The life and work of St. Paul

ST. PAUL AT CORINTH. 813
had encamped on the Areopagus, and devoted to the flames the temples on the
Acropolis on the very grounds urged by St. Paul, " that the gods could not be
shut within walls, and that the whole universe was their home and temple." l
Yet the sword and fire of Xerxes, and all the millions of his vast host, have
been utterly impotent in then* effects, if we compare them to the results which
followed from the apparent failure of this poor and insulted tent-maker.
Of all who visit Athens, myriads connect it with the name of Paul who
never so much as remember that, since the epoch of its glory, it has been
trodden by the feet of poets and conquerors and kings. They think not of
Cicero, or Virgil, or Germanicus, but of the wandering tent-maker. In
all his seeming defeats lay the hidden germ of certain victory. He founded
no church at Athens, but there it may be under the fostering charge of the
converted Areopagite a church grew up. In the next century it furnished
to the cause of Christianity its martyr bishops and its eloquent apologists. 2
In the third century it flourished hi peace and purity. In the fourth century
it was represented at Nicaea, and the noble rhetoric of the two great Christian
friends St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nazianzus was trained in its Christian
schools. Nor were many centuries to elapse ere, unable to confront the
pierced hands which held a wooden Cross, its myriads of deities had fled into
the dimness of outworn creeds, and its tutelary goddess, in spite of the
flashing eyes which Homer had commemorated, and the mighty spear which
had been moulded out of the trophies of Marathon, resigned her maiden
chamber to the honour of that meek Galilsean maiden who had lived under
the roof of the carpenter of Nazareth the virgin mother of the Lord. 3
CHAPTER XXYIIL
ST. PAUL AT CORINTH.
" Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours
Slmffled their feet along the pavement white,
Companioned or alone ; while many a light
Flared here and there from wealthy festivals,
And threw their moving shadows on the walls,
Or found them clustered in the corniced shade
Of some arched temple-door or dusky colonnade."
KEATS, Lamia.
"Ecdtsia Dei in Corintho : Isetum et ingens paradoxon."
BENGKL, in 1 Cor. i. 2.
NNOTICED as he had entered it nay, even more unnoticed, for he was now
alone St. Paul left Athens. So little had this visit impressed him, that he
only once alludes to it, and though from the Acroeorinthus he might often
8 Publiua, A.D. 179; Quadratus, Euseb. H. B. iv. 23; Aristidea, A.D. 126; Athena-
goras, circ. A.D. 177.
3 It was probably in the sixth century, when Justinian closed the schools of philosophy,
that the Parthenon wa* dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and the Thesenm to Sfc
George of Cappadocia.