The life and work of St. Paul

ST. PAUL AT ATHENS. 299
remark, in those uncouth accents which excited so much hatred and ridicule
in his worthless subjects, was
"SUNT IDOLA ANTIQUOBUM!" 1
It was made a scoff and a jest against him, and doubtless, in a Pontiff of the
sixteenth century, it shows an intensity of the Hebraising spirit singularly
unsoftened by any tinge of Hellenic culture. But, as has been admitted even
by writers of the most refined aesthetic sympathies, the old German Pope was
more than half right. At any rate, the sort of repugnance which dictated his
disparaging remark would have been not only natural, but inevitable, hi a
Pharisee in the capital of Judaism and under the very shadow of the Temple
of the Most High. "We who have learnt to see God in all that is refined and
beautiful; whom His love has lifted above the perils of an extinct paganism;
whom His own word has taught to recognise sunbeams from the Fountain of
Light in every grace of true art and every glow of poetic inspiration, may
thankfully admire the exquisite creations of ancient genius; but had Paul
done so he could not have been the Paul he
"
was. The prejudices of the
iconoclastic Jew," says lienan, with bitter injustice,
"
blinded him ; he took
' '
these incomparable images for idols. His spirit,' says his biographer, was
embittered within him when he saw the city filled with idols.' Ah, beautiful
and chaste images true ; gods and true goddesses, tremble ! See the man
who will raise the hammer against yon. The fatal word has been :
pronounced
you are idoh. The mistake of this ugly little Jew will be your death-warrant." J
Yes, their death-warrant as false gods and false goddesses, as " gods of the
heathen " which " are but idols," 3 but not their death-warrant to us as worka
of art; not their death-warrant as the imaginative creations of a divinely-
not their death-warrant as echoes from within of that outward
given faculty ;
beauty which is a gift of God ;
not in any sense their death-warrant as stand-
ing for anything which is valuable to mankind. Christianity only discouraged
Art so long as Art was the handmaid of idolatry and vice ; the moment this
danger ceased she inspired and ennobled Art. It is all very well for senti.
mentalists to sigh over " the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was
Rome ;" but Paganism had a very ragged edge, and it was this that Paul daily
witnessed. Paganism, at its best, was a form assumed by natural religion,
and had a power and life of its own ; but, alas ! it had not in it enough salt of
solid morality to save its own power and life from corruption. St. Paul
needed no mere historical induction to convince him that the loftiest heights
of culture are compatible with the lowest abysses of depravity, and that a
shrine of consummate beauty could be a sink of utter infamy. Nay, more, he
the Belvedere (Symonds, Renaissance, p. 377).
1 He walled up, and never entered,
3
St. Paul, p. 172. The word KardSvUov is, however, St. Luke's, not St. Paul's.
3 "The pagan worship of beauty . . . had ennobled art and corrupted nature;
extracted wonders from the quarries of Pentelicus, and horrors from the populace of
Rome and Corinth ; perfected the marbles of the temple, and degraded the humanity of
the worshipper. Heathenism had wrought into monstrous ^combination plrf sical beauty
):
Wid moral deformity (Martineau, Hourt of Thoitght, p. 306),