Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/551

 Under the impulse of such feelings, he immediately sought occasion to make an attack on this dominant spirit of idolatry. He accordingly, in his usual theater of exertion,—the Jewish synagogue,—freely made known the new revelation of the truth in Jesus, both to the Jews, and to those Gentiles who reverenced the God of Israel, and listened to religious instruction in the Jewish house of worship. With such effect did he proclaim the truth, and with such fervid, striking oratory, that the Athenians, always admirers and cultivators of eloquence, soon had their attention very generally drawn to the foreign teacher, who was publishing these very extraordinary doctrines, in a style of eloquence so peculiar and irregular. The consequence was, that his audiences were soon extended beyond the regular attendants on the Jewish synagogue worship, and many of the philosophic sages of the Athenian schools sat listening to the apostle of Jesus. They soon undertook to encounter him in argument; and Paul now resorting to that most classic ground, the Athenian forum, or Agora, was not slow to meet them. On the spot where Socrates once led the minds of his admiring hearers to the noble conceptions of moral truth, Paul now stood uttering to unaccustomed ears, the far more noble conceptions of a divine truth, that as far outwent the moral philosophy of "Athena's wisest son," as did the life, and death, and triumphs of the crucified Son of Man, the course and fate of the hemlock-drinker. Greatly surprised were his philosophical hearers, at these very remarkable doctrines, before unheard of in Greece, and various were the opinions and comments of the puzzled sages. Some of those of the Epicurean and Stoic schools, more particularly, had their pride and scorn quite moved at the seeming presumption of this fluent speaker, who without diffidence or doubt uttered his strange doctrines, though characterized by a style full of irregularities, and a dialect remarkably distinguished by barbarous provincialisms, and scornfully asked, "What does this rattling fellow mean?" Others, observing that he claimed such divine honors for Jesus, the founder of his faith, remarked, that "he seemed to be a preacher of foreign deities." At last, determined to have their difficulties resolved by the very highest authority, they took him before the very ancient and venerable court of the Areopagus, which was the supreme council in all matters that concerned religion. Here they invited him to make a full communication of the distinctive articles of his new faith, because they felt an honest desire to have the particulars of a subject