to Europe, a great providential
decision was taking effect, of which, as children of the West, we
cannot think without the profoundest thankfulness. Christianity arose
in Asia and among an Oriental people; and it might have been expected
to spread first among those races to which the Jews were most akin.
Instead of coming west, it might have gone eastward. It might have
penetrated into Arabia and taken possession of those regions where the
faith of the False Prophet now holds sway. It might have visited the
wandering tribes of Central Asia and, piercing its way down through the
passes of the Himalayas, reared its temples on the banks of the Ganges,
the Indus and the Godavery. It might have traveled farther east to
deliver the swarming millions of China from the cold secularism of
Confucius. Had it done so, missionaries from India and Japan might
have been coming to England and America at the present day to tell the
story of the Cross. But Providence conferred on Europe a blessed
priority, and the fate of our continent was decided when Paul crossed
the Aegean.
97. Macedonia.--As Greece lay nearer than Rome to the shore of Asia,
its conquest for Christ was the great achievement of his second
missionary journey. Like the rest of the world it was at that time
under the sway of Rome, and the Romans had divided it into two
provinces--Macedonia in the north and Achaia in the south. Macedonia
was, therefore, the first scene of Paul's Greek mission. It was
traversed from east to west by a great Roman road, along which the
missionary moved, and the places where we have accounts of his labors
are Philippi, Thessalonica and Beroea.
98. The Greek character in this northern province was much less
corrupted than in the more polished society to the south. In the
Macedonian population there still lingered something of the vigor and
courage which four centuries before had made its soldiers the
conquerors of the world. The churches which Paul founded here gave him
more comfort than any he established elsewhere. There are none of his
Epistles more cheerful and cordial than those to the Thessalonians and
the Philippians; and, as he wrote the latter late in life, the
perseverance of the Macedonians in adhering to the gospel must have
been as remarkable as the welcome they gave it at the first. At Beroea
he even met with a generous and open-minded synagogue of Jews--the
rarest occurrence in his experience.
99. Women and the Gospel.--A prominent feature of the work in
Macedonia was the part taken in it by women. Amid the general decay of
religions throughout the world at this period, many women everywhere
sought satisfaction for their religious instincts in the pure faith of
the synagogue. In Macedonia, perhaps on account of its sound morality,
these female proselytes were more numerous than elsewhere; and they
pressed in large numbers into the Christian Church. This was a good
omen; it was a prophecy of the happy change in the lot of women which
Christianity was to produce in the nations of the West. If man owes
much to Christ, woman owes still more. He has delivered her from the
degradation of being man's slave and plaything and raised her to be his
friend and his equal before Heaven; while, on the other hand, a new
glory has been added to Christ's religion by the fineness and dignity
with which it is invested when embodied in the female character.
These things were vividly illustrated in the earliest footsteps of
Christianity on our continent. The first convert in Europe was a
woman, at the first Christian service held on European soil the heart
of Lydia being opened to receive the truth; and the change which passed
upon her prefigured what woman in Europe was to become under the
influence of Christianity. In the same town of Philippi there was
seen, too, at the same time an equally representative image of the
condition of woman in Europe before the gospel reached it, in a poor
girl, possessed of a spirit of divination and held in slavery by men
who were making gain out of her misfortune, whom Paul restored to
sanity. Her misery and degradation were a symbol of the disfiguration,
as Lydia's sweet and benevolent Christian character was of the
transfiguration of womanhood.
100. Liberality of the Churches.--Another feature which prominently
marked the Macedonian churches was a spirit of liberality. They
insisted on supplying the bodily wants of the missionaries; and, even
after Paul had left them, they sent gifts to meet his necessities in
other towns. Long afterward, when he was a prisoner at Rome, they
deputed Epaphroditus, one of their teachers, to carry thither similar
gifts to him and to act as his attendant. Paul accepted the generosity
of these loyal hearts, though in other places he would work his fingers
to the bone and forego his natural rest rather than accept similar
favors. Nor was their willingness to give due to superior wealth. On
the contrary, they gave out of deep poverty. They were poor to begin
with, and they were made poorer by the persecutions which they had to
endure. These were very severe after Paul left, and they lasted long.
Of course they had broken first of all on Paul himself. Though he was
so successful in Macedonia, he was swept out of every town at last like
the off-scourings of all things. It was generally by the Jews that
this was brought about. They either fanaticized the mob against him,
or accused him before the Roman authorities of introducing a new
religion or disturbing the peace or proclaiming a king who would be a
rival to Caesar. They would neither go into the kingdom of heaven
themselves nor suffer others to enter.
101. But God protected His servant. At Philippi He delivered him from
prison by a physical miracle and by a miracle of grace still more
marvelous wrought upon his cruel jailor; and in other towns He saved
him by more natural means. In spite of bitter opposition, churches
were founded in city after city, and from these the glad tidings
sounded out over the whole province of Macedonia.
