The life and work of St. Paul

214 THE LIFE AND WOKK OF ST. PAUL.
mission by signs and wonders, they folk that it was not tho time to yield to
opposition. Their stay, therefore, was prolonged, and the whole population of
the city was split into two factions the one consisting of their enemies, the
other of their supporters. At length the spirit of faction grow so hot that the
leaders of the hostile party of Jews and Gentiles made a plot to murder
the Apostles. 1 Of this they got timely notice, and once more took flight.
Leaving the totrarchy of Iconium, they still pursued the great main road, and
made their way some forty miles into the district of Antiochus IV., King of
Commagene, and to the little town of Lystra in Lycaonia.
The site of Lystra has never been made out with perfect certainty, but
there is good reason to believe that it was at a place now known as Bui Bir
.Kilisseh, or tho Thousand and One Churches, once the see of a bishop, and
rowdod with the ruins of sacred buildings. It lies in the northern hollows of
,he huge isolated mass of an extinct volcano, "rising like a giant from a plain
level as tho sea." * It is called the Kara Dagh, or Black Mountain, and is
still the haunt of dangerous robbers.
Both at Lystra and in the neighbouring hamlets the Apostles seem to
have preached with success, and to have stayed for some little time. On one
occasion Paul noticed among his auditors a man who had been a cripple from
his birth. His evident eagerness 3 marked him out to the quick insight of the
Apostle as one on whom a work of power could bo wrought. It is evident on
the face of the narrative that it was not every cripple or every sufferer that
Paul would have attempted to heal ; it was only such as, so to speak, met
half-way tho exertion of spiritual power by their own ardent faith. Fixing
hie eyes on him, Paul raised
"
his voico to its full compass, and cried Rise
on thy feet upright." Thrilled with a divine power, the man sprang up ; he
began to walk. The crowd who were present at the preachings, which seem
on this occasion to have been in the open air, were witnesses of the miracle,
and reverting in their excitement, perhaps from a sense of awe, to their rude
native Lycaouian dialect 4
just as a Welsh crowd, after being excited to an
overpowering degree by tho English discourse of some great Methodist, might
express its emotions in Welsh they cried :
'
The gods have come down to us
in the likeness of men. The tall and venerable one is Zeus ; the other, the
younger and shorter one, who speaks so powerfully, is Hermes.' *
Ignorant
1 The Af.la Pauli et Thcdae, of which the scene IB laid at Iconium, are BO purely
apocryphal as hardly to deserve notice. They are printed in Grabe, Spicilcg. 1 ; Tischendorf,
A ctn Apost. Apocr. p. 40. Tertullian says that a presbyter in Asia was deposed for
having forged the atory out of love for 1'aul (Dt Bapt, 17) ; St. Jerome adda that it was
St. Jolin who deposed him.
2 Kinneir, Travel* in Karamnnia, p. 212.
* Acts xiv. 9, ijxov* TOW HavAov AaAovirof.
4 Jftblotisld, in his monograph Dt Linyitd Lycaonid, concluded that It waa a corrupt
Assyrian, and therefore Semitic dialect ; Guhling, that it was Greek, corrupted with
Syriac. The only Lycaonian word we know IB i