jug of water. Like the
Stoic, he believed in perfect freedom of speech, and therefore he
spoke loudly and often abusively of all and sundry who appeared to him
to deserve it. Some such men doubtless were sincere enough, like the
earlier hermits or preaching friars, but many of them were simply idle
and virulent impostors who thoroughly deserved that name of the "dog"
which was commonly given to them, and which came to designate their
school.

The mention of impostors and hypocrites brings us naturally to a point
which may have been foreseen. To the ancient world the professional
philosophers were the nearest approach to our professional clergy.
They affected an appearance accordingly; and the philosopher was
regularly known by his long beard, his coarse cloak, and his staff.
But, alas! there were many who disgraced their cloth. There were Stoic
teachers who practised all manner of secret vices, and whose behaviour
was in outrageous contradiction to their creed of the "absence of
emotions." There were not only many Honeymans, there were many
Stigginses. There were idlers and vagabonds on a level with the
mendicant friars and pardon-sellers of the time of Chaucer. There were
pompous hypocrites. Also side by side with the serious and earnest
philosopher, as deeply learned in the books of his sect as a modern
divine, there were charlatans and dabblers. It is unfortunately in
this last light that the Apostle Paul appeared to the professional
Stoic and Epicurean teachers of Athens. They were the finished
products of the philosophic schools of the most famous universities,
while he was supposed by them to be teaching some new kind of
philosophy. Philosophers were apt to be itinerant, and St. Paul was
looked upon as but another of these new arrivals. In his language they
detected what seemed to be borrowed notions not consistently bound
together, and they therefore called him by a name which it is not easy
to translate. Literally it is "a picker up of seeds"--that is to say,
a sciolist who gathers scraps from profounder people and gives them
out with an air. Perhaps the nearest, although an undignified, word is
"quack." That Paul possessed a knowledge of Greek philosophy, and
particularly of Stoicism, is practically certain. He came from Tarsus
in Cilicia, and Cilicia was the native home of many leading Stoics,
including its greatest representative in all antiquity. He had been
taught by Gamaliel, who was versed in "the learn