102. Achaia.--When, leaving Macedonia, Paul proceeded south into
Achaia, he entered the real Greece--the paradise of genius and renown.
The memorials of the country's greatness rose around him on his
journey. As he quitted Beroea, he could see behind him the snowy peaks
of Mount Olympus, where the deities of Greece had been supposed to
dwell. Soon he was sailing past Thermopylae, where the immortal Three
Hundred stood against the barbarian myriads; and, as his voyage neared
its close, he saw before him the island of Salamis, where again the
existence of Greece was saved from extinction by the valor of her sons.
103. Athens.--His destination was Athens, the capital of the country.
As he entered the city, he could not be insensible to the great
memories which clung to its streets and monuments. Here the human mind
had blazed forth with a splendor it has never exhibited elsewhere. In
the golden age of its history Athens possessed more men of the very
highest genius than have ever lived in any other city. To this day
their names invest it with glory. Yet even in Paul's day the living
Athens was a thing of the past. Four hundred years had elapsed since
its golden age, and in the course of these centuries it had experienced
a sad decline. Philosophy had degenerated into sophistry, art into
dilettanteism, oratory into rhetoric, poetry into versemaking. It was
a city living on its past. Yet it still had a great name and was full
of culture and learning of a kind. It swarmed with so-called
philosophers of different schools, and with teachers and professors of
every variety of knowledge; and thousands of strangers of the wealthy
class, collected from all parts of the world, lived there for study or
the gratification of their intellectual tastes. It still represented
to an intelligent visitor one of the great factors in the life of the
world.
104. With the amazing versatility which enabled him to be all things
to all men, Paul adapted himself to this population also. In the
market-place, the lounge of the learned, he entered into conversation
with students and philosophers, as Socrates had been wont to do on the
same spot five centuries before. But he found even less appetite for
the truth than the wisest of the Greeks had met with. Instead of the
love of truth an insatiable intellectual curiosity possessed the
inhabitants. This made them willing enough to tolerate the advances of
any one bringing before them a new doctrine; and, as long as Paul was
merely developing the speculative part of his message, they listened to
him with pleasure. Their interest seemed to deepen, and at last a
multitude of them conveyed him to Mars' Hill, in the very center of the
splendors of their city, and requested a full statement of his faith.
He complied with their wishes and in the magnificent speech he there
made them, gratified their peculiar tastes to the full, as in sentences
of the noblest eloquence he unfolded the great truths of the unity of
God and the unity of man, which lie at the foundation of Christianity.
But, when he advanced from these preliminaries to touch the consciences
of his audience and address them about their own salvation, they
departed in a body and left him talking.
105. He quitted Athens and never returned to it. Nowhere else had he
so completely failed. He had been accustomed to endure the most
violent persecution and to rally from it with a light heart. But there
is something worse than persecution to a fiery faith like his, and he
had to encounter it here: his message roused neither interest nor
opposition. The Athenians never thought of persecuting him; they
simply did not care what the babbler said; and this cold disdain cut
him more deeply than the stones of the mob or the lictors' rods. Never
perhaps was he so much depressed. When he left Athens, he moved on to
Corinth, the other great city of Achaia; and he tells us himself that
he arrived there in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.
106. Corinth.--There was in Corinth enough of the spirit of Athens to
prevent these feelings from being easily assuaged. Corinth was to
Athens very much what Glasgow is to Edinburgh. The one was the
commercial, the other the intellectual capital of the country. Even
the situations of the two places in Greece resembled in some respects
those of these two cities in Scotland. But the Corinthians also were
full of disputatious curiosity and intellectual hauteur. Paul dreaded
the same kind of reception as he had met with in Athens. Could it be
that these were people for whom the gospel had no message? This was
the staggering question which was making him tremble. There seemed to
be nothing in them on which the gospel could take hold: they appeared
to feel no wants which it could satisfy.
107. There were other elements of discouragement in Corinth. It was
the Paris of ancient times--a city rich and luxurious, wholly abandoned
to sensuality. Vice displayed itself without shame in forms which
struck deadly despair into Paul's pure Jewish mind. Could men be
rescued from the grasp of such monstrous vices? Besides, the
opposition of the Jews rose here to unusual virulence. He was
compelled at length to depart from the synagogue altogether, and did so
with expressions of strong feeling. Was the soldier of Christ going to
be driven off the field and forced to confess that the gospel was not
suited for cultured Greece? It looked like it.
