The life and work of St. Paul

ST. PAUL AT ATHENS. 309
Since, then, we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine
is like gold or silver or brass, the graving of art and of man's genius." 1
Condensed as this speech evidently is, lot us pause for an instant, before
we give its conclusion, to notice the consummate skill with which it was
framed, the pregnant meanings infused into its noble and powerful sentences.
Such skill was eminently necessary in addressing an audience which attached
a primary importance to rhetoric, nor was it less necessary to utilise every
moment during which he could hope to retain the fugitive attention of that
versatile and superficial mob. To plunge into any statements of the peculiar
doctrines of Christianity, or to deal in that sort of defiance which is the weapon
of ignorant fanaticism, would have been to ensure instant failure ; and since
his solo desire was to win his listeners by reason and love, he aims at becoming
as a heathen to the heathen, as one without law to them without law, and
speaks at once with a large-hearted liberality which would have horrified
the Jews, and a classic grace which charmed the Gentiles. In expres-
sions markedly courteous, and with arguments exquisitely conciliatory,
recognising their piety towards their gods, and enforcing his views by
an appeal to their own poets, he yet manages, with the readiest power
of adaptation, to indicate the fundamental errors of every class of his
listeners. While seeming to dwell only on points of agreement, he yet
practically rebukes in every direction their natural and intellectual self-complacency.
2 The happy Providence others, but not St. Paul; might have said
the happy accident 3 which had called his attention to the inscription on th
nameless altar, enabled him at once to claim them as at least partial sharers in
the opinions which he was striving to enunciate. His Epicurean auditors believed
that the universe had resulted from a chance combination of atoms ; he
tells them that it was their Unknown God who by His fiat had created the
universe and all therein. They believed that there were many gods, but that
they sat far away beside their thunder, careless of mankind ; he told them that
there was but one God, Lord of heaven and earth. Around them arose a
circle of temples as purely beautiful as hands could make them yet there,
under the very shadow of the Propylsaa and the Parthenon, and with all those
shrines of a hundred divinities in full view with their pillared
vestibules and
their Pentelic marble, he tells the multitude that this God who was One, not
"Judaea gens Deum sine simulacro colit" (Varro, Fr. p. 229).
Hence the "Nil
praeter nubes et caeli numen adorat " of Juv. iiv. 97 and " Dedita sacris Incerti Judaea
Dei " of Luc. ii. 592 ; Tac. H. v. 6.
2 Paul had that beautiful spirit of charity which sees the soul of good even in things
evil. Hostile as he was to selfish hedonism, and to hard "apathy," he may yet have
seen that there was a good side to the philosophy both of Epicurus and Zeno, in so far
"
as Epicurus taught the happiness of a cultivated and self-contented mind, and Zeno
contributed to diffuse a lofty morality. "Encore quo les philosophes soient les protecteurs
de 1'erreur toutefois Us ont frappe a la porte de la verit& (Veritatis forea
pulsant. Tert.) S'ils ne sont pas entr&i dans son sanctuaire, ai us n ont pas eu le bonneur
de la voir et de 1'adorer dans son temple, Us se sont quelquefois pr6sentes a sea portiqueft,
qt lui ont rendu de loin quelque hommage " (Bossuet, Panty. & Ste. flntof****-
' The word TV'^I does not oQW }n the J?.T-