The life and work of St. Paul

ANTIOCH IN PISIDLA. 208
have furnished us with minute and picturesque descriptions of the abrupt
stone-paved ascents; the sarcophagi and sculptured tombs among the pro-
jecting rocks ; the narrowing valleys through which the rivers descend, and
over which frown precipices perforated with many caves ; the sudden bursts
of magnificent prospect in which you gaze " from the rocky stops of the
throne of winter upon the rich and verdant plain of summer, with the
blue sea in the distance ;
" the constant changes of climate ; the zones of
vegetation through which the traveller ascends ; the gleam of numberless
cascades caught hero and there amid the dark pine groves that clothe the
lower slopes ;
the thickets of pomegranate and oleander that mantle the river-
beds ; the wild flowers that enamel the grass with their rich inlay ; the
countless ilocks of cattle grazing over pastures whose interminable expanses
are only broken by the goat's-hair huts of the shepherd, made to this day of
the same material as that by the manufacture of which St. Paul earned his
daily bread. And when the traveller has emerged on the vast central plateau
of Asia Minor they describe the enchanting beauty of the fresh and salt water
lakes by which the road often runs for miles ; the tortoises that sun them-
selves in the shallow pools ; the flights of wild swans which now fill the air
with rushing wings, and now " ruffle their pure cold plumes " upon the
waters the storks that stand for hours ;
patiently fishing in the swampy pools.
Such must have been the sights which everywhere greeted the eyes of Paul
and Barnabas as they made their way from Perga to the Pisidian Antioch.
They would have filled a modern missionary with rapture, and the feelings of
gratitude and adoi'ation with which a Martyn or a Heber would have " climbed
by these sunbeams to the Father of Lights " would have gone far to help
them in the endurance of their hard and perilous journeys. Mungo Park, in
a touching passage, has described how his soul, fainting within him to the
very point of death, was revived by seeing amid the scant herbage of the
desert a single tuft of emerald moss, with its delicate filaments and amber
spores; and the journals of those whose feet in recent days have been
beautiful upon the mountains over which they carried the message of peace,
abound in passages delightfully descriptive of the scenes through which they
passed, and which they regarded as aisle after aisle iu the magnificent temple
of the one true God. But, as wo have already noticed, of no such feeling is
there a single trace in the writings of the Apostle or of his historian. The
love of natural scenery, which to moderns is a source of delight so continuous
and so intense, was little known to the ancients in general, and in spite
of a few poetic exceptions, was known perhaps to the Semites of that ago
least of all. 1 How often did Paul climb the mountain passes of the Taurus ;
how often had ho seen Olympus
" Soaring snow-clad through its native sky ;"
how often had he passed on foot by " the great rivers that move like God's
1 St. Paul was eminently a homo desideriorum ; a man who, like all the beat
lived in the hopes of the future (Kom. riii. 24 ; xv. 4; Tit. ii. 13, &c.).