that there was or might be some Being beyond the circuit
of their recognition, who might be chagrined or angry if
Athens should overlook him. This admission the speaker
seizes on, and says There is such a God, unknown,
indeed, to you, and Him I proclaim. He thus replies that,
in one sense, he is not "a setter forth of strange gods 5" but
he does not say that the very god who owned the anony-
mous altar was Jehovah, for the god of that altar must
have been really an idol, so far as Athenian imagination
pictured him. But he took the idea which the inscription
implied, and expanded it. There is a God unknown to
you a being not found in your lists who has no statue
among these numerous groups, and no temple on that
eminence ; Him so dimly and scantily acknowledged, the
one true God, I proclaim. By this very thought he takes
Him out of the category of the Greek divinities. He is not
one of them, nor yet another of similar nature who claims
admission among them. O, no. He is

" God that made the world, and all things therein, see-
ing that He is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in
temples made with hands." He is God, the one Creator
of earth, and all in it and on it ; its furniture and its popu-
lation; its botanical productions and its living creatures.
The one God made the world its hills with their crowns
of snow, and its valleys with their fields and flowers ; its
rivers, lakes, and seas ; its mines and minerals ; its grasses
and herbs; its rock and soils; its climates and physical



GOD THE CREATOR. 193

influences ; every nation upon it, and all that supports
them and gives them occupation or pleasure. Tokens of
His existence are on every side alike in the atom of sand
and the strata of majestic mountains ; in the lordly eagle
and in the insect that sports away its existence during
the brief sunset; as well in the instinct which rules the
lower creation, as in the reason which dignifies man. The
air around, and the breeze which freshens into a hurricane
the tide which lifts the water of the gulf and harbour with
such periodical uniformity ; the freshness of spring and the
life of summer all are brought into being by the one
God on high. Nothing is self-produced. He is the one
Maker. Trees may propagate themselves, but their veins
and vessels, their secret chemical elaborations, their life and
organism, the fruit of the fig and the oil of the Athenian
olive, are from Him. The sculptor does not originate his
materials, nor the painter his colours ; each finding them
as made by the great Artist only recombines and applies
them. Demosthenes did not invent the language in which
he spoke, any more than the nightingale had taught herself
the melody which gushes from her throat. The Creator's
inspiration gives not only the love of art and the endow-
ments of genius, but He has also supplied what art and
genius had wrought upon the metal out of which the
sword of Miltiades had been forged, the parchment on
which the laws of Solon had been inscribed, and the ivory
and gold out of which the queenly statue of the city-
goddess had been constructed. Nor does nature only prove
that there is an original vital force, but also that this force,
as guided by wisdom and prompted by love, resides in a

N



194 PAUL AT ATHENS.

living personal Intelligence. The world is not eternal, nor
is it the result of an eternal series of causes, or the won-
drous product of chance. Nay, the more we explore the
causes in operation around us, and the farther and higher
we carry our analysis of them, the more do we feel them
relieved of complexity and converging into unity, and the
more clearly do we discern that all causes are themselves
but the effects of the First Great Cause, Himself uncaused
the " God that made the world and all things therein."

This conception strikes at the root of polytheism. The
Athenians had their gods which they specially claimed, and
the nations around them rejoiced in similar property. The
gods of the one were not the gods of the other, nor was any
alliance recognized among them. Each race had its own
tutelar divinity, to whose mythic powers it owed its exist-
ence, and sometimes its name. The hill on which Paul
stood had its title from one god, and the city had its name
from the guardian goddess Minerva Pallas Athene*. But
the apostle vindicates the unity of God as sole Creator.
He made and filled the earth " The earth is the Lord's, and
the fulness thereof, the world, and they that dwell therein."
The Athenians spent their time in continuous inquiries
after something new ; surely their passion for novelty was
now gratified. Creation was a new idea to them. Plato
had not dreamed of it ; Aristotle had taken it out of the
range of possibilities. The relation of matter to mind was
not understood among them, nor could they speculate suc-
cessfully on the origin of the universe. But the apostle's
simple statement laid down the truth, that the earth took
its being from God's creative power, was not, on the one



CREATION. 195

hand, a fortuitous concourse of atoms, nor, on the other,
the result of some necessary law which controlled divinity
itself, or acted without the superintendence of a personal
governing God. The forms of creation, as shown by modern
science, prove it to have been a voluntary act, and not the
product of what a French philosopher calls " a necessary
force." Nor has the Creator been obliged to repeat Him-
self. The fossils of the earlier rocks have no analogues
among the beds of the tertiaries. Successive acts of crea-
tion, and the introduction of a thousand new species, did
not exhaust His styles of work. "The Lord God, the
Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is
weary." He is not, as those Epicureans dreamed, some
dim phantom far above the stars in idle and voluptuous
indifference ; nor is He, as the Stoic argued, the soul of
the world, which

" Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent."

God made the earth, and He is above it and apart from it,
but yet its active Lord and untiring benefactor ; and it is
in no sense the complement of His being, or a necessary
evolution of His essence. The one Creator is enthroned
upon the work of His hands.

Creation is thus ascribed by the apostle to God, and
though we cannot comprehend the act or process, we never
can doubt it. For, if there has been no creation, then all
is eternal, and all is God or an evolution of God. On
such a hypothesis there can be no law, no freedom, no per-
sonality, and no moral distinctions ; for what we term sin
would be as really thought or done by God as what we



196 PAUL AT ATHENS.

term virtue, since He would be the only thinker and agent
in the universe. But, though we cannot understand
creation as either the making of something out of nothing,
or the eduction of result from latent almighty power, or
the image of what is real in the archetypal Mind, we can
know it in some of its properties. We can picture a por-
tion of space unfurnished, and then picture it as peopled
with worlds. Nor will it avail as an argument against
the idea of creation, that it implies change in an unchange-
able God ; for the purpose to create is eternal, and omni-
potence is not changed in essence when it puts forth an
effort. The relation of the finite to the infinite is of all
things indeed the most perplexing. That the one and that
the other exists our consciousness assures us in every act
of cognition. To deny the infinite and sink into atheism,
or to deny the finite and dream ourselves into pantheism,
is a revolt against reason, a vain attempt to burst those
limits which are necessarily imposed upon human thought.
We enter not on the question as to man's knowledge of
the infinite, or as to the form and foundation of his consti-
tutional beliefs. Only it is evident to consciousness that
ideas of eternity and infinity surround all our thoughts,
for to whatever point of time or of space we reach forth in
fancy, we are forced to believe in time and space still
stretching beyond. It is true that we can neither grasp
infinitude nor span eternity, but we do have a notion of
either without a comprehension of them such a notion as
suffices for faith and worship. So feeble is reason out of
its sphere, and so true, in fine, is the declaration of the
apostle "Through faith we understand that the worlds



GOD THE PROPRIETOR. 197

were framed by the word of God; so that things which
are seen were not made of things which do appear."

And as the sole originator He has the indefeasible right
of being sole governor. He is " Lord of heaven and earth,"
proprietor and ruler of the universe not earth only, but
heaven and earth. The immense spaces that the Greek
imagination could roam in, where the sun flamed in splen-
dour, and the moon waxed and waned in serener glory,
and the stars shone out like " isles of light," are, when
surveyed by the telescopic glass, found to be furnished with
innumerable worlds. Nothing like a limit to creation can
be discovered ; far as man can penetrate he finds star upon
star in compacted array. The distant star-dust has been
resolved into densely-crowded orbs; and light from the
remoter nebulae must have been two million of years on its
journey to us. The Lord of heaven has a kingdom which
no imagination can measure in its vastness, nor depict in its
variety and grandeur the firmament thickly strewn with
suns and planets. Surely such a one " dwelleth not in
temples made with hands." The temples in front of the
apostle, around him, and behind him, were the boast of
Grecian taste and skill. The gods to whom they were
dedicated were supposed, in some vague sense, to fill them.
Their respective gods had shrines in them, and claimed
them as their residence. They were, indeed, of unsurpassed
magnificence. The Theseum was the earliest and most
complete; the temple of Wingless Victory was "a thing of
beauty;" and there was in front of him the Parthenon
virgin's house, or temple of Minerva of majestic mass
and outline, formed of Pentelican marble, with its forty-six



198 PAUL AT ATHENS.

Doric columns adorned with sculptures and friezes, and its
inner walls decorated with choicest paintings. But the
Infinite can dwell in no such structure ; nor needs He
such a domicile. He fills space ; infinitude is His temple.
" Whither shall I go from thy Spirit ? or whither shall I
flee from thy presence ? If I ascend up into heaven, thou
art there : if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the utter-
most parts of the sea ; even there shall thy hand lead me
and thy right hand shall hold me." This God whom
Paul made known had no rival, no one like Him, no one
second to Him ; nor could He be supposed to inhabit any
edifice built by the hands of man. Such a notion was
unworthy of Him; it brought him down to the level of
humanity, as if He were one of many tenants, and not the
one proprietor. To localize Him would be to degrade
Him.

" Neither is He worshipped with men's hands, as though
He needed anything;" worshipped served or cared for.
The popular heathen idea was that the gods needed to be
ministered unto, though the minds of a few thinking men,
as Lucretius and Seneca, might rise above such a gross
conception. Thus the priest of Apollo remonstrates :

" If e'er with wreaths I hung thy sacred fane,
Or fed the flames with fat of oxen slain,
God of the silver bow, thy shafts employ,
Avenge thy servant, and the Greeks destroy."

The god was supposed to be placed under obligation by
the service rendered to him, and was expected in equity
to repay it. But this notion cannot apply to the Divine



GOD THE PROVIDER. 199

Being, seeing He " giveth to all life, and breath, and all
things " the one universal benefactor. No one has any-
thing which God has not given him j and the highest gift
life conscious being, " life and breath " life and that
respiration on which life depends are from Him ; nay, life
and all things all that makes life desirable and happy.

He giveth "life," and none but He, the Living One.
It is a rill from the Fountain of life. Growth and other
qualities belong to plants, such as circulation of sap
and respiration by their leaves ; but life characterizes
man with its voluntary and involuntary functions, its
enjoyments and capabilities, its appetites and instincts,
its operations on the world without it, and its conscious
possession of its powers within it. Pleasure, glory, and
usefulness are bound up with its prolongation. So sweet is
it that few choose to part with it, and the cessation of it
was regarded by the apostle's hearers as the direst of calami-
ties. He who is our life confers and supports it in His
ineffable goodness for "man liveth not by bread alone."

He giveth " breath," which, as the condition and means
of life, is, therefore, singled out by the apostle. Even then
the atmosphere was popularly valued as the first of neces-
sary gifts, and, when scientifically examined, its preciousness
is not only confirmed, but it becomes a powerful proof
of divine unceasing goodness. For the air we breathe
is endowed with many qualities, the loss or disturbance
of which must be fatal to life. If it lose its gravity, or
if its elasticity be changed or become changeable ; if it
thicken, and darken, and cease to be an invisible medium ;
if it be deprived of its compressibility, or if any amount



200 PAUL AT ATHENS.

of cold could condense it ; if the gases composing it were
to vary in their proportions ; or if it were not universally
present, and what is vitiated by respiration purified and
restored animal existence would be extinguished on the
face of the earth.

And His bounty is immense, for He giveth " all things."
Whatever we have He has given us the food on our table,
and the raiment on our persons, with ability to win them
and health to enjoy them. Let there be a scanty harvest,
and, when corn cannot be bought with money, there must be
famine ; let a worm gnaw the cotton plant, and the shadow
of death would be cast over Britain capital useless, gold
without circulation, trades unemployed, machinery without
motion, empty warehouses, ships without freights, and
millions in want of work and bread. Nor let any man
boast of being the architect of his own fortune ; for the
materials out of which he builds it, the skill with which
he constructs it, and the propitious season which enables
him to rear it without pause or discomfiture are each of
them the gift of the one sovereign benefactor. Discovery,
invention, science, art, adventure, commercial shrewdness,
literary power, mechanical skill, and political success ; the
sharp eye that is first to perceive the " tide in the affairs
of men j" and the wary enterprise that launches the vessel
upon it are not self-originated. "Every good gift and
every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from
the Father of Lights."

Everything possessed by everyone, without exception of
gift or person, is of God's bestowal. God is, therefore, inde-
pendent of man for His happiness ; it wells up from an






SPIRITUAL SERVICE. 201

exhaustless fountain in His own bosom. Nor is He in need
of such services as are made in human temples neither
the blood of sacrifices to support, nor the odour of incense
to refresh Him. For He is the one Giver, always giving
and never getting, still bestowing and never repaid there
being a perpetual outflow, but no reflux. If, therefore,
all that man has be from God, and all he proposes to
supply his divinities with be from the same source, it is
plain that He who gives it, and has so freely parted with
it, is not in need of it. The wretched anthropomorphism
which had crept in among the Jews is thus reproved by
the psalmist " I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices,
or thy burnt-offerings, to have been continually before me.
I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he-goats out
of thy folds : for every beast of the forest is mine, and the
cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the
mountains ; and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If
I were hungry, I would not tell thee : for the world is
mine, and the fulness thereof. Will I eat the flesh of
bulls, or drink the blood of goats ? Offer unto God
thanksgiving ; and pay thy vows unto the most High ;
and call upon me in the day of trouble ; I will deliver thee,
and thou shalt glorify me." His service must correspond
to His nature, and must, therefore, be spiritual service.
Those who are so liberally provided for by Him, who live
by His bounty and breathe His air, and owe all things to
His goodness, will surely rejoice to bless Him ; and when
they feel that they have no claim on His generosity, and
that yet it is so unceasing, will they not invoke their souls
and all within them " to bless His holy name?" " Can a



202 PAUL AT ATHENS.

man be profitable to God as he that is wise may be pro-
fitable to himself?" "If thou be righteous, what givest
thou Him, or what receiveth He of thine hand?" He is
not worshipped with men's hands, but with men's hearts.
The silent hymn of a grateful spirit rolls upward to His
ear, though no music should be warbled from the lips.
" God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must wor-
ship Him in spirit and in truth." When Solomon dedi-
cated the temple, he exclaimed under this impression
" But will God in very deed dwell with men on the earth ?
Behold, heaven, and the heaven of heavens, cannot con-
tain thee, how much less this house that I have built ! "
And, in his address before the council, Stephen had said
in Paul's hearing " Howbeit the Most High dwelleth
not in temples made with hands as saith the prophet,
Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool; what
house will ye build me, saith the Lord, or what is the
place of my rest? hath not my hand made all these things?"



PAUL AT ATHENS. 203



fart tt

Having shown them the divine independence and self-
sufficiency, the apostle proceeds to assert the unity of the
human race as being of one origin, and no matter how
widely they may have been scattered as being guided and
controlled by the one God in their migrations and settle-
ments ; their history being but the record of His dealings
with them, and His regulation of their movements. He adds
" And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to
dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the
times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation."
All the nations are of one blood or race. The Athenians
boasted that they were autochthones self-produced, or
sprung of the soil of Attica, and looked with contempt on
surrounding barbarians. But all had a common origin,
and none could vaunt themselves over their neighbours.
The Greek with that lofty brow " the dome of thought ''
who lived on the idea of beauty, with whom the arts
had found a home, and who had a history so grand from
the days of Solon, was a brother of the rude Scythian
with the low forehead and stolid visage, who wore a coarse
vesture of sheepskin, and was as ignorant in soul as
degraded in life. For God "hath made caused all
nations for to dwell settle on all the face of the earth."
Whatever advantage any nation has in the country
occupied by it, is due to God. It fills the realm which



204 PAUL AT ATHENS.

God designed for it. Attica had not been chosen by
the people on account of its superior qualities, but God
chose it for them. It was not Hercules, Cecrops, Pelops,
Theseus, or any other ancient mythical leader, that had
selected Greece, but God had made the region, and made
their forefathers to migrate into it. Bceotia, Sparta,
Sicily, and Ionia, with many cities in which they had
contended, were sprung of the same stock as themselves.
And he who was now bespeaking their attention, whose
dark eye and aquiline features showed him to be of a
race which they despised, and whose annals they could
not appreciate, stood, in point of lineage, on the same level
with themselves.

Polytheism is bound up with the notion of distinct and
different races. But if all nations be alike in bodily struc-
ture, and one blood be in all their veins, and they possess the
same range of instinct and appetites, their oneness of origin
is demonstrated. That man, no matter what his colour, or
stature, or home, is but one species with many varieties, is
a truth proved by ethnology, and confirmed by the results
of comparative philology. Among the lower creation, the
skull of the mastiff differs more from that of the Italian
greyhound, than the skull of the European from the central
African or the Hottentot, and dogs and horses carried to
the hills in India lose their hair and become woolly, like the
shawl-goats of the country. Complexion and features are
soon altered by climate and physical condition. The third
generation of educated and well-fed negroes loses the prog-
nathous type, while filth and famine are known to reduce
white victims to a dull and meaningless cast of countenance.



THE NATIONS OF ONE ORIGIN. 205

He that made the world and all things therein, is, therefore,
God of all the nations. It is a fiction for them to have
separate gods, as if each tribe had sprung from a different
deity, and owed him homage as lord and guardian. The
nations are all brethren, created by the one Divine Being
" Have we not all one Father; hath not one God created us?"
It was imagined, too, that the various gods had separate
and independent territories, beyond which their jurisdiction
did not go, and which they were often obliged to defend
against invasion. In the Homeric songs they espouse
rival interests, and cabal and quarrel in petty jealousy
and revenge. Juno will have her way for her favourites,
Venus will not desert hers, Apollo sends a plague upon
the Greeks because his priest is insulted, while Jupiter
is at his wit's end amid the strifes and antipathies of
Olympus. Nay, Minerva (Athene') had contended for the
possession of Athens with Neptune, he appealing to a well
which had sprung up at the stroke of his trident, and she
to an olive which the king had seen her plant on the
summit of the Acropolis. The deities of Greece were
powerless in Italy, and had neither name nor residence in
Persia. Every race had its mythology, and would fight for
its idols as readily as for its acres, so that a war between
two nations was usually a war between their gods, as well
as between their soldiers. But the apostle tells them that
the nations, no matter how distant in settlement, unlike
in colour, civilization, or worship, descend from a common
ancestry, and have a common origin in God. All the
power and sovereignty which they assigned to numerous
local divinities was, therefore, to be concentrated in one



206 PAUL AT ATHENS.

great Being the Maker of the world, and the Lord of
heaven and earth.

And this one Being also "hath determined the times
before appointed, and the bounds of their habitations."
This doctrine was also taught by Moses " When the
most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when
he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of
the people according to the number of the children
of Israel." The periods of their existence have been
defined, and its limits mapped out by God. By the
periods he means not simply their national duration, but
also the crises or turning-points in their national experi-
ence. And they had many of them in their own history.
Not to speak of such epochs as the return of the Heracleids,
the religious mission of Epimenides, the deeds of the
Alcmaeonids, the despotism of Pisistratus, or the usurpa-
tion of the thirty tyrants, there had been the battle of
Marathon, when Asiatic invasion was repelled by a gallant
handful, and, ten years after, the victorious naval action at
Salamis both of them hairs-breadth escapes for Athens,
and both securing against loss of liberty and degradation
into a Persian satrapy. These momentous junctures were
the fore-appointment of an unrecognized Protector, who
settles the limits of nations ; for there is a boundary which
they can not pass, no matter what their ambition, and
what the success of their arms. Their own defeats, and
the ostracism of so many of their leaders, had shown this.
Miltiades the patriot of Marathon, and Themistocles the
hero of Salamis, had been sent into exile for misadventures
by which the ambitious projects of Greece were limited,



HISTORICAL CRISES. 207

and similar had been the fate of Cimon and Alcibiades.
Beyond certain termini Athens could not, with all her