The life and work of St. Paul

310 THE LIFE AND WOUK OF ST. FATTL.
many, dwelt not in their toil-wrought temples, 1 but in the eternal temple of
His own creation. But while he thus denies the Polytheism of the multitude,
his words tell with equal force against the Pantheism of the Stoic, and the
practical Atheism of the Epicurean. While he thus de-consecrated, as it
were, the countless temples, the Stoics would go thoroughly with him a
; when
he said that God needeth not our ritualisms, the Epicurean would almost
recognise the language of his own school 3
; but, on the other hand, he laid the
axe at the root of their most cherished convictions when he added that Matter
was no eternal entity, and God no impersonal abstraction, and Providence no
mere stream of tendency without us, which, like a flow of atoms, makes for
this or that ; but that He was at once the Creator and the Preserver, the living
and loving Lord of the material universe, and of all His children in the
great family of man, and of all the nations, alike Jew and Gentile, alike Greek
and barbarian, which had received from His decrees the limits of then* endur-
ance and of their domains. In this one pregnant sentence he also showed the
falsity of all autochthonous pretensions, and national self-glorifications, at the
expense of others, as well as of all ancient notions about the local limitations
of special deities. The afflicted Jew at whom they were scoffing belonged to
a race as dear to Him as the beautiful Greek and the barbarian ;
was equally
His care, as from His throne Ho beholds all the dwellers upon earth. And
when ho told them that God had given them the power to find Him, and that
they had but dimly groped after Him in the darkness nnd when he clenched
by the well-known hemistich of Aratus and Cleanthes (perhaps familiar to
them at their solemn festivals) the truth that we are near and dear to Him,
the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand, they would be prepared
for the conclusion that all these cunning effigies at which he pointed as he
spoke all these carved and molten and fictile images, were not and could not
be semblances of Him, and ought not to be worshipped* were they even as
venerable as the "heaven-fallen image" the Aiotrerls &ya\fia of their
patron-goddess, or glorious as the chryselephantine statue on which Phidias
had expended his best genius and Athens her richest gifts.
Thus far, then, with a considerateness which avoided all offence, and a
power of reasoning and eloquence to which they could not be insensible, he
had demonstrated the errors of his listeners mainly by contrasting them with
the counter-truths which it was his mission to announce. 5 But lest the mere
1 2 Chron. Vi. 32, 33. iroto? S' a.v O!KO rettroviav wXorOU VTO AV* TO Selov ircpt/JoAoi TOI^M*
mxM ; (Eur. ap. Clem. Alex. Strom. V. xi. 76).
*
Seneca, ap. Lact. Instt. vi. 25, and Ep, Mor. x.xxi. 11.
/'Omnis enim per se Divom natura necesse est
Immortal! aevo sumiuft cum pace
fruatur . . .
Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nihil indigo, nosiri." Lucr. 11. 850.
Cf. Sen. Ep. 95, 47. St. Paul, however, more probably derived the sentiment, If from
any source, from 2 Mace. xiv. 35, or from Ps. 1. 11, 12 ; Job xli. 11.
4 See for the Pagan view Cic. de Nat. Dew. i. 18.
5 Tiie Epicurean notion of happiness as the result of coarser atoms was as marterial as
Paley's, who considers it to be "a certain state of the nervous system in that part of the
system in which we feel joy and grief . . . which may be the upper region of the stomach
or the fine net-work lining the whole region of the praecordia '
Philos, ch. vi.).
(Moral