The life and work of St. Paul

300 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
knew by personal observation, what we may only be led to conjecture by
thoughtful comparison, that there was no slight connexion between the superficial
brightness and the hidden putrescence ; that the flowers which yielded
the intoxicating honey of ancient art were poisoned flowers ;
that the perfectness
of sculpture might have been impossible without the nude athleticism
which ministered to vice. For one who placed the sublime of manhood in
perfect obedience to the moral law, for one to whom purity and self-control
were elements of the only supreme ideal, it was, in that age, impossible to
love, impossible to regard even with complacence, an Art which was avowedly
the handmaid of Idolatry, and covertly the patroness of shame. Our regret
for the extinguished brilliancy of Athens will be less keen when we bear in
mind that, more than any other city, she has been the corruptress of the world.
She kindled the altars of her genius with unhallowed incense, and fed them
with strange fires. Better by far the sacred Philistinism if Philistinism it
were for which this beautiful harlot had no interest, and no charm, than the
veiled apostasy which longs to recall her witchcraft and to replenish the cup
of her abomination. Better the uncompromising Hebraism which asks what
concord hath Christ with Belial and the Temple of God with idols, than the
corrupt Hellenism which, under pretence of artistic sensibility or archaeological
information, has left its deep taint on modern literature, and seems to be never
happy unless it is raking amid the embers of forgotten lusts.
Nor was Paul likely to be overpowered by the sense of Athenian greatness.
Even if his knowledge of past history were more profound than we imagine
it to have been, yet the Greece that he now saw was but a shadow and a
"
corpse Greece, but living Greece no more." 1 She was but trading on the
memory of achievements not her own she was but ;
repeating with dead lips
the echo of old philosophies which had never been sufficient to satisfy the
yearnings of the world. Her splendour was no longer an innate effulgence,
but a lingering reflex. Centuries had elapsed since all that was grand and
heroic in her history had " gone glimmering down the dream of things that
were ;" and now she was the weak and contemptuously tolerated dependent of
an alien barbarism, 2
puffed up by the empty recollection of a fame to which
she contributed nothing, and retaining no heritage of the past except its
monuments, its decrepitude, and its corruption. Among the things which he
saw at Athens there were few which Paul could naturally admire. He would
1 See Apollonius, Ep. Ixx. (uli supr.). 'EAAijm o'ecrdc 2et? ivopaftvAuT. . .