The life and work of St. Paul

8T. PAUL AT ATHENS. 303
University towns at the deadest and least productive epochs of their past. It
was full of professors, rhetors, tutors, arguers, discoursers, lecturers, grammarians,
pedagogues, and gymnasts of every description and ; among all these
Sophists and Sophronists there was not one who displayed the least particle of
originality or force. Conforming sceptics lived in hypocritical union with
atheist priests, and there was not even sufficient earnestness to arouse any
antagonism between the empty negations of a verbal philosophy and the
1 hollow professions of a dead religion. And of this undistinguished throng
of dilettanti pretenders to wisdom, not a single name emerges out of the
obscurity. Their so-called philosophy had become little better than a jingle
of phrases 2
the languid repetition of effete watchwords the unintelligent
echo of empty formulae. It was in a condition of even deeper decadence than
it had been when Ciearo, on visiting Athens, declared its philosophy to be all
a mere chaos &vu K&rw upside
down. 3
Epicureans there were,
still main-
taining the dictum of their master that the highest good was pleasure ;
Stoics asserting that the highest good was virtue; but of these Epicureans
some had forgotten the belief that the best source of pleasure lay in virtue,
and of these Stoics some contented themselves with their theoretic opinion
with little care for its practical illustration. With the bettor side of both
systems Paul would have felt much sympathy, but the defects and degeneracies
of the two systems rose from the two evil sources to which all man's
sins and miseries are mainly due namely, sensuality and pride. It is true
indeed that
M When Epicurus to the world had taught
That pleasure was the chiefest good,
His life he to his doctrines brought,
And in a garden's shade that sovran pleasure sought ;
Whoever a true Epicure would be,
May there find cheap and virtuous luxury."
Bat the famous garden where Epicurus himself lived in modest abstinence *
soon degenerated into a scene of profligacy, and his definition of pleasure, as
consisting in the absence of physical pain or mental perturbation (arapa^a), had
led to an ideal of life which was at once effeminate and selfish. He had mis-
placed the centre of gravity of the moral system, and his degenerate followers,
1 See Eenan, St. Paid, p. 186, who refers to Cio. ad Fan. xvi. 21 ; Lucian, Dial.
Mori. xx. 5 ; Philostr. Apollon. iv. 17.
2
SiAoero^iafEXAjjixuv Adycuv 6