108. But the tide turned. At the critical moment Paul was visited
with one of those visions which were wont to be vouchsafed to him at
the most trying and decisive crises of his history. The Lord appeared
to him in the night, saying, "Be not afraid, but speak, and hold not
thy peace; for I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee to hurt
thee; for I have much people in this city." The apostle took courage
again, and the causes of discouragement began to clear away. The
opposition of the Jews was broken, when they hurried him with mob
violence before the Roman governor, Gallio, but were dismissed from the
tribunal with ignominy and disdain. The very president of the
synagogue became a Christian, and conversions multiplied among the
native Corinthians. Paul enjoyed the solace of living under the roof
of two leal-hearted friends of his own race and his own occupation,
Aquila and Priscilla. He remained a year and a half in the city and
founded one of the most interesting of his churches, thus planting the
standard of the cross in Achaia also and proving that the gospel was
the power of God unto salvation even in the headquarters of the world's
wisdom.
THE THIRD JOURNEY
109. It must have been a thrilling story Paul had to tell at Jerusalem
and Antioch when he returned from his second journey; but he had no
disposition to rest on his laurels, and it was hot long before he set
out on his third journey.
110. In Asia.--It might have been expected that, having in his second
journey planted the gospel in Greece, he would in his third have made
Home his principal aim. But, if the map be referred to, it will be
observed that, in the midst, between the regions of Asia Minor which he
evangelized during his first journey and the provinces of Greece in
which he planted churches in his second journey, there was a
hiatus--the populous province of Asia, in the west of Asia Minor. It
was on this region that he descended in his third journey. Staying for
no less than three years in Ephesus, its capital, he effectively filled
up the gap and connected together the conquests of his former
campaigns. This journey included, indeed, at its beginning, a
visitation of all the churches formerly founded in Asia Minor and, at
its close, a flying visit to the churches of Greece; but, true to his
plan of dwelling only on what was new in each journey, the author of
the Acts has supplied us only with the details relating to Ephesus.
111. Ephesus.--This city was at that time the Liverpool of the
Mediterranean. It possessed a splendid harbor, in which was
concentrated the traffic of the sea which was then the highway of the
nations; and, as Liverpool has behind her the great towns of
Lancashire, so had Ephesus behind and around her such cities as those
mentioned along with her in the epistles to the churches in the book of
Revelation--Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and
Laodicea. It was a city of vast wealth, and it was given over to every
kind of pleasure, the fame of its theater and race-course being
world-wide.
112. But Ephesus was still more famous as a sacred city. It was a
seat of the worship of the goddess Diana, whose temple was one of the
most celebrated shrines of the ancient world. This temple was
enormously rich and harbored great numbers of priests. At certain
seasons of the year it was a resort for flocks of pilgrims from the
surrounding regions; and the inhabitants of the town flourished by
ministering in various ways to this superstition. The goldsmiths drove
a trade in little silver models of the image of the goddess which the
temple contained and which was said to have fallen from heaven. Copies
of the mystic characters engraven on this ancient relic were sold as
charms. The city swarmed with wizards, fortune-tellers, interpreters
of dreams and other gentry of the like kind, who traded on the
mariners, merchants and pilgrims who frequented the port.
113. Paul's work had therefore to assume the form of a polemic against
superstition. He wrought such astonishing miracles in the name of
Jesus that some of the Jewish palterers with the invisible world
attempted to cast out devils by invoking the same name; but the attempt
issued in their signal discomfiture. Other professors of magical arts
were converted to the Christian faith and burnt their books. The
vendors of superstitious objects saw their trade slipping through their
fingers. To such an extent did this go at one of the festivals of the
goddess that the silversmiths, whose traffic in little images had been
specially smitten, organized a riot against Paul, which took place in
the theater and was so successful that he was forced to quit the city.
114. But he did not go before Christianity was firmly established in
Ephesus, and the beacon of the gospel was twinkling brightly on the
Asian coast, in response to that which was shining from the shores of
Greece on the other side of the Aegean. We have a monument of his
success in the churches lying all around Ephesus which St. John
addressed a few years afterward in the Apocalypse; for they were
probably the indirect fruit of Paul's labors. But we have a far more
astonishing monument of it in the Epistle to the Ephesians. This is
perhaps the profoundest book in existence; yet its author evidently
expected the Ephesians to understand it. If the orations of
Demosthenes, with their closely packed arguments between the
articulations of which even a knife cannot be thrust, be a monument of
the intellectual greatness of the Greece which listened to them with
pleasure; if the plays of Shakspeare, with their deep views of life and
their obscure and complex language, be a testimony to the strength of
mind of the Elizabethan Age, which could enjoy such solid fare in a
place of entertainment; then the Epistle to the Ephesians, which sounds
the lowest depths of Christian doctrine and scales the loftiest heights
of Christian experience, is a testimony to the proficiency which Paul's
converts had attained under his preaching in the capital of Asia.