* NOV 8 1910 *; 
 
 Division j5SZG5"'^ 
 Section .W )5 
 

^j> William gurnet Wxi^lit 
 
 CITIES OF PAUL: Beacons of the Past rekindled 
 for the Present. i6mo, $i.io, nei. Postage extra 
 
 ANCIENT CITIES, FROM THE DAWN TO THE 
 DAYLIGHT. i6mo, $1.25. 
 
 THE WORLD TO COME. Sermons. i6mo, $1.25. 
 
 MASTER AND MEN: The Sermon on the Moun- 
 tain Practiced on the Plain. i6mo, $1.25. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 
 Boston and New York. 
 
CITIES OF PAUL 
 
CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 95eacon^ of tl^e ^a$t refttnMeti 
 for t^t ^re^ent 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM BURNET WRIGHT 
 
 NOV 8 1910 
 
 llCkl SEtf 
 
 ^^OOinu <l^\\l^ 
 
 AUTHOR OF "ANCIENT CITIES, FROM THE DAWN TO 
 THE DAYLIGHT'* 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY 
 
 1905 
 
TO THE READER 
 
 The diseases which infected all and 
 ruined most of the cities mentioned in 
 this book are not strangers among us. 
 Political rings more insolent and more 
 rapacious than that which plundered 
 Tarsus are objects familiar to most 
 Americans. The greed that turned into 
 bandits the merchants of Corinth has 
 perverted into depredators upon the 
 community some, at least, of those sol- 
 diers without uniforms, whose legitimate 
 business is to defend it from hunger and 
 cold and nakedness. Roman contempt 
 for the helpless slave has reappeared in 
 that brutal indifference to the public wel- 
 fare shown alike by syndicates of capital 
 and combinations of labor ; upper and 
 nether millstones grinding the rest of us 
 between them. Many trustees of enor- 
 mous revenues confided to their charge 
 
viii TO THE READER 
 
 for use in visiting the fatherless and 
 widows in their affliction do not appear 
 to have kept themselves unspotted from 
 the world. The taint of the spirit which 
 degraded Greek athletics is said to have 
 touched even our universities. These, 
 and other facts of which the effects are 
 traced in these pages, appear, when illu- 
 mined by the " Beacons of the Past," 
 sufficiently alarming. 
 
 But there are signs of better things to 
 come. A general insurrection against the 
 usurped authority of spoilsmen and the 
 forces of organized injustice has begun. 
 It is gaining strength. Shifty politicians 
 who have led the people by the tinkle 
 of party names as bell-wethers lead 
 sheep are bewildered by a new spirit 
 with which their experience has not 
 taught them how to cope. In many 
 places they have seen themselves dis- 
 regarded, and their henchmen outvoted 
 in favor of what they have despised 
 
TO THE READER ix 
 
 as " Sunday-school politics/' The men 
 whose popularity to-day eclipses all other 
 reputations are those who have shown 
 the disposition and ability which enabled 
 Gideon to cast down the altar of corrup- 
 tion that defiled his home, and to break 
 the power of its ministers. 
 
 Young men — in whom is the hope 
 of the Republic — are enlisting with un- 
 selfish enthusiasm and in constantly in- 
 creasing numbers to fight the good fight. 
 The corrupters are hard pressed. The 
 only dangers honest men need fear are 
 those which arise when enthusiasm grows 
 weary in well doing. Against that temp- 
 tation may this little book help to brace 
 true patriots by leading them in hours 
 of discouragement or apparent defeat to 
 ponder the experiences of that preemi- 
 nent reformer who, when he was weak, 
 was strong because he felt that he could 
 " do all things " through the One who 
 strengthened him. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PACK 
 
 I. Tarsus, the City of Paul's Youth i 
 
 II. Ephesus, the City of Superstitions 25 
 
 III. Philippi, the City of the Suicides 58 
 
 IV. Thessalonica, the City of the Sufferers 79 
 V. Old Corinth, the City of the Athletes 1 16 
 
 VI. New Corinth, the City of the Parvenus 1 40 
 
 VII. Colossae, the City of the Slave 163 
 
 VIII. Ancyra, the City of the Weathercocks 1 84 
 
 IX. Tyana, the Pagan Bethlehem 208 
 
CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 I 
 
 TARSUS 
 
 THE CITY OF PAUL'S YOUTH 
 
 At the angle formed by the junction of 
 the Syrian coast-line with that of Asia 
 Minor the land is dented by a small 
 thimble-shaped inlet tilting east of north. 
 Upon its shore the Phoenicians built a 
 city, after which it was called " the Gulf 
 of Myriandros/* The Greeks built an- 
 other, which gave it the name of Issus. 
 A third, founded by Alexander to com- 
 memorate his conquest of Darius, caused 
 it to be permanently designated " the 
 Gulf of Alexander." 
 
 Even Celtic irreverence would scarcely 
 venture to clip the august name at which 
 the ancient world grew pale into "Sandy 
 the Great." But "Iskander" is Turk- 
 
2 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 ish for "Alexander." There seems no 
 harm in docking that. "Alexander's 
 Gulf" has therefore come down to us in 
 the undignified form of " Scandaroon." 
 
 Stretching westward from this inlet for 
 sixty miles and extending thirty in aver- 
 age width, inclosed on the north and 
 west by rugged mountains and on the 
 south by the Mediterranean Sea, lies the 
 Cilician plain. Sterile now, it was once 
 a fertile prairie. No other equal portion 
 of the earth's surface has been rendered 
 so famous by the battles fought upon its 
 breast or waged upon its borders. Near 
 its western boundary and dominating the 
 entire region so completely that we may 
 venture to call the whole plain, as Jose- 
 phus says " it was called of old," " Tar- 
 sus," stood the City of PauFs Youth. 
 
 Three hundred and thirty-two years 
 before the birth of Christ Persia was the 
 one conspicuous nation in the world. 
 For weight of influence she bore to other 
 
TARSUS 3 
 
 nations much the same relation which 
 at present England bears to Egypt or 
 France to Morocco. Those living at that 
 time may have heard rumors of military 
 preparations in the north of Greece. 
 Compared with the kinglet who was mak- 
 ing them, the Persian monarch appeared 
 as the Russian Czar, before his prestige 
 was destroyed, would have looked beside 
 the King of Belgium. Had the kinglet 
 been asked whither he was going, the 
 reply might have been, " To Tarsus, for 
 the conquest of the world ! " 
 
 Had you lived forty-one years before 
 the birth of Christ, you might have seen 
 in the harbor of Egyptian Alexandria a 
 vessel loading with purple and gold and 
 pearls and perfumes. Had you asked its 
 owner, "Whither shall it bear you? " the 
 reply, spoken without an error or a trace 
 of foreign accent in either one of seven 
 languages, and spoken in a voice of 
 such alluring sweetness that to resist its 
 
4 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 enchantment seemed beyond the power 
 of mortal man, might have been, " I am 
 going to Tarsus to conquer the world !" 
 
 A little later the Cilicians saw a gilded 
 barge gliding up the Cydnus, propelled 
 by sails of purple silk and oars of silver, 
 which kept time to the music of flutes. 
 Upon the deck beneath a canopy of cloth 
 of gold reclined the Sorceress of the Nile. 
 Lovely children winged as cupids clus- 
 tered around her couch ; fair women 
 adorned as graces handled the tackling 
 of twisted gold and silver or flung upon 
 the air the costliest of Arabian perfumes. 
 At Tarsus the enchantress stepped upon 
 the shore, entered the Agora, smiled 
 upon Mark Antony, then the virtual 
 sovereign of the earth, and led him a 
 willing captive with her jeweled hand. 
 
 Had you lived eleven centuries after 
 the birth of Christ, you would have heard 
 Europe clanging with arms. The ablest 
 captain of his age, the devoutest of the 
 
TARSUS 5 
 
 German Caesars and — made so by that, 
 I think — beyond comparison the most 
 commanding of them all, was gather- 
 ing into his army the ablest warriors 
 of Christendom. The seventy winters 
 which had changed his luxuriant beard 
 from red to white had purified his am- 
 bitions and increased his authority. Ask 
 him whither he is going, and he will 
 answer, " To Tarsus, to conquer the 
 Orient for Christ ! " Near Tarsus you 
 might have seen the same waters which 
 attacked but spared the life of Alexander 
 and floated the barge of Cleopatra stab 
 to death with their icy chill the body of 
 Barbarossa. 
 
 Had you been alive when Christ was 
 born, you might have seen a little boy 
 playing in a garden at Tarsus. Had you 
 asked him whither he was going, he could 
 not have told you, but we can reply, 
 "He was going from Tarsus to conquer 
 the world ! " 
 
6 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 The empire Alexander founded at 
 Tarsus endured ten years. The sover- 
 eignty Cleopatra established at Tarsus 
 lasted a few months. The army of 
 Frederick melted away when, near Tar- 
 sus, its leader died. But for nineteen 
 centuries the victories of the boy from 
 Tarsus have multiplied with the years, 
 and you, reader, whatever your creed 
 may be, are, by reason of the civiliza- 
 tion which has moulded you, a captive 
 of his bow and of his spear. 
 
