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Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History, a non-fiction book by Charlotte M. Yonge |
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Chapter 39. The Gospel In Greece. B.C. 146-A.D. 60 |
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_ CHAPTER XXXIX. THE GOSPEL IN GREECE. B.C. 146-A.D. 60 After a time Macedon and Achaia were made by the Romans into provinces, each of which had a governor who had been one year in a magistrate's office at Rome, and then was sent out to rule in a province for three or for five years. In 146, nearly a hundred years after the ruin of Corinth, Julius Caesar built it up again in great strength and beauty, and made it the capital of Achaia. As it stood where the Isthmus was only six miles across, and had a beautiful harbour on each side, travellers who did not wish to go round the dangerous headlands of the Peloponnesus used to land on one side and embark on the other. Thus Corinth become one of the great stations for troops, and also a mart for all kinds of merchandise, and was always full of strangers, both Greeks and Jews. The Romans, as conquerors, had rights to be tried only by their own magistrates and laws, and these laws were generally just. They were, however, very hard on subject nations; and, therefore, the best thing that could happen to a man was to be made a Roman citizen, and this was always done to persons of rank, by way of compliment--sometimes to whole cities. Athens had never had a great statesman or soldier in her since the time of Phocion, but her philosophers and orators still went on discoursing in the schools, and for four hundred years at least Athens was a sort of university town, where the rich young men from Rome, Carthage, Alexandria, Asia Minor, and Syria came to see the grand old buildings and works of art, and to finish their education. For though the great men of Greece were all dead, their works, both in stone and in writing, still remained, and were the models of all the world, and their language was spoken all over the East. The Romans' own tongue, Latin, was used at home, of course, but every gentleman knew Greek equally well, and all the Syrians, Jews, and Egyptians who had much intercourse with them used Greek as the language sure to be known--much as French is now used all over Europe. But there was an answer coming to all those strainings and yearnings after God and His truth which had made those old Greek writings beautiful. There is a story that one night a ship's crew, passing near a lonely island in the AEgean Sea, sacred to the gods, heard a great wailing and crying aloud of spirit voices, exclaiming, "Great Pan is dead." Pan was the heathen god of nature, to whom sacred places were dedicated, and this strange crying was at the very night after a day when, far away in Judaea, the sun had been darkened at noon, and the rocks were rent, and One who was dying on a cross had said, "It is finished." For the victory over Satan and all his spirits was won by death. Some fifteen years later than that day, as Paul, a Jew of Tarsus, in Asia Minor, with the right of Roman citizenship, and a Greek education, was spreading the knowledge of that victory over the East--while he slept at the new Troy built by Alexander, there stood by his bed, in a vision by night, a man of Macedon, saying, "Come over and help us." He went, knowing that the call came from God, and the cities of Macedon gained quite new honours. Philippi, where he was first received, had a small number of Jews in it, to whom he spake by the river side, but many Greeks soon began to listen; and then it was that the evil spirits, who spake aloud to men in heathen lands, first had to own the power of Christ, who had conquered. A slave girl, who had long been possessed by one of these demons, was forced at the sight of Paul and his companion Silas to cry aloud, "These men are the servants of the Most High God, which show unto us the way of salvation." She followed them about for some days doing this, until Paul, grieved in the spirit, bade the evil one, in JESUS' name, to leave her. At once the name of the Conqueror caused the demon to depart; but the owner of the slave girl, enraged at the loss of her soothsaying powers, accused the Apostle and his friend to the magistrates, and, without examination, they were thrown into prison. At night, while they sang praise in the dungeon, an earthquake shook it; the doors were open, the fetters loosed, and the jailer, thinking them fled, would have killed himself, but for Paul's call to him that all were safe. He heard the Word of life that night, and was baptised; but St. Paul would not leave the prison, either then or at the permission of the magistrates, when they found they had exceeded their powers, but insisted that they should come themselves to fetch him out, thus marking his liberty as a Roman, so that others might fear to touch him. He had founded a church at Philippi, in which he always found great comfort and joy; and when he was forced to go on to Thessalonica, he found many willing and eager hearers among the Greeks; but the Jews, enraged at his teaching these, stirred up the mob, and not only forced him to leave that city, but hunted him wherever he tried to stop in Macedon, so that he was obliged to hurry into the next province, Achaia, and wait at Athens for the companions whom he had left to go on with his work at Philippi and Thessalonica. While at Athens, the multitude of altars and temples, and the devotion paid to them, stirred his spirit, so that he could not but speak out plainly, and point to the truth. It seemed a new philosophy to the talkers and inquirers, who had talked to shreds the old arguments of Plato and Epicurus, and longed for some fresh light or new interest; and he was invited to Areopagus to set forth his doctrine. There, in the face of the Parthenon and the Acropolis, with philosophers and students from all parts of the empire around, he made one of his greatest and noblest speeches--"Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are greatly religious. For as I passed through your city, and beheld how ye worship, I found an altar with this inscription--'TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.' Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship; Him declare I unto you." Then, looking forth on the temples crowded on the rocks, he tried to open their minds to the truth that the God of all dwells in no temples made with hands, that all men alike are His children, and that, since living, breathing, thinking man has sprung from Him, it is lowering His greatness to represent Him by cold, dead, senseless stone, metal, or ivory. "He bore with the times of ignorance," said Paul; "but now He called on all men to turn to Him to prepare for the day when all should be judged, by the Man whom He had ordained for the purpose, as had been shown by His rising from the dead." The Greeks had listened to the proclamation of one great unseen God, higher than art could represent; but when Paul spoke of rising from the dead, they burst into mockery. They had believed in spirits living, but not in bodies rising again, and the philosophers would not listen. Very few converts were made in Athens, only Dionysius, and a woman named Damaris, and a few more; and the city of learning long closed her ears against those who would have taught her what Socrates and Plato had been feeling after like men in the dark. At the merchant city of Corinth, Paul had greater success; he stayed there nearly two years, and from thence sent letters to the Thessalonians, who were neglecting their daily duties, expecting that our Lord was about immediately to return. After Paul had left Corinth, he wrote to that city also, first to correct certain evils that had arisen in the Church there, and afterwards to encourage those who had repented, and promise another visit. This visit, as well as one to his Macedonian churches, was paid in his third journey; and when he had been arrested at Jerusalem, and was in Rome awaiting his trial before the emperor, Nero, he wrote to his friends at Philippi what is called the Epistle of Joy, so bright were his hopes of his friends there. St. Andrew also laboured in Greece, and was put to death in Achaia, by being fastened to a cross of olive-wood, shaped like an X, where he hung exhorting the people for three days before he died. When St. Paul was released, he and the great evangelist St. John, and such of the apostles as still survived, set the Church in order, appointing bishops over their cities, and Dionysius of Athens became Bishop of Corinth, and St. Paul's pupil from Antioch, Titus, was Bishop of Crete, and received an epistle from Paul on the duties of his office. In process of time Christianity won its way, and the oracles became silent, as the demons which spoke in them fled from the Name of JESUS. _ |
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