Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/550

 HIS VISIT TO ATHENS.

Paul, thus obeying the command given by Jesus in his first charge to the original twelve, went on under the guidance of his Beroean brethren, according to his own request, by sea, to Athens, where he parted from them, giving them charge to tell Silas and Timothy to come on after him, as soon as their commission in Macedonia would allow. He then went about Athens, occupying the interval while he waited for them, in observations upon that most glorious of all earthly seats of art and taste. As he wandered on an unheeded stranger, among the still splendid and beautiful, though then half-decaying works, which the combined devotion, pride and patriotism of the ancient Athenians had raised to their gods, their country, and its heroes,—in the beautifully picturesque yet simple expression of the apostolic historian, "Paul saw the city wholly given to idolatry." How many splendid associations does it call up before the mental eye of the classical scholar who reads it? As the apostle wandered along among these thousand works of art, still so hallowed in the fond regard of the scholar, the antiquarian, the man of taste, the poet, and the patriot, his spirit was moved within him, when he every where saw how the whole city was given to idolatry. Not a spot but had its altar; every grove was consecrated to its peculiar nymphs, its Dryads and its Fauns; every stream and fountain had the votive marble for its own bright Nereid;—along the plain rose the splendid colonnades of the yet mighty temples of Jupiter, and all the Olympian gods; and above all, on the high Acropolis, the noble rose over the glorious city, proclaiming to the eye of the distant traveler, the honors of the virgin goddess of wisdom, of taste and philosophic virtue, whose name crowned the city, of which she, was throughout all the reign of Polytheism, the guardian deity.

These splendid but mournful testimonies of the misplaced energies of that inborn spirit of devotion, which, all over the world in all times, moves the heart of man to the worship of that Eternal power of whose existence he is ever conscious, touched the spirit of Paul with other emotions than those of delight and admiration. The eye of the citizen of classical and splendid Tarsus, was not indeed blind to the beauties of these works of art, whose fame was spread throughout the civilized world, and with whose historic and poetic glories his eye and ear had long been made familiar; but over them all was cast a moral and spiritual gloom which darkened all these high and rich remembrances, otherwise so bright.