 A visit to his birthplace and early 
 home will help us to know him, because 
 the impressions received in childhood 
 are the chisels of character and make 
 the " child the father of the man." Pass- 
 ing many facts which justified the Apos- 
 tle's civic pride and warranted him in 
 calling his birthplace " no mean city," I 
 ask your attention to those only which 
 shed light upon himself. 
 
 I. Paul was by inheritance a Roman 
 
TARSUS 7 
 
 citizen. His birth at Tarsus fostered in 
 him a consciousness of that dignity 
 more powerfully than birth in Rome 
 itself would have done. For Tarsus, 
 though in culture the rival of Athens 
 and Alexandria, in commerce a metro- 
 polis, and in importance to the imperial 
 navy without a peer, was not one of 
 those cities in which birth carried with 
 it the rights of Roman citizenship. The 
 few, therefore, in Tarsus who possessed 
 that distinction would be more eminent 
 among their neighbors than the many 
 in Rome who possessed it would be 
 among theirs, for the same reason which 
 makes an Englishman more conspicuous 
 in Calcutta than in London. Born the 
 equal of any subject, he was bred where 
 that inheritance was peculiarly signifi- 
 cant. It is not strange, therefore, that he 
 alone of the Apostles showed at all times 
 a sense of high worldly station. His 
 aristocratic consciousness was ingrained. 
 
8 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 In boyhood it became a part of him- 
 self. It was nourished by the deference 
 showed everywhere to birth and breed- 
 ing. It never left him. Witness the 
 calm dignity of his address to the com- 
 mander of Antonia ; the quiet author- 
 ity with which he called to account 
 the magistrates of Philippi whom other 
 Jews in that city would have approached 
 as Shylock approached Bassanio ; the 
 unembarrassed mien with which he re- 
 buked Agrippa and instructed Festus. 
 Though a Roman he was also an Israel- 
 ite, and an Israelite of the highest class. 
 That he counted a greater honor than 
 even Rome could confer. We shall gain 
 a fairly accurate conception of his feelings 
 toward Rome on the one hand and Jeru- 
 salem on the other by thinking of Mon- 
 tefiore or Disraeli, than whom no Jews 
 were prouder of their Hebrew lineage 
 and no Englishmen more loyal to their 
 British birth. This twofold inheritance 
 
TARSUS 9 
 
 fitted Paul to become first an apostle, 
 and secondly an apostle to the Gentiles. 
 II. Another characteristic of St. Paul 
 was his keen sense of civic responsibility. 
 He alone of the Apostles — if we may 
 judge from their writings — saw in the 
 duties of citizenship a miniature of what 
 Christians owe to the new Jerusalem. It 
 is difficult to imagine John or James or 
 Peter saying, " Our citizenship is in 
 heaven ; . . . therefore, my brethren, so 
 [i. e. as faithful citizens] stand fast in the 
 Lord." But for some reason Paul had 
 learned to think of the kingdom of God 
 as a municipality in which every citizen 
 was faithful to his civic obligations.' 
 
 ' Excepting Hebrews viii, 1 1 , a quotation from 
 one whose civic consciousness was exceedingly alert, 
 the words "citizen/* "citizenship," and their cor- 
 related verb occur, I believe, but eight times in the 
 New Testament; five times in expressions attributed 
 to Paul, twice in those assigned to Luke, PauPs 
 companion, and perhaps his amanuensis, and once 
 from the lips of a Roman officer. 
 
10 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 This seems to be the reason. During 
 the generation preceding his birth Tar- 
 sus had been a prey to thieves like those 
 who have robbed and, what is worse, 
 come near to murdering the manhood of 
 certain cities in the United States. The 
 " Boss " of the putrid ring was named 
 Boethus. Mark Antony promised Tar- 
 sus a gymnasium, — probably a new one 
 more magnificent than that which ap- 
 pears to have been already standing on 
 the left bank of the Cydnus, — and ap- 
 pointed this well-known scoundrel super- 
 intendent and custodian of the funds 
 for its construction, for the scamp had 
 flattered the general's vanity by writing 
 a silly poem in praise of the victory at 
 Philippi. When Antony reached Tar- 
 sus certain civil service reformers who 
 were not afraid to speak out plainly told 
 him how plausible and slippery a knave 
 Boethus was. Among other charges they 
 proved that he had secreted for his own 
 
TARSUS II 
 
 pocket's profit even the gymnast's oil. 
 The rascal made no attempt to deny the 
 accusation. His sole defense was this : 
 "O most noble Antony, as Homer sung 
 the praises of Achilles and Agamemnon, 
 so have I sung yours. Ought I to be 
 brought before you on a charge like 
 this ? " 
 
 The reformers replied, " Homer 
 never stole oil, and you have ! *' 
 
 To those who are not politicians the 
 reply may appear adequate. But it did 
 not satisfy the triumvir. Through his 
 vanity the prosecution failed. Boethus, 
 made more brazen by its failure, stole 
 with increased effrontery. But the re- 
 formers were in earnest. They were of 
 a different type from those who shriek 
 themselves hoarse over the corruptions 
 of a ring and vote at the next election 
 to continue it in power. They perse- 
 vered, and the Providence who always 
 helps such men helped them. 
 
12 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 For a time Boethus treated them as 
 Mr. Tweed treated the reformers of 
 New York, — sneered, "What are you 
 going to do about it ? " 
 
 But the Power who, even to energetic 
 and persistent patriots, sometimes seems 
 dead but never is, in his own good time 
 abolished Antony and put in his place 
 an honest emperor, Augustus. Now 
 there was a man of rare ability and per- 
 fect integrity, a native of Tarsus, who 
 had been the tutor of Augustus, and had 
 earned that sovereign's entire confidence. 
 His name was Athenodorus. When the 
 cry of the reformers reached Rome, Au- 
 gustus appointed this man governor of 
 their city. Athenodorus broke up the 
 ring, banished Boethus with his hench- 
 men, pounded the " organization " into 
 powder, and governed the city so well 
 that upon his death the citizens voted 
 him divine honors, and established an an- 
 nual festival to commemorate his virtues. 
 
TARSUS 13 
 
 All this occurred in the last generation 
 before Paul, and Paul was born before 
 Athenodorus died. In his boyhood the 
 Apostle must have witnessed many times, 
 perhaps taken part in, the celebration 
 of "Athenodorus* Day," as American 
 boys are familiar with " Washington's 
 Birthday." 
 
 The mention in the Epistle to the 
 Philippians of " citizenship in heaven " 
 seems to me a window through which 
 one may see the battle between Tarsus 
 and the ring that disgraced it. Can poli- 
 ticians who have fattened upon corrup- 
 tion in modern cities be described more 
 accurately than in these words which the 
 memory of Boethus may well have sug- 
 gested, " For many walk, of whom I 
 have told you often, and now tell you 
 even weeping, that they are enemies of 
 the cross of Christ ; whose end is de- 
 struction, whose God is their belly, and 
 whose glory is their shame, who mind 
 
14 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 earthly things. For our citizenship is in 
 heaven, from whence also we look for the 
 Saviour Jesus Christ.'* 
 
 III. It will be remembered how often 
 St. Paul refers to the Greek games, not 
 only in writing to the Corinthians, where 
 he could scarcely avoid doing so, but 
 elsewhere. Foot-races, boxing, hitting 
 the mark — words from these sources 
 fall from his pen as if they belonged to 
 his mother tongue. Dean Howson has 
 counted in the Pauline Epistles thirty re- 
 ferences to Greek athletic sports, and adds 
 that he has not exhausted the list. This 
 is remarkable for two reasons. Paul was 
 a Jew, and the Jews hated these naked 
 sports because they counted them ob- 
 scene. He was a Christian, and the Chris- 
 tians hated them because they thought 
 them cruel. I do not remember any 
 allusion to them by the other Apostles, 
 though John and Peter must have been 
 frequently brought in contact with them. 
 
TARSUS 15 
 
 What led Paul to make so much of 
 them ? Is not this the explanation ? 
 
 His boyhood was spent in Tarsus. 
 There Greek manners prevailed. No 
 boy could have breathed the atmosphere 
 produced by the Greek passion for ath- 
 letics without yielding in some degree 
 to its influence. The gymnasium where 
 the athletes trained and where the young 
 men found a school more attractive than 
 their famous university must have been 
 for the youth of Tarsus a centre of in- 
 terest. The games were to them more 
 than football and boating are to the 
 universities of England and America. 
 Could the boy Paul altogether escape 
 the infection ? One cannot imagine the 
 Apostle as a spectator watching the con- 
 tests at Isthmia, yet he shows a famili- 
 arity with the minutest details of their 
 management and practice which could 
 have been obtained only by frequent 
 observation. This is not surprising if in 
 
1 6 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 later life he drew his illustrations from 
 the recollections of his boyhood, as all 
 men are prone to do. 
 
