great numbers of priests. At certain
seasons of the year it was a resort for flocks of pilgrims from the
surrounding regions; and the inhabitants of the town flourished by
ministering in various ways to this superstition. The goldsmiths drove
a trade in little silver models of the image of the goddess which the
temple contained and which was said to have fallen from heaven. Copies
of the mystic characters engraven on this ancient relic were sold as
charms. The city swarmed with wizards, fortune-tellers, interpreters
of dreams and other gentry of the like kind, who traded on the
mariners, merchants and pilgrims who frequented the port.

113. Paul's work had therefore to assume the form of a polemic against
superstition. He wrought such astonishing miracles in the name of
Jesus that some of the Jewish palterers with the invisible world
attempted to cast out devils by invoking the same name; but the attempt
issued in their signal discomfiture. Other professors of magical arts
were converted to the Christian faith and burnt their books. The
vendors of superstitious objects saw their trade slipping through their
fingers. To such an extent did this go at one of the festivals of the
goddess that the silversmiths, whose traffic in little images had been
specially smitten, organized a riot against Paul, which took place in
the theater and was so successful that he was forced to quit the city.

114. But he did not go before Christianity was firmly established in
Ephesus, and the beacon of the gospel was twinkling brightly on the
Asian coast, in response to that which was shining from the shores of
Greece on the other side of the Aegean. We have a monument of his
success in the churches lying all around Ephesus which St. John
addressed a few years afterward in the Apocalypse; for they were
probably the indirect fruit of Paul's labors. But we have a far more
astonishing monument of it in the Epistle to the Ephesians. This is
perhaps the profoundest book in existence; yet its author evidently
expected the Ephesians to understand it. If the orations of
Demosthenes, with their closely packed arguments between the
articulations of which even a knife cannot be thrust, be a monument of
the intellectual greatness of the Greece which listened to them with
pleasure; if the plays of Shakspeare, with their deep views of life and
their obscure and complex language, be a testimony to the strength of
mind of the Elizabethan A