Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/547

 *tion, was at once well received by a vast majority of the hearers—but more especially by the Greeks, whose conceptions of the religion which they had espoused, were far more rational and exalted than even the notions of the original Israelites, whose common ideas of a Redeemer being connected and mixed up, as their whole faith was, so much with what was merely national and patriotic in their feelings, had led them to disregard the necessarily spiritual nature of the new revelation expected, and had caused them almost universally to image the Messiah as a mere Jewish conqueror, who was to aim mainly at the restoration of the ancient dominion of long-humbled Judah. Therefore, while the Greeks readily and joyfully accepted this glorious completion of the faith whose beginnings they had learned under the old covenant,—the Jews for the most part scornfully rejected the revelation which presented to them as their Messiah, "a man of sorrows,"—a Galilean,—a Nazarene,—one without pomp or power; the grand achievment of whose earthly career was that most ignominious death on the cross. No: this was not the Messiah for whom they looked and longed, as the glorious restorer of Israel, and the bloody conqueror of the Gentiles; and it was therefore with the greatest indignation that they saw the great majority of those converts from heathenism, whom they had made with so much pains, now wholly carried away with the humbling doctrines of these new teachers. Thus "moved with envy," the unbelieving Jews resorted to their usual expedient of stirring up a mob; and accordingly, certain low fellows of the baser sort among them, gathered a gang, and set the whole city on an uproar,—an effect which might seem surprising, from a cause apparently so trifling and inadequate, did not every month's observation on similar occurrences, among people that call themselves the most enlightened and free on the globe, suffice to show every reader, that to "set a whole city in an uproar," is the easiest thing in the world, and one more often done by "certain lewd fellows of the baser sort," about the merest trifle, than in any other way. And here then again, is another of those fac-simile exhibitions of true human nature, with which the honest and self-*evident story of Luke abounds; and in this particular instance what makes him so beautifully graphical and natural in his description of this manifestation of public opinion, is the fact that he himself was a spectator of the whole proceedings at Thessalonica,—and therefore gives an eye-witness story. The mob being