 Of metaphors and illustrations drawn 
 from Roman soldiers he has left us more 
 than twelve. He seems to have liked 
 military men and to have felt at home 
 with them. I incline to think this, too, 
 was owing to his birth at Tarsus. The 
 mountains north of that city and only 
 twenty miles away were infested by bri- 
 gands who made themselves a terror to 
 the whole Cilician plain until, not very 
 long before the Apostle's birth, they were 
 subdued by Cicero. Though I do not 
 know that it was so, it seems likely that 
 the soldiers sent to protect the city from 
 further depredations dwelt at Tarsus, 
 and that the citizens they protected 
 learned to value them as friends. 
 
 IV. Few passages in the Apostle's 
 writings have been so much misunder- 
 stood as those in which he appears to 
 
TARSUS 17 
 
 depreciate intellect and learning. " The 
 wisdom of this age," he wrote, " is fool- 
 ishness with God." Many have fancied 
 that here and in similar passages he 
 meant to disparage the spelling-book, 
 and all that it stands for. The most un- 
 lettered reader ought to be guarded from 
 that delusion, by noticing that more 
 than any other New Testament writer 
 St. Paul honors the human intellect by 
 appeals to its powers of reasoning and 
 capabilities of knowledge. 
 
 When he wrote " the wisdom of this 
 age," he was thinking of such instruction 
 as was given at the University of Tarsus, 
 familiar to him from his youth. The uni- 
 versities of Athens, Alexandria, and Tar- 
 sus were then all and more than all that 
 Oxford and Cambridge are to England 
 or Harvard and Yale to America. There 
 is no indication that the Apostle was fa- 
 miliar with the great Greek thinkers. In 
 the places those men had occupied three 
 
1 8 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 centuries before, silly professors now 
 rattled like dried peas in a pod. They 
 were the prototypes of those mediaeval 
 school-men who wasted their time de- 
 bating how many angels could stand 
 upon a needle's point. The problems 
 they discussed were for the most part as 
 trivial as they were insoluble. They cared 
 nothing for facts. Their boast was that 
 they could take any side of any question, 
 and by tricks of logic prove that it was 
 true. They were called " Sophists " or 
 in English " wise men." It was to their 
 pseudo-wisdom St. Paul referred. With 
 the like of these foolish chatterers he was 
 frequently confronted during his Gentile 
 ministry. At Tarsus he had learned to 
 understand them. They had filled its air 
 with their silly twaddle. In his youth 
 he had heard their harangues contrasted 
 with the teaching of Moses and the Pro- 
 phets. No wonder he despised them. 
 Most readers would probably apprehend 
 
TARSUS 19 
 
 his meaning if his language were para- 
 phrased into, "The sophistry of this 
 age is foolishness with God ; " we may 
 add, " and with men too." 
 
 V. In an age when the Jews had nearly 
 lost all practical belief in a future life, 
 and most of the Gentiles had lost it 
 altogether, St. Paul wrote those words 
 which have done more than the writings 
 of all the other Apostles to bring men 
 under the powers of the world to come. 
 What qualified him to do that ? 
 
 Several circumstances. Among them 
 not the least was his birth in Tarsus. 
 There he had become familiar with a me- 
 morial which made him understand what 
 comes to communities when they lose 
 faith in a future life. 
 
 A few miles from the city was the vil- 
 lage of Anchiale. Tafel traced its foun- 
 dation to the Sybarite king Sardanapalus, 
 the Asshurbanipal of history. Here was 
 a tomb supposed to be that of the As- 
 
20 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 Syrian monarch. Over it stood a colos- 
 sal stone statue snapping its fingers 
 toward heaven, and bearing in Assyrian 
 letters the inscription : 
 
 " Sardanapalus the son of Anacyn- 
 daraxes built in one day Anchiale and 
 Tarsus. Eat, drink, and be merry. No- 
 thing else is worth that (a finger snap) ! " 
 
 We need search no farther for the 
 origin of the quotation " Let us eat and 
 drink, for to-morrow we die," or for 
 the horror with which the Apostle repu- 
 diates that creed. In Tarsus he had seen 
 whither it leads. 
 
 VI. iEgae was another village near 
 Tarsus. Here was a famous temple of 
 ^sculapius, doubtless, like others of its 
 kind, furnished with dexterous devices 
 for counterfeiting miracles. I have no 
 question that here Paul gained the 
 knowledge of jugglers' tricks which en- 
 abled him at a glance to see through the 
 pretensions of Elymas. 
 
TARSUS 21 
 
 VII. Two other important facts may 
 now be mentioned. 
 
 I pass the circumstance that Tarsus 
 was the emporium for the Cilician goat*s- 
 hair tents, which it was the Apostle's 
 trade to make, with this remark. One 
 can scarcely doubt that the loveliest and 
 most comforting illustration regarding 
 death he ever used occurred to him 
 while working at his craft. Was it not 
 the goat-skins on his knees, as he sewed 
 them together and reflected upon the 
 use for which his hands were preparing 
 them, and thought how soon they would 
 wear out, that moved him to write, 
 " We know that if our earthly house of 
 this tent were dissolved, we have a build- 
 ing of God, an house not made with 
 hands, eternal in the heavens." 
 
 But all readers of the New Testament 
 are aware of St. Paul's familiarity with 
 commerce and ships. 
 
 Tarsus was an ancient Chicago. Her 
 
22 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 coins represent her as a woman seated 
 among bales of merchandise. At the 
 mouth of the Cydnus, twelve miles away, 
 was the largest navy yard in the world. 
 There, too, was the chief rendezvous, 
 with the possible exception of Alexandria, 
 of the Roman mercantile marine. Here 
 were the shipyards to which galleys, 
 men-of-war, and merchantmen — a ma- 
 jority of which had been built of the 
 timber from forests close by — returned 
 for repairs. The place was a Wool- 
 wich, a Liverpool, and one is tempted 
 to add a Greenwich all in one. It was 
 the pride of Tarsus. It is difficult to 
 doubt that here in his boyhood Paul 
 gained the familiarity with maritime 
 affairs which made him at home on ship- 
 board, and became conspicuous on the 
 disastrous voyage to Puteoli. On that 
 voyage, it will be remembered, his judg- 
 ment was several times diametrically op- 
 posed to that of professional seamen. 
 
TARSUS 23 
 
 and was in every instance proved to be 
 correct. 
 
 It seems as if the " Divinity that 
 shapes our ends " had decreed that a man 
 should be prepared to become the chief 
 Apostle to the Gentiles. Therefore his 
 youth must be spent where he will be- 
 come familiar with all their ways. 
 
 He shall stand before kings, there- 
 fore he must be born and bred in a so- 
 cial sphere that is not easily dazzled by 
 the purple. 
 
 He shall win a hearing from those 
 who care for nothing but amusement, 
 therefore his boyhood must be spent 
 where an intimate acquaintance with 
 their favorite amusements will enable 
 him to clothe his message in illustrations 
 that cannot fail to arrest their attention 
 and arouse their interest. 
 
 He shall confound the rhetoricians 
 who have persuaded a bewildered age to 
 mistake them for logicians, therefore 
 
24 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 he must be placed where a perfect under- 
 standing of their sophistries shall come 
 to him as an inheritance. 
 
 He shall teach two years at Ephesus, 
 therefore he must understand the ways 
 of politicians. 
 
 He shall spend much time closeted with 
 soldiers, therefore, for his own comfort, 
 he must in boyhood learn to love them. 
 
 He shall make many a voyage, and a 
 knowledge of the sea is for him impera- 
 tive, therefore he must be cradled among 
 ships. 
 
 He must understand the chief indus- 
 tries of men, therefore in childhood he 
 shall play among bales of merchandise. 
 
 He shall be the world's most potent 
 preacher of the resurrection, therefore 
 the most impressive picture on his primer 
 shall be an illustration of what it means 
 to lose faith in immortality. 
 
 For all these reasons he must be born 
 at Tarsus. 
 
II 
 
 EPHESUS 
 
 THE CITY OF SUPERSTITIONS 
 
 Beautiful for situation ; the metropolis 
 and chief commercial mart of the pro- 
 vince of Asia; preeminent in the Orient 
 for the splendor of her buildings ; wor- 
 shiping in a temple which was counted 
 the most wonderful of the world's seven 
 wonders, and to which troubled souls 
 from Spain to India made pilgrimages 
 to atone for their transgressions or sent 
 for amulets to charm away their sorrow ; 
 mother of the church which inaugurated 
 the worship of the Virgin and placed the 
 Madonnaof Christianity upon the throne 
 which for centuries the Madonna of pa- 
 gans had occupied ; cradle of Parrhasius, 
 residence of Zeuxis, and home of Apelles, 
 the greatest painter who ever lived ; a 
 
26 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 school of art which had no equal and but 
 one superior in the ancient world ; birth- 
 place of two of the most commanding 
 intellectual conceptions yet given to man- 
 kind, for here was formulated that doc- 
 trine of " The Word " which dominates 
 Christian creeds, and here Heracleitus 
 announced the truth which, rediscovered 
 by Charles Darwin, steers the science of 
 to-day ; city in which Antony, " drunk 
 with the caresses " of Cleopatra, " madly 
 flung a world away," and in which Julian 
 was led by juggling priests to waste a 
 noble life in vain attempts to restore the 
 ruined shrines of Olympus ; the city 
 where Paul wrote that letter to Corinth 
 which is still the manual of Christian 
 churches ; home where Luke, " the be- 
 loved physician," spent his declining 
 years, and John founded the first semi- 
 nary for the training of young men " be- 
 cause they were strong ; " burial place, 
 almost certainly, of that disciple " whom 
 
EPHESUS 27 
 
 Jesus loved," as also of Luke and Tim- 
 othy and probably of the Virgin Mary ; 
 memorable for giving name to that 
 Pauline epistle pronounced by Cole- 
 ridge to be " the divinest composition of 
 man;" arena where the great Apostle 
 " fought with wild beasts," and where in 
 later years bishops and deacons in "the 
 Robber Council" trampled each other 
 in the name of Christ with a malignity 
 wild beasts are incapable of feeling ; — 
 Ephesus, called by the whole Ionic race, 
 as London was called by Englishmen, 
 "The Good Old City" and named by 
 Pliny " The Eye of Asia," well deserves 
 attention. 
 
 More than to its material advantages, 
 great as they were, its magnificence was 
 due to the superstition which atmos- 
 phered its site with the same kind of 
 reverence that Christians feel for Beth- 
 lehem. Ephesus was founded and fos- 
 tered by the superstition of pagans. It 
 
28 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 was long the world^s chief nursery of 
 those magical arts which superstition 
 engenders. Its heart, the temple of 
 Diana, was destroyed and the temple's 
 foundations allowed to sink out of hu- 
 man sight and memory by the supersti- 
 tion of Christians. In view of these 
 facts, it seems significant that whether 
 the Epistle to the Ephesians was origi- 
 nally addressed to those whose name it 
 bears or not, it may be described cor- 
 rectly as the inspired antidote to super- 
 stition. For the controlling purpose of 
 the epistle is to show the futility in 
 religion of everything but affectionate 
 obedience to God, while superstition 
 consists solely in reliance upon some- 
 thing other than such obedience. It is 
 also significant that superstition is the 
 danger against which the letter addressed 
 to the church at Ephesus and preserved 
 in the Apocalypse warns its readers. " I 
 know thy works, . . . but I have this 
 
EPHESUS 29 
 
 against thee, that thou didst leave thy 
 first love." 
 
 To continue religious activities after 
 the love that inspired them has departed, 
 to fast three times a week only to ap- 
 pease a power one fears, is useless 
 drudgery. It perverts Christianity into 
 another of those superstitions it was 
 commissioned to destroy, and ends by 
 making the name of Christ a fetich as 
 impotent as a silver shrine of Diana. 
 
 I. Few landmarks remain to give a 
 correct conception of the ancient city. 
 The streams which fertilized her fields 
 have shifted their channels. Her coast- 
 line is changed. The canal which made 
 her harbor the Liverpool of Asia — the 
 province of that name — has long been 
 silted up. Of the famous temple outside 
 her walls not even the grave is marked. 
 No mound swells over its ruins which 
 are hidden beneath twenty feet of soil. 
 When Mr. Wood began his excavation. 
 
30 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 the tobacco reserved for the sultan's use, 
 the choicest raised in his dominions, 
 grew above the streets where the people 
 shouted in the ears of Paul " Great is 
 Diana of the Ephesians ! " The city 
 where John taught has vanished. Yet it 
 is that city through which I shall try to 
 lead you. 
 
 Two rather steep hills, separated by 
 a narrow valley : One of them, a ridge 
 about thirteen hundred feet high, ran 
 nearly east and west. From its shape and 
 presumably also from the indentations 
 which probably serrated its crest before 
 they were leveled to accommodate a gar- 
 rison, it was named " Prion," that is, the 
 " Saw." The other hill, a little higher 
 than Prion and north of its east end, was 
 named " Coressus," or " Lady's Hill." 
 
 Tradition said that once when Diana 
 lost her way, as the skillfulest hunters 
 sometimes do, she ascended this ele- 
 vation and inquired, " Whose place is 
 
EPHESUS 31 
 
 this ? " whereupon some sharp-witted 
 Raleigh replied, " Coressus," which 
 meant, as nearly as one can get it into 
 English, " Thine, my Lady ! " Hence 
 the name. 
 
 A line drawn from the north base of 
 Lady's Hill to the west base of " The 
 Saw " would form the hypothenuse of a 
 right triangle.' In the space inclosed by 
 it was the great basin which formed the 
 inner harbor of the city. This was sup- 
 plied by water from the sea, which is now 
 more than four miles distant, by a canal, 
 partly natural, partly artificial, and easily 
 navigable for the largest vessels then 
 
 ' These are Mr. Wood* s identifications. Others, 
 as Faulkner, call Mr. Wood's "Prion** '< Cores- 
 sus,*' and his "Coressus** "Prion.** In spite of 
 Professor Ramsay* s great authority, I believe Mr. 
 Wood's identifications to be correct, because they 
 harmonize best with known facts. The Austrian dis- 
 coveries have not yet been published, but I do not 
 see how they can affect this conclusion. In reading 
 Faulkner or Professor Ramsay one must substitute 
 "Prion** for Wood's "Coressus** and vice versa. 
 
32 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 afloat, until it was silted up through 
 the miscalculation of an engineer whose 
 blunder helped to ossify this main artery 
 of commerce and so to make the city 
 perish of gangrene. 
 
 Around the east front of this basin, 
 — which is to-day a reedy marsh, — the 
 most important buildings clustered. The 
 north side of Mt. Prion and the west 
 and north of Coressus, terraced to their 
 tops, were occupied by residences. 
 
 The walls circling along Mt. Prion, 
 a little south of its crest and around the 
 east and north base of Coressus, have 
 been traced from a point on the south 
 side of the canal west of the Great Basin 
 to a point on the north side of the basin. 
 They were more than ten feet thick ; 
 some thirty-six thousand feet in extent; 
 were strengthened at intervals of a hun- 
 dred feet by towers forty feet square, with 
 sally ports between them, and inclosed 
 about a thousand acres. 
 
EPHESUS 33 
 
 The city abounded in buildings which 
 for strength and splendor and all but 
 size equaled any and surpassed most of 
 those in Rome itself. The population ex- 
 tended far beyond the walls. This bird's- 
 eye view will enable the reader to locate 
 the few places to which I shall call his 
 attention. 
 
 West of Lady's Hill, between it and 
 the basin, was the Great Forum, and close 
 to it the school of Tyrannus, in which 
 Paul taught. Opening toward this Fo- 
 rum and hewn into the base of Lady's 
 Hill, was the great theatre. It was faced 
 throughout with white marble, and seated 
 nearly twenty-five thousand. It was used 
 not only for spectacular displays but for 
 religious and political assemblies, and 
 seems to have served also as a bourse or 
 meeting-place for the Board of Trade. 
 Municipal decrees were inscribed upon 
 the panels of its enormous stage. Many 
 of these the spade has brought to light. 
 
34 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 Here it was that the populace rejected 
 Paul and chose Demetrius for pilot. 
 
 The east side of Lady's Hill (Co- 
 ressus) appears to have been a cemetery. 
 Here, nearly opposite the great theatre, 
 but somewhat north of it and higher on 
 the incline, was the cave in which, as the 
 legend ran, the seven sleepers enjoyed 
 their long repose. It was a cleft in the 
 hill artificially wrought — it is not known 
 when — into a sort of temple. Mark this 
 spot, for there is reason to suspect that 
 something of world-wide interest, to be 
 considered presently, occurred there. 
 
 At its east end, where the valley be- 
 tween the Saw and Lady's Hill broadens 
 toward the plain, the discovery of a tomb, 
 with the cross, the nimbus-crowned hu- 
 man figure, and the symbolic ox, lends 
 help to the tradition that Luke was 
 buried here. From the great theatre an 
 avenue ran eastward between the Saw 
 (Prion) and Lady's Hill (Coressus), 
 
EPHESUS 35 
 
 curved around the latter to the north, 
 and passing through the Magnesian Gate 
 continued north-north westto the Temple 
 of Diana, a mile beyond. Until the last 
 quarter of the nineteenth century that 
 stupendous structure was supposed by 
 modern scholars to have stood within 
 the city walls. Mr. Wood, after search- 
 ing six years in vain for its location, 
 discovered in the great theatre an in- 
 scription which showed him where to 
 look, and digging twenty feet below a 
 field of barley he found the true site. 
 
 The avenue between the Magnesian 
 Gate and the temple deserves attention. 
 The gate itself, the only one of the six 
 superb entrances to the city which con- 
 cerns us, was a magnificent structure. It 
 was flanked with strong towers, and 
 offered two broad openings for vehi- 
 cles, with one for pedestrians between 
 them. Above these, I cannot tell pre- 
 cisely where, was carved in high relief 
 
36 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 the figure of Nemesis, with wings and 
 wheels to indicate that she was equally 
 at home on earth and in air. Beneath, 
 the name of Vespasian in due time ap- 
 peared. 
 
 From this gate two chariot-ways, sep- 
 arated by a footway, led to the temple. 
 The footway was covered by a decorated 
 roof resting on marble pillars. Both 
 sides of the avenue were lined with 
 statues carved by Greek sculptors, tab- 
 lets dedicated to renowned Ephesians, 
 and tombs in which it seems terra-cotta 
 lamps were kept burning day and night. 
 Conspicuous among these was the co- 
 lossal bronze representing Androclus, 
 the mythical William Tell of Ephesus, 
 as an armed warrior holding, I believe but 
 am not sure, a torch in place of a spear. 
 
 The avenue seems to have been not 
 only a thoroughfare, but to have had 
 playgrounds for children, and it touches 
 a tender chord to find, in digging to its 
 
EPHESUS 37 
 
 level, marbles such as our boys play with 
 and hairpins of gold, silver, bone, and 
 cheap metal, dropped perhaps by girls 
 who romped here two thousand years 
 ago. 
 
 The avenue terminated at the great 
 temple built on the site of that which 
 was burned on the night of Alexander's 
 birth. It was the work of the same ar- 
 chitect who designed Alexandria. The , 
 grandeur of his conceptions was revealed, 
 not only in the Pharos of that city, but 
 even more impressively in his request 
 for permission to hew Mt. Athos into a 
 statue of Alexander which should repre- 
 sent him holding in his right hand a 
 city large enough for ten thousand in- 
 habitants and in his left a lake into 
 which all the streams of the mountain 
 should be gathered and poured — a 
 perpetual cataract — into the iEgean. 
 There is hopeless uncertainty about the 
 artist's name. Strabo calls him Cheiro- 
 
38 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 crates; Plutarch calls him Stasicrates ; 
 another author calls him Deinocrates, 
 and still another Chersiphron. No one 
 knows which name to accept. It is sig- 
 nificant of many things that if asked 
 who destroyed the famous temple every 
 schoolboy would reply, " Herostratos 
 was that scamp/' ' though no scholar 
 living can tell who rebuilt it. That, too, 
 in spite of the fact that because the in- 
 cendiary fired the temple to make his 
 name remembered by posterity, the city 
 decreed that no one should speak his 
 name under penalty of death. 
 
 All men know that Cain was the first 
 murderer. But who was the first physi- 
 cian ? Let him who can reply. 
 
 A glance at the temple revealed a forest 
 of white marble columns surrounded by 
 beautiful gardens. The shafts, each sixty 
 feet in height and hewn from a single 
 block, stood upon drums carved in high 
 » De Quincey. 
 
EPHESUS 39 
 
 relief by the skillfulest Greek artists. 
 The columns were the gifts of kings. 
 
 The heart of this marble forest was 
 the Shrine of Diana. In that shrine stood 
 the image of the goddess in pure gold, 
 and beside it, shaped into the semblance 
 or rather the suggestion of a human 
 figure, the meteor stone "which fell from 
 heaven." 
 
 But these were not the only treasures 
 of the temple. It contained statues in 
 gold and silver of Egyptian Isis, Phry- 
 gian Cybele, Syrian Astarte, and the su- 
 preme female deities of other nations, so 
 that worshipers from far and near, find- 
 ing within its precincts the objects they 
 adored, were made to feel as a devout 
 Roman Catholic feels before the shrine 
 of the Madonna. The temple was also 
 rich in works by Praxiteles and other 
 sculptors inferior to him alone. It con- 
 tained a gallery of paintings by Parrha- 
 sius, Zeuxis, and Apelles. Here, among 
 
40 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 several other portraits of Alexander by 
 the last-named artist, hung that one of 
 which the story ran that when Alexan- 
 der declared it was not like him, and 
 Bucephalus neighed in recognition be- 
 fore it, the painter told the monarch that 
 his horse was a better judge of art than 
 its master. This was the picture which 
 moved the Ephesians to say, " There 
 are two Alexanders, one invincible, be- 
 gotten by Philip ; the other inimitable, 
 created by Apelles." 
 
 The temple furnished not only a 
 Lady's chapel to every pagan cult and 
 a British museum of art, but a savings 
 bank for the poor, a bank of deposit 
 and discount for the rich, a mont de pVefe 
 or pawn shop for the shiftless, and an 
 asylum sanctuary for criminals. No cul- 
 prit could be legally arrested within bow- 
 shot of its bounds. Here, too, was the 
 merchant's principal board of trade. 
 
 Thus every department of Ephesian 
 
EPHESUS 41 
 
 life was so dominated by the Temple of 
 Diana that we may say the atmosphere 
 the Ephesians breathed was generated 
 here. This fact should be kept in mind 
 when we read the nineteenth chapter of 
 Acts. 
 
 II. Mr. Wood discovered in the great 
 theatre an inscription which informs us 
 that when the men who, " having seized 
 Gaius and Aristarchus, Paul's compan- 
 ions," " rushed into '' that place, were 
 boys, some of them may have dropped 
 their marbles to run toward that same 
 theatre after one of those processions 
 which helped prepare the way for the 
 victory of the peddler over the Apostle. 
 It tells of a wealthy Roman gentleman 
 named Salutarius who presented a num- 
 ber of gold and silver images, each weigh- 
 ing from three to seven pounds, which 
 the city voted to Artemis. One of them 
 represented Diana holding two stags ; 
 another figured the city as a woman 
 
42 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 wearing a mural crown. The munici- 
 pality decreed that on the 25th of May, 
 the birthday of the goddess, these im- 
 ages should be carried from the tem- 
 ple to the theatre and exhibited there. 
 This decree, the name of the donor, the 
 value of his gift, and the route to be 
 taken by the procession Mr. Wood found 
 inscribed upon an inner wall. It seems 
 probable that the ceremony formed an 
 aeolian attachment to that held every year 
 on the same date in honor of Diana. 
 The only reason for supposing it was 
 not is that the images were to enter the 
 city by the Magnesian and leave it by 
 the Coressian ; and the latter, it has been 
 held, intended solely for pedestrians, 
 must have been too narrow for the pas- 
 sage of chariots and cars. This objection, 
 however, disappears before the reported 
 discovery by the Austrian explorers of a 
 broad street leading through it from the 
 basin to the temple. 
 
EPHESUS 43 
 
 If the images formed a part of the 
 annual procession, its general appearance 
 could scarcely have been widely different 
 from the following. 
 
 First comes a band of damsels clad 
 in fawn skins, scattering flowers as they 
 pass. Then priests in leopard skins, 
 some preceding, some following a plat- 
 form car drawn by white mules. On this 
 the gifts of Salutarius are displayed. 
 Next the car of the goddess, drawn by 
 stags, and bearing, not the meteorite 
 stone, but a golden image representing a 
 woman with many breasts, gleaming with 
 jewels, supported between two golden 
 sceptres fastened to the floor of the car. 
 Then follow musicians. After them a 
 woman dressed as the divine huntress 
 with bow and quiver. Then troops of 
 animals, dogs, deer, lions, specimens led 
 in leash of most beasts that hunt or are 
 hunted. 
 
 At the Magnesian Gate the pro- 
 
44 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 cession is met by young men of the 
 city in holiday attire, and by them con- 
 ducted along the south side of Lady's 
 Hill to the theatre where the gifts of 
 Salutarius are placed for inspection. The 
 terraces on both sides of the street are 
 crowded with spectators, any of whom 
 would be greatly if not dangerously con- 
 spicuous unless he wore pendant from 
 his neck or fastened on his bosom a gold 
 or silver emblem, a tiny temple, shrine, 
 or image, to mark him* as one of those 
 ready to shout " Great is Diana of the 
 Ephesians ! '* These trinkets were the 
 " shrines " for which Demetrius bulled 
 the market when it had been seriously 
 depressed by the preaching of Paul. 
 
 Twenty-five thousand persons crowd 
 the theatre to hear speeches praising the 
 generosity of Salutarius. When these 
 have been spoken, the crowd rushes to 
 the temple to see the most accomplished 
 female dancers in the world — the Elsslers 
 
EPHESUS 45 
 
 and Taglionis of their day — perform, 
 with clanging shields and flashing swords, 
 the far-famed dance of the Amazons, 
 which can be witnessed nowhere else. 
 It seems likely that Demetrius selected 
 for his attack on the Apostle some such 
 occasion as this, as Cyril selected Lent 
 for the assassination of Hypatia and 
 Catherine a saint's day for the murder 
 of Coligni. Demetrius was probably a 
 large employer of labor. His was pre- 
 sumably the chief manufactory of the 
 images worn by the people. His trade had 
 been damaged already, and was threat- 
 ened with ruin by the new religion. 
 Workingmen were alarmed by the fear 
 of losing employment. Priests, the good 
 ones, were excited by zeal for the honor 
 of their deity ; the bad ones by anxiety 
 for their trade. Unless this proclaimer 
 of an " unknown God " " who dwelt not 
 in temples, neither was worshiped with 
 men's hands," can be suppressed, their 
 
46 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 pockets will be depleted and their influ- 
 ence curtailed. 
 
 Thus avarice joined with hunger and 
 superstition to prepare powder for the 
 explosion, and a festival may have sup- 
 plied the spark. Some one whispers that 
 there is an atheist about who has per- 
 suaded many to blaspheme by denying 
 the deity of Diana. Another adds that 
 through his influence trade has fallen oflF 
 and workingmen are being discharged. 
 Another adds that the atheist is a miser- 
 able Jew whom even his despised coun- 
 trymen have driven as a miscreant from 
 Jerusalem. The whispers multiply as 
 whispers do. They grow into outcries. 
 " Where is the atheist ? " " Bring him 
 into the theatre ! " 
 
 The mob, now furious, rushes thither. 
 They will drag Paul, if they can find him, 
 into the place where all can see him, sure 
 that he will not leave it alive. " Some 
 shout one thing, some another," snarl- 
 
EPHESUS . 47 
 
 ing, howling, and foaming in a way the 
 memory of which may have suggested 
 the words, " I fought with wild beasts at 
 Ephesus ! " 
 
 III. On the east side of Lady's Hill, 
 in an artificially enlarged cleft, are the 
 signs of what seems to have been a 
 temple, and in later times a church. It 
 was the cave I have asked the reader to 
 mark. Here, it was fabled, seven young 
 men, brothers and Christians, con- 
 demned to death during the persecution 
 under Diocletian, fled for concealment. 
 Miraculously protected, they fell asleep 
 and slept two hundred years. On awak- 
 ening they came forth and found the 
 city converted to Christ. Thereupon 
 after telling their story with great joy, 
 they yielded up the ghost, and to com- 
 memorate the wonder the cave was 
 wrought into a Christian church. 
 
 But something occurred at Ephesus 
 — and though no one, I believe, has 
 
48 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 ventured to say precisely where, there 
 are reasons for thinking it may have 
 been here — more important than the 
 fiction of the Seven Sleepers. 
 
 The " cave " was sacred to Arcadian 
 Artemis. 
 
 While Julian, still a youth, was waver- 
 ing between the claims of the religion in 
 which he had been bred and those of 
 the Greek cult it had superseded, he left 
 Athens for a surreptitious conference with 
 Maximus at Ephesus. Maximus was an 
 aged philosopher celebrated for wisdom 
 and also for powers deemed supernatural. 
 He was said to possess a voice of such 
 exquisite sweetness that no one could 
 hear him speak without being fascinated, 
 as Ulysses had been by the songs of the 
 sirens. Many thought his words oracular. 
 There are reasons which make it seem 
 probable to me that it was to this "cave," 
 furnished with all appliances of the 
 juggler's art, that the old man brought 
 
EPHESUS 49 
 
 the young Julian. Spectres of fire ap- 
 peared in the darkness. They moved 
 around him. Mysterious sounds reached 
 his ears. A voice declared, "The gods 
 have given you the soul of Alexander.'* 
 
 Trembling with awe, the future em- 
 peror made the sign of the Cross. In- 
 stantly the spectres vanished and the 
 sounds ceased. A moment followed of 
 darkness and silence. Then the same 
 voice was heard from afar saying, " That 
 sign is impotent, but it marks a blas- 
 phemer to whom the gods will not 
 speak." 
 
 Then Julian fell upon his face and 
 swore a great oath that he would replace 
 the old gods upon their thrones or per- 
 ish in the attempt. Faithfully he kept 
 the oath, and it is to his lasting honor 
 that he strove to accomplish it not by 
 the arguments of force, but by the per- 
 suasions of reason. When at last he was 
 compelled to utter the confession which 
 
50 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 Swinburne has paraphrased in the mem- 
 orable lines, — 
 
 «' Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean ! 
 The world has grown grey with thy breath. 
 We have drunken of things Lethean, 
 And fed on the fulness of death,'* — 
 
 no man could truthfully say that he 
 had shed blood for the furtherance of 
 his faith. The fiction of the Seven Sleep- 
 ers started those fairy tales of the 
 " Sleeping Beauty " and the like which 
 have cultivated the imaginations and 
 sweetened the tempers of our children ; 
 but the waking vision of Julian in the 
 cave — it may be where the fabled sleep- 
 ers lay — helped to change for half a 
 generation the official religion of the Ro- 
 man Empire, to pervert into an enemy 
 of Christianity one of the least unchrist- 
 like of all the Caesars, and went far to 
 confirm in him those misconceptions of 
 duty which enabled him to count as a 
 virtue his usurpation of imperial power. 
 
EPHESUS 51 
 
 IV. But the saddest form of super- 
 stition that ever raged in Ephesus was 
 manifested there in the year of our Lord 
 449. I do not refer to the worship of the 
 Virgin Mother, which originated from 
 the decree of a council held in that city 
 a few years earlier. On the contrary, of 
 all the dogmas which I disbelieve, that 
 one which for centuries led men to see 
 in Mary those divine qualities which 
 theologians had made it impossible for 
 them to see in the phantom they had 
 substituted for her son, seems to me the 
 sweetest, the tenderest, and the most 
 beneficent. At a time when to most 
 Christians the word " Christ " signified 
 incarnate cruelty, the spirit of Christ 
 under the name of his Mother softened 
 the sorrows, kindled the aspirations, and 
 when it could not extirpate restrained 
 the wicked passions of untold millions. 
 Far be it from me to brand as a pernicious 
 superstition the faith which enabled 
 
52 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 Jacopone to chant the Stabat Mater in 
 the ears of an age which was soon to see, 
 on every highway of Europe, flagellants 
 frenzied by fear and dying in despair 
 from the self-inflicted scourgings by 
 which they strove to appease the wrath 
 of the inexorable phantom they had 
 been taught to call " Christ." 
 
 The superstition which clothed Ephe- 
 sus with infamy was the same which has 
 done more than all others to delay the 
 coming of the Kingdom. It was the 
 superstition which sired the Inquisition, 
 burned Huss, kindled the fires of Smith- 
 field, and painted Europe many times 
 with blood. It murdered Bruno and 
 tried to murder Luther, gathered the 
 fagots for Servetus, and cursed humanity 
 with Philip the Second. It was the su- 
 perstition which the prophets of Israel 
 fought without ceasing, which Paul's 
 energies were strained to destroy, against 
 which Christ was never through with 
 
EPHESUS 53 
 
 warning his disciples ; the superstition 
 that creeds are more important than con- 
 duct, and that to love God with all the 
 heart and one's neighbor as one's self, 
 is wholly insufficient for the salvation of 
 the soul that holds erroneous opinions. 
 In 449 A. D., the churches from Rome to 
 Antioch and from Alexandria to Con- 
 stantinople were fiercely excited over a 
 point of theological dogma. What that 
 dogma meant no mortal understood then 
 and no mortal understands now. There 
 were certain party catchwords concerning 
 the two natures of Christ. The words 
 had been emptied of their meaning, if 
 indeed they ever had any meaning, as 
 completely as the word " Tory " or 
 " Kingsman " has been emptied of the 
 meaning it carried in America to the sol- 
 diers of Washington. The words stood 
 for no clear conception, but for a vacuum 
 of conception. They became mere party 
 war-cries. 
 
54 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 An Ecclesiastical Council, summoned 
 by the emperor, convened at Ephesus. 
 It was called to determine whether Eu- 
 tyches, a teacher at Constantinople, used 
 the orthodox war-cry. Dioscurus, Bishop 
 of Alexandria, declared that he did. Fla- 
 vian, Bishop of Constantinople, declared 
 that he did not. One hundred and thirty- 
 five, some say one hundred and fifty, 
 bishops with their delegates assembled 
 to try the case. Dioscurus, made presi- 
 dent of the council, not by the vote of 
 his peers, but by imperial decree, con- 
 trolled an overwhelming majority of the 
 members. The council met surrounded 
 by soldiers who had been placed under 
 his orders. Blank papers were given to 
 the members of the council. These 
 they were compelled at sword's edge to 
 sign. Over the signatures thus obtained 
 the opinion of the majority was written, 
 and so the council speedily reached a 
 " unanimous " decision. It was charged 
 
EPHESUS 55 
 
 at the opening of proceedings that one 
 of the bishops in conference had com- 
 mitted an atrocious crime, for which he 
 ought to be disqualified. Dioscurus, the 
 president, replied, " If you have a com- 
 plaint against his orthodoxy we will re- 
 ceive it, but we are not here to pass 
 judgment upon unchastity." Before the 
 " unanimous " verdict was declared, the 
 majority filled the air (it was in the Church 
 of Madonna Mary) with loud and angry 
 denunciations of the minority. When 
 the verdict had been given, the Bishop 
 of Alexandria, backed by a retinue of 
 soldiers and a rabble of monks, shouting 
 " He who would divide the nature of 
 Christ should himself be cut in two ; 
 kill them ! kill them ! " knocked down 
 his brother the Bishop of Constantinople, 
 trampled the breath out of his body, and 
 mangled it so that in three days he died 
 of his wounds. The delegate from Rome, 
 who represented the great Leo, saved 
 
56 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 his life by flight, and the rest of the 
 minority — some by lying, some by hid- 
 ing in holes and cellars — escaped as best 
 they could. 
 
 All this occurred in the city to which 
 every member of the council believed 
 that Paul had written, " I therefore, the 
 prisoner in the Lord, beseech you to 
 walk worthily of the calling wherewith ye 
 were called, with all lowliness and meek- 
 ness, with longsuffering, forbearing one 
 another in love." All this was done in 
 the city where John had so often re- 
 peated the Master's words, "A new 
 commandment I give unto you, that ye 
 love one another." All this was done in 
 the city where, according to a tradition 
 which every one of the council ought to 
 have known, and most of them prob- 
 ably did know, that same disciple had 
 preached until, grown too feeble to walk, 
 he was carried into his pulpit, and there 
 repeated day after day the same words, 
 
EPHESUS 57 
 
 adding no comment, "Little children, 
 love one another," till wearied by the 
 iteration his hearers asked him to say- 
 something more, and heard him reply, 
 " No 1 no ! Little children, there is 
 nothing more ! " 
 
Ill 
 
 PHILIPPI 
 
 THE CITY OF THE SUICIDES 
 ** . . . Thou shalt meet me at Philippi." 
 
 So, Shakespeare tells us, the spirit of 
 Julius Caesar summoned Brutus from 
 Asia to Macedonia. 
 
 The scene is not a creation of the 
 poet. To the minute details, — of place, 
 tent near Sardis ; of time, past mid- 
 night ; the solitude ; the sleeplessness ; 
 the futile attempt to read ; the fading 
 light, " how ill this taper burns," — it 
 is copied from Plutarch. 
 
 There is no valid reason for doubt- 
 ing that amid precisely these circum- 
 stances Brutus saw or thought he saw 
 an apparition and heard or thought he 
 heard it say, " I am thy evil genius. I 
 will meet thee at Philippi." There is no 
 
PHILIPPI 59 
 
 doubt whatever that he went to Philippi, 
 and that there, by his defeat and death, 
 changed the history of the world. 
 
 Paul also, alone, in Asia, at night, 
 saw a vision. A man of Macedonia ap- 
 peared and said to him, " Come over 
 into Macedonia and help us." 
 
 The Apostle obeyed the summons, 
 and at Philippi inaugurated a change still 
 more important. But Philippi claims 
 attention not only because there the 
 "last of the Romans" ended and the 
 " first of the Apostles " began their work 
 in Europe ; at Philippi, it may be said, 
 the civilized world was conquered three 
 times and in three different ways. 
 
 Without the phalanx Alexander could 
 not have overcome the Orient. But it 
 was the thousand talents taken yearly 
 by his father from the mines of Philippi 
 which created the phalanx. 
 
 At Philippi forty-two years before 
 Christ the battle was fought which de- 
 
6o CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 cided that the Roman republic should 
 be an empire. At Philippi it seems 
 probable that Paul planted Christianity 
 in Europe. For these reasons it seems 
 scarcely an exaggeration to say that at 
 Philippi deeds were done which have 
 three times conquered the civilized world, 
 — once by money, once by arms, and 
 once by moral force. 
 
 Only ruins, among which are traces 
 of a theatre, cut in the solid rock of 
 the hillside, and an ancient sarcophagus, 
 which the peasants still believe to be the 
 crib of Bucephalus, mark the site of 
 the celebrated city, but it is possible, by 
 combining hints from widely separated 
 sources, to form a fairly accurate picture 
 of the place. 
 
 It was as purely as San Francisco a 
 creation of gold mines. 
 
 A certain mountain in Thrace was 
 believed to be the favorite resort of 
 Dionysus, the Greek Bacchus. Him, 
 
PHILIPPI 6 1 
 
 the Thraclan mountaineers chiefly wor- 
 shiped. The mountain was also rich 
 in gold, which most men chiefly worship. 
 At the foot of the mountain was a min- 
 ing camp, — one can scarcely say "a 
 settlement," — named, from the abun- 
 dance of waters near it, " The Springs." 
 
 Philip, a more far-sighted statesman 
 than his more celebrated son, discerned 
 the capabilities of the location. First he 
 renamed it after himself. There were sev- 
 eral springs, and he meant to claim them 
 all. Each of them was therefore named 
 " Philip," and the whole of them " The 
 Philips." Thus the city got the plural 
 name Philippi, not because there were 
 many Philips, but many streams bearing 
 the same man's name. 
 
 Next, in order to secure an adequate 
 supply of laborers, he declared the place, 
 because it was near the sacred mountain, 
 a sanctuary. This soon made It a sort 
 of Botany Bay, a refuge for criminals 
 
62 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 and fugitive slaves from all parts of 
 Greece, for here the laws they had broken 
 could not claim them. 
 
 To keep such refuse at work, to pre- 
 vent their cutting each other's throats and 
 decamping with treasure, no less than to 
 protect their operations from the fierce 
 mountaineers, soldiers and fortifications 
 were requisite. The astute monarch pro- 
 vided both, and so arose Philippi, the 
 treasury from which the gold that en- 
 abled Alexander to conquer the world 
 was drawn. 
 
 We will visit the place in the year 
 B. c. 42. 
 
 Sailing westward across the 2EgeB,n 
 Sea from near the site of Homer*s Troy, 
 we land at Neapolis, the port of Phil- 
 ippi. Here close to the water runs the 
 low range called, because it joins two 
 lofty elevations, Symbalon, or the Link. 
 It rises steeply. A mile and a half of 
 the Egnation Road brings us to its sum- 
 
PHILIPPI 63 
 
 mit. Sixteen hundred feet below us on 
 the west lies a fertile plain rimmed with 
 mountains. Upon it, nine miles to the 
 northwest, stood the city. The Egna- 
 tion Road, dividing it into unequal parts, 
 formed its main street. The north and 
 smaller section, triangular in shape, was 
 built upon a rounded hill of solid rock 
 and called " High Town." The south 
 and larger section formed a square drawn 
 on the base of the triangle, was on level 
 ground, and was called " Low Town." 
 
 In High Town stood the Citadel. It 
 was of prodigious strength, and was prob- 
 ably the prison from which an earth- 
 quake delivered Paul. Both sections 
 were inclosed by two concentric walls 
 strengthened by towers and ramparts, 
 and leaving between them a broad space 
 filled with gardens and statues. Enter- 
 ing the main street from the east by the 
 Neapolitan Gate, where, more than a cen- 
 tury later, Claudius placed his magnificent 
 
64 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 arch, we pass on the left a vast theatre, 
 not built upon, but cut into the rocky hill. 
 Walking the length of the main street and 
 out through the " Spring Gate " or " Gate 
 of the Fountains " on the west, we pass, 
 whether within or without both walls 
 or between the two I am not sure, the 
 " Aqueduct." Here the rivulets which 
 gave name to the city were collected in 
 a basin which supplied it with water, and 
 discharged the surplus into the sinuous 
 stream of the Gangas upon the banks of 
 which Brutus cursed and Lydia prayed. 
 The city was small. High Town and 
 Low Town together included less than 
 a mile north and south by half that dis- 
 tance east and west. Long peace had 
 made the walls seem needless, and the 
 wealthy lived in suburbs which extended 
 indefinitely south and east in a wilder- 
 ness of lovely gardens adorned with 
 statues and blooming with roses famed 
 throughout the world for their beauty. 
 
PHILIPPI 65 
 
 On the plain south of the city, amid 
 marshes and rivulets which except for a 
 small part of the year have long been 
 dry, the battle that destroyed the last 
 hope of the republic was fought. Here 
 by his own hand died the " noblest Ro- 
 man of them all," with the curse upon 
 his lips, " May the gods avenge upon 
 the enemies of Rome these multiplied 
 misfortunes ! " 
 
 " We must fly ! " cried some one. 
 " Yes," answered Brutus, " but not with 
 our feet, with our hands," and fell upon 
 his sword. 
 
 Cassius had already killed himself; and 
 an almost incredible number of nobles, 
 some moved by patriotic despair, some 
 by selfish fears, followed the example of 
 these leaders. 
 
 Ninety-four years had passed when 
 Paul, sunjmoned thither as Brutus had 
 been by a vision or an apparition, entered 
 Philippi. To understand his experiences 
 
66 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 there and the epistle written in view of 
 them, one should keep in mind two 
 facts. The first is that for some reason 
 he felt more at home with the Philip- 
 pian Christians than with those of other 
 places ; wrote to them with less reserve, 
 more as a pastor to his people or a 
 father to his family. The second is that 
 Philippi had become a military " Colo- 
 nia." Those born there had the rights 
 of Roman citizenship. The cities en- 
 joying that honor were few. There was 
 probably no other in the world where 
 it was prized so highly or guarded so 
 jealously as here. When the magistrates 
 learned that they had unwittingly tram- 
 pled upon it, they were aware that they 
 would probably be mobbed if the fact 
 became known. This accounts for their 
 terror and their eagerness to keep their 
 blunder concealed when Paul, always 
 alert to his surroundings and fully un- 
 derstanding the dilemma in which they 
 
PHILIPPI 67 
 
 had placed themselves, informed them 
 who he was. 
 
 There seem to have been few Jews in 
 the city, perhaps not enough for a syna- 
 gogue. The children of Abraham who 
 lived there met for worship in a " porch " 
 outside the walls, and probably upon 
 the banks of the stream which drank 
 the blood of Brutus. 
 
 There is a suggestiveness in the fact 
 that the first Christian convert at Phil- 
 ippi appears to have been a woman. 
 
 The original cult of the region was 
 the worship of Dionysus. His minis- 
 ters were priestesses. Wild-eyed, loose- 
 haired, they danced and rushed to and 
 fro in riotous orgies ; and these Baccha- 
 nalian revels, led always by women be- 
 lieved to be inspired by the Deity, formed 
 one of the most diabolical features of 
 paganism. That this cult survived in the 
 time of Paul is indicated by the fact that 
 one such woman, supposed to be pos- 
 
68 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 sessed by the god, a slave girl who by 
 her " soothsaying brought much gain " 
 to her owners, followed Paul about the 
 streets declaring that he was the servant 
 of the most High God. 
 
 Ten or twelve years passed. The 
 Apostle came to love the little church at 
 Philippi as he loved no other. To it more 
 than to others he looked for sympathy. 
 It was the only one which never gave 
 him cause to shed a tear. To it he wrote, 
 and wrote amid circumstances which we 
 should consider most depressing, the 
 letter that may properly be called his 
 "joy song," for none of his other writ- 
 ings approaches it in gladness of heart. 
 
 He is a prisoner at Rome. One can 
 almost hear the clank of the chain bind- 
 ing his right arm to the Pretorian as he 
 draws it over the parchment in writing. 
 And one can read between the lines re- 
 miniscences of Philippi and revelations 
 of Rome. 
 
PHILIPPI 69 
 
 I. The battle of Philippi was natu- 
 rally counted by Augustus the most 
 important ever fought. It established 
 the empire and gave him his throne. 
 He therefore dignified the city with su- 
 preme honors and carved his name upon 
 its monuments. Claudius adorned it 
 with a triumphal arch commemorating 
 the same victory. The incidents of the 
 battle must have been familiar to every 
 one who walked its streets in the first 
 century, for inscriptions at each turn 
 brought them to mind. Plutarch wrote 
 only what was matter of common report 
 when he attributed to Brutus this dis- 
 quisition, "When 1 was young, Cas- 
 sius ... I blamed Cato for killing him- 
 self, thinking it an irreligious act and 
 not a valiant one among men to try to 
 evade the divine course of things and 
 not fearlessly to receive and undergo the 
 evil that shall happen, but to run away 
 from it. But now in my own fortunes I 
 
70 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 am of another mind ; for if Providence 
 shall not dispose of what we now under- 
 take according to our wishes, I resolve 
 to put no further hopes or warlike pre- 
 parations to the proof, but will die con- 
 tented with my fortunes. For I have 
 already given up my life to my country, ^^ 
 
 Was there no remembrance of this 
 when the Apostle wrote, " For me to live 
 is Christ. ... I am in a strait betwixt 
 two, having a desire to depart, and to be 
 with Christ ; which is far better : never- 
 theless to abide in the flesh is more need- 
 ful for you." Therefore he will not 
 imitate Brutus even in his wish to die. 
 
 II. Once and once only Paul used the 
 word erroneously translated in our re- 
 ceived version " robbery." It is in the 
 Epistle to the Philippians, and signifies 
 "a thing to be snatched at." In less 
 forceful but more dignified phrase the 
 Revised Version renders it " a thing to 
 be grasped." Christ thought equality 
 
PHILIPPI 71 
 
 with God a thing not to be snatched at, 
 but certified as his by humility and re- 
 nunciation. 
 
 Where else on earth could that de- 
 scription appear so forceful as in the city 
 where the most important and the most 
 familiar event in its history had been a 
 battle in which the four most powerful 
 men in the world fought, each trying to 
 " snatch " for himself universal sover- 
 eignty ? Where else would the contrast 
 between the ways of Christ and those 
 of human ambition appear so conspicu- 
 ous as in the city where the victory of 
 Caesar over Brutus was blazoned upon 
 arches, inscribed upon the stage of the 
 theatre, carved upon the Citadel, and kept 
 constantly in mind by the divine honors 
 which had been instituted to Octavius 
 and continued to his successors ? 
 
 III. Paul, remember, was at Rome. 
 He was constantly in the company — 
 for a considerable time at least — of one 
 
72 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 of the Pretorian Guards. They were 
 coarse men. Their vocation kept them 
 near the emperor. They were idle and 
 indolent and familiar with all the scan- 
 dals of the palace. He must have heard 
 their gossip. Indeed he implies that he 
 did by the knowledge he shows of what 
 was going on among them. I dare only 
 hint at the foulness with which they 
 reeked. Nero was emperor and Nero 
 was their favorite. That is enough to 
 say. They must have chattered about 
 what they saw and heard. There was 
 nothing else for them to talk of. Con- 
 versations like this must have occurred 
 in Paul's hearing, for if his friends were 
 allowed to visit him, there can be little 
 doubt that at a time when the Pretorians 
 were emperor-makers and enjoyed bound- 
 less license, no one of them would have 
 submitted to the prohibition of visits 
 from his cronies. 
 
 " Yesterday all Rome was at the the- 
 
PHILIPPI 73 
 
 atre," I fancy one of them saying. " Lady 
 Blank had on a purple gown. When the 
 emperor saw it he flew into a fury, sent 
 three of us to tear off her clothes. We 
 did it, too, and she had to go home naked 
 as she was born." " That 's nothing," ex- 
 claims another; "his brother sang a song 
 at court, and sang it so well that Nero, 
 who sings like a frog and thinks him- 
 self a nightingale, went crazy with envy 
 and told the old witch Locusta to poison 
 him at dinner. She tried to, but it did n*t 
 work. So Nero pounded her black and 
 blue till she promised to try again. He 
 would n't trust her alone, and made her 
 try her poison on some pigs. It killed 
 them in a flash. So he got his brother 
 to dinner and fed him on the devil's mix- 
 ture. That ended him, and yesterday 
 Locusta was made a duchess by the old 
 boy for doing it — the old hag ! " 
 
 If I should describe the half of what 
 was going on in the palace and among 
 
74 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 the Pretorians around him, these words 
 written by the Apostle to his beloved 
 Philippians would seem the gasping of 
 one in a sewer, smothering for fresh air. 
 "Brethren, whatsoever things are true, 
 whatsoever things are honorable, what- 
 soever things are just, whatsoever things 
 are pure, . . . whatsoever things are of 
 good report ; if there be any virtue, if 
 there he any praise, think on these 
 things/' 
 
 IV. There is a coincidence which may 
 be mentioned by way of introduction to 
 a more important matter, as it may pos- 
 sibly have occurred to the Apostle. 
 
 Two women of the church at Philippi, 
 Euodia and Syntyche, were at odds, 
 seriously so it seems, for Paul exhorts 
 them to come to an agreement and " be- 
 seeches" a friend to help them do so. 
 
 We are somewhat at sea for accurate 
 dates, but about this time the bitter ri- 
 valry between two court ladies filled 
 
PHILIPPI 75 
 
 Rome with scandal. Their names were 
 Octavia and Poppaea