The life and work of St. Paul

THE SECOND CAPITAL OF CHRISTIANITY. 165
it has also produced some of the basest and vilest of mankind. The Jews at
Antioch were of just the same mixed character as the Jews at Alexandria, or
sure that there must have
Borne, or Paris, or London ; and we may be quite
been many among them who, instead of witnessing for Jehovah, would only
add a tinge of original wickedness to the seething mass of atheism, idolatry,
and polluted life.
And thus for the great mass of the population in Antioch there was nothing
that could be truly called a religion to serve as a barrier against the ever-rising
flood of Roman sensuality and Graeco-Syrian suppleness. What religion there
was took the form of the crudest nature-worship, or the most imbecile superstition.
A few years before the foundation of a Christian Church at Antioch,
iu the year 37, there had occurred one of those terrible earthquakes to which,
in all ages, the city had been liable. 1
It might have seemed at first sight
incredible that an intellectual and literary city like Antioch a city of wits and
philosophers, of casuists and rhetoricians, of poets and satirists should at once
have become the dupes of a wretched quack named Debborius, who professed
to avert such terrors by talismans as ludicrous as the famous earthquake-pills
which so often point an allusion in modern literature. Yet there is in reality
nothing strange in such apparent contrasts. History more than once has
shown that the border-lands of Atheism reach to the confines of strange
credulity. 3
Into this city of Pagan pleasure into the midst of a population pauperised
by public doles, and polluted by the indulgences which they procured among
the intrigues and ignominies of some of the lowest of the human race at one
1 Our authorities for the description and condition of Antioch are unusually rich.
The chief are Josephus, B. J. vii. 3, 3 ; Antt. xii. 3, 1 ; xvi. 5, 3 ; c. Ap. ii. 4 ;
1 Mace. iii. 37 ; xi. 13 ; 2 Mace. iv. 79, 33 ; v. 21 ; xi. 36 ; Philostr. Vit. Apollon. iii. 58 ;
Libaniiis, Antioch. pp. 355, 356 ; Chrysost. Hvm.il. ad Pop. Antioch. vii., in Matth., et
passim ; Julian, Misopogon ; Pliny, H. N. v. 18 ; and, above all, the Chronographia, of
John of Antiocn, better known by his Syriac surname of Malala, or the Orator. C. O.
Muller, in his Antiquitates Antiockenae (Gott. 1830), has diligently examined all these
and other authorities. Some accounts of modern Antioch, by travellers who have visited
it, may be found in Pocock's Descript. of the East, ii. 192; Chesney, Euphrates Expedition,
i. 425, seqq. ; Bitter, Palast. u. Syria, iv. 2. Its hopeless decline dates from 1268, when
it was reconquered by the Mohammedans.
2 The state of the city has been described by a master-hand. "It was," says M. Kenan
rendered still more graphic in his description by familiarity with modern Paris "an
unheard-of collection of jugglers, charlatans, pantomimists, magicians, thaumaturgists,
a city of races, of games, of dances, of processions, of
sorcerers, and priestly impostors ;
festivals, of bacchanalia, of unchecked luxury ; all the extravagances of the East, the
most unhealthy superstitions, the fanaticism of orgies. In turns servile and ungrateful,
worthless and insolent, the Antiochenes were the finished model of those crowds devoted
to Csesarism, without country, without nationality, without family honour, without a
name to preserve. The great Corso which traversed the city was like a theatre, in which
all day long rolled the waves of a population empty, frivolous, fickle, turbulent, sometimes
witty, absorbed in songs, parodies, pleasantries, and impertinences of every description.
It was, " he continues, after describing certain dances and swimming-races, which,
if we would understand the depravity of Gentile morals, we are forced to mention, "like
an intoxication, a dream of Sardanapalus, in which all pleasures, all debaucheries, unfolded
themselves in strange confusion, without excluding certain delicacies and refinements "
(Les Apdtres, p. 221). The Orontes never flowed with fouler mud than when there began
to spring up upon its banks the sweet fountain of the river of the water of life.