The life and work of St. Paul

THB SECOND CAPITAL OF CHRISTIANITY. 167
the coinage of a, new word, destined to a glorious immortality ; the disciplea
were first called CHRISTIANS at Antioch.
It is always interesting to notice the rise of a new and memorable word,
but not a few of those which have met with universal acceptance have started
into accidental life. It is not so with the word " Christian." It indicates a
deeisive epoch, and was the coinage rather of a society than of any single
man. More, perhaps, than any word which was ever invented, it marks, if I
may use the expression, the watershed of all human history. It signalises the
emergence of a true faith among the Gentiles, and the separation of that faith
from the tenets of the Jews. All former ages, nations, and religious
contribute to it. The conception which lies at the base of it is Semitic, and
sums up centuries of expectation and of prophecy in the historic person of
One who was anointed to be for all mankind a Prophet, Priest, and King.
that the
But this Hebrew conception is translated by a Greek word, showing
great religious thoughts of which hitherto the Jewish race had been the
appointed guardians, were henceforth to be the common glory of mankind,
and were, therefore, to be expressed in a language which enshrined the world's
most peiiect literature, and which had been imposed on all civilised countries
by the nation which had played by far the most splendid part in the secular
annals of the past. And this Greek rendering of a Hebrew idea was stamped
with a Roman form by receiving a Latin termination, 1 as though to fore-
shadow that the new name should be co-extensive with the vast dominion
which swayed the present destinies of the world. And if the word was thus
pregnant with all the deepest and mightiest associations of the past and of the
present, how divine was to be its future ! history Henceforth it was needed
to describe the peculiarity, to indicate the essence, of all that was morally the
greatest and ideally the most lovely in the condition of mankind. From the
day when the roar of the wild beast in the Amphitheatre was interrupted by
the proud utterance, Christianua sum from the days when the martyrs, like
"
a host of Scsevolas," upheld their courage by this name as they bathed their
hands without a shudder in the bickering fire the idea of all patience, of all
heroic constancy, of all missionary enterprise, of all philanthropic effort, of all
cheerful self-sacrifice for the common benefit of mankind is in that name.
How little thought the canaille at Antioch, who first hit on what was to them
a convenient nickname, that thenceforward their whole city should be chiefly
famous for its " Christian " associations ; that the fame of Seleucus Nicator
and Antiochus Epiphanes should be lost in that of Ignatius and Chrysostom ;
and that long after the power of the imperial legates had been as utterly
1 The Greek adjective from Xpion-b? would have been Xpi