The life and work of St. Paul

BOYHOOD IN A. HEATHEN CITY, 19
The state of affairs resulting from the social atmosphere which he proceeds
to describe is as amusing as it is despicable. It gives us a glimpse of the
professorial world in days of not such as
Pagan decadence; of a professorial world,
it now is, and often has been, in our English and German
Universities, where Christian brotherhood and mutual esteem have taken
the place of wretched rivalism, and where good and learned men devote
their lives to " gazing on the bright countenance of truth in the mild and
dewy air of delightful studies," but as it was also in the days of the Poggios,
Filolfos, and Politians of the Renaissance cliques of jealous scwans, narrow,
selfish, unscrupulous, base, sceptical, impure bursting with gossip, scandal,
" "
and spite. The thrones of
" "
these little academic gods were as
mutually hostile and as universally degraded as those of the Olympian deities,
in which it was, perhaps, a happy thing that they had ceased to believe. One
another avenged himself
illustrious professor cheated the State by stealing oil ;
on an opponent by epigrams ; another by a nocturnal bespattering of his
house ; and rhetorical jealousies often ended in bloody quarrels. On this
modifying spectacle of littleness in great places the people in general looked
with admiring eyes, and discussed the petty discords of these squabbling
sophists as though they were matters of historical importance. 1 We can well
imagine how unutterably frivolous this apotheosis of pedantism would appear
to a serious-minded and faithful Jew ; and it may have been his Tarsian
reminiscences which added emphasis to St. Paul's reiterated warnings that
"
the wise men of heathendom, " alleging themselves to be wise, became fools ;
that " they became vain La their disputings, and their unintelligent heart
'' 2 "
was darkened that the wisdom of this world is ;
folly in the sight of God,
for it is written, He who graspeth the wise in their own craftiness." And
again, " the Lord knoweth the reasonings of the wise that they are vain." 3
But while he thus confirms his tenet, according to his usual custom, by
Scriptural quotations from Job and the Psalms, and elsewhere from Isaiah and
Jeremiah, 4 he reiterates again and again from his own experience that the
Greeks seek after wisdom and regard the Cross as foolishness, yet that the
foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God stronger than
men, and that God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound
the wise, and the base things of the world to cosfound the mighty ; and that
when, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God,
it pleased God by "the foolishness of the proclamation" 6
for in his
strong irony he loves and glories in the antitheses of his opponent's choosing
" by the foolishness of the thing preached " to save them that believe. 8
If the boasted wisdom of the Greek and Roman world was such as the young
rt OVTOVJ Sunups i Kvivoc, ty wapoucdGrivTai, Ka.0a.irtp rwy bpi-idiov oi vypoC (Philostr.
ubi supr.).
2 Horn. i. 21, 22. 1 Cor. ffi. 1820.
4 Job v. 13; Ps. xciv. 11; Isa. xiix. 14; xxxiii. 18; xliv. 25; Jer. viii 9: 1 Cor. L
1827.
5 1 Cor. L 21, SLO. rfft Utopias rov mipuwaTos.
1 Cor. L 1826; ii 14; iii. 19; iv. 10; 2 Cor. jd. 16, 19.