Acts 17:16

THE GREAT UNIVERSITY CITY OF THE WORLD

‘How while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him, as he beheld the city full of idols.’

Acts 17:16 (R.V.)

St. Paul was too sensitive to history and too loyal to learning to remain indifferent to the proud memories of this city into which his missionary travel has brought him. It was “the great university city of the world.” His feelings, therefore, must have been akin to those which rise in the soul of an ardent American scholar when he visits England and sees Oxford or Cambridge for the first time.

I. It was not the fame of Athens which affected the Apostle most.—It was not its magnificent monuments, nor its picturesque situation, nor even the fact that the streets which he was treading, and the market which he had passed through were places where Socrates had taught, and Plato had written, and Demosthenes had spoken, and Phidias had worked. These things, we may believe, had their interest for St. Paul, but they did not move him profoundly. That which brought heat to his soul, that which made the Apostle burn, was the number and the nature of the city’s idols. Look which way he would in that great city there was idolatry. And not an idolatry of a refined and pardonable sort; not an idolatry which is picturesque without being gross, and which is content with personifying the powers of Nature after the best patterns of human things. It was not such an idolatry; but an idolatry which destroyed the very sense of modesty, which appealed to the animal passions of man, which deified evil and said to it: ‘Be thou my good.’

II. The idol worship which had got hold of Athens provoked St. Paul’s Christian spirit as he looked at it and took in its terrible significance. Had the Apostle been a cynic, he might have been satisfied with a less consuming feeling than hot indignation. As he took in the situation, feature by feature, he might have contented himself with the sarcastic reflection that ‘in this centre of the world’s education, amid the lecture rooms where the philosophers had taught for centuries that it was mere superstition to confuse an idol with the Divine nature which it represented—the idols were probably in greater number than anywhere else in St. Paul’s experience’ (Ramsey’s St. Paul: the Citizen and the Traveller). But the Apostle was never cool enough in the presence of great sin to play the cynic. He loved humanity too well to sneer with cold blood at the degrading results of its best philosophy. And, besides, was he not the missionary of Jesus Christ?

III. Who was Jesus Christ to St. Paul?—More than Socrates had ever been to his almost worshipping pupils in that very city of Athens. More than a great teacher, that is, whose personality is charming and whose principles are wise and good. Jesus Christ to St. Paul was, as he afterwards told these Athenian people, ‘the One Whom God had ordained to judge the world in righteousness.’ That was what Jesus Christ was to St. Paul. He was one who stood for the weal or woe of the human race. He was one against whom all baseness, all degradation of high things to low uses, all putting forward of darkness for light were abominations. He was one who alone could fill up the large measure of the claim ‘All souls are mine.’ Jesus Christ was this and more to St. Paul. And therefore it was that ‘his spirit was provoked within him as he beheld’ ‘the truth of God exchanged for a lie’ in this philosophic city of Athens.

IV. Jealousy for the Lord was working in St. Paul.—It was the same emotion which burnt in Elijah when he cried out that he had been ‘very jealous’ for the Lord of Hosts. The Apostle could not bear to see wickedness on the throne of culture. He could not assent to the animal in man enslaving the intellect and stifling the soul of man. And therefore it was that his spirit chafed and fretted as he looked around in Athens, and saw the shameful things before which the best-educated people of antiquity bowed themselves.

—Rev. Canon Lewis.

Illustration

‘One of our weekly reviews in its notice of a book on the reign of the Roman Emperor Tiberius says: “We do not believe in any special pruriency of imagination having infected the Italian mind in the first century. The material remains of Pompeii, surprised by ashes without a moment’s notice of preparation, show, as a whole, less of that side of human nature than any equal section of London or Paris, if surprised in the same way” (Athenæum, June 21, 1902). The Christian Church in its authoritative utterances has not gone so far as that. She has never been so bold as to say that London at the present moment exceeds Pompeii in wickedness. Whether it be so or not, it is not for us on the present occasion to decide. But after such plain speaking from the Athenæum on the subject of London’s moral condition, it is surely the duty of the Christian Church in the Metropolis to examine herself, and to see whether she has not been too lenient to London’s sins—and whether she has not often been dumb when she ought to have cried aloud and spared not.’