. Yet it still had a great name and was full
of culture and learning of a kind. It swarmed with so-called
philosophers of different schools, and with teachers and professors of
every variety of knowledge; and thousands of strangers of the wealthy
class, collected from all parts of the world, lived there for study or
the gratification of their intellectual tastes. It still represented
to an intelligent visitor one of the great factors in the life of the
world.

104. With the amazing versatility which enabled him to be all things
to all men, Paul adapted himself to this population also. In the
market-place, the lounge of the learned, he entered into conversation
with students and philosophers, as Socrates had been wont to do on the
same spot five centuries before. But he found even less appetite for
the truth than the wisest of the Greeks had met with. Instead of the
love of truth an insatiable intellectual curiosity possessed the
inhabitants. This made them willing enough to tolerate the advances of
any one bringing before them a new doctrine; and, as long as Paul was
merely developing the speculative part of his message, they listened to
him with pleasure. Their interest seemed to deepen, and at last a
multitude of them conveyed him to Mars' Hill, in the very center of the
splendors of their city, and requested a full statement of his faith.
He complied with their wishes and in the magnificent speech he there
made them, gratified their peculiar tastes to the full, as in sentences
of the noblest eloquence he unfolded the great truths of the unity of
God and the unity of man, which lie at the foundation of Christianity.
But, when he advanced from these preliminaries to touch the consciences
of his audience and address them about their own salvation, they
departed in a body and left him talking.

105. He quitted Athens and never returned to it. Nowhere else had he
so completely failed. He had been accustomed to endure the most
violent persecution and to rally from it with a light heart. But there
is something worse than persecution to a fiery faith like his, and he
had to encounter it here: his message roused neither interest nor
opposition. The Athenians never thought of persecuting him; they
simply did not care what the babbler said; and this cold disdain cut
him more deeply than the stones of the mob or the lictors' rods. Never
perhaps was he so much depressed. When he left Athens, he moved on to
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