el Christian church. As usual, however, the Jews stirred
up animosities, and Paul and Silas were obliged to leave, spending
several days at Berea and preaching successfully among the Greeks. These
conquests were the most brilliant that Paul had yet made,--not among
enervated Asiatics, but bright, elegant, and intelligent Europeans,
where women were less degraded than in the Orient.

Leaving Timothy and Silas behind him, Paul, accompanied by some faithful
Bereans, embarked for Athens,--the centre of philosophy and art, whose
wonderful prestige had induced its Roman conquerors to preserve its
ancient glories. But in the first century Athens was neither the
fascinating capital of the time of Cicero, nor of the age of Chrysostom.
Its temples and statues remained intact, but its schools could not then
boast of a single man of genius. There remained only dilettante
philosophers, rhetoricians, grammarians, pedagogues, and pedants, puffed
up with conceit and arrogance, with very few real inquirers after truth,
such as marked the times of Socrates and Plato. Paul, like Luther, cared
nothing for art; and the thousands of statues which ornamented every
part of the city seemed to him to be nothing but idols. Still, he was
not mistaken in the intense paganism of the city, the absence of all
earnestness of character and true religious life. He was disappointed,
as afterward Augustine was when he went to Rome. He expected to find
intellectual life at least, but the pretenders to superior knowledge in
that degenerate university town merely traded on the achievements of
their ancestors, repeating with dead lips the echo of the old
philosophies. They were marked only by levity, mockery, sneers, and
contemptuous arrogance; idlers were they, in quest of some new
amusement.

The utter absence of sympathy among all classes given over to
frivolities made Paul exceedingly lonely in Athens, and he wrote to
Timothy and Silas to join him with all haste. He wandered about the
streets distressed and miserable. There was no field for his labors. Who
would listen to him? What ear could he reach? He was as forlorn and
unheeded as a temperance lecturer would be on the boulevards of Paris.
His work among the Jews was next to nothing, for where trade did not
flourish there were but few Jews. Still, amid all this discouragement,
it would seem that Paul attracted sufficient notice, from his
conversation with the idlers and chatterers of the Agora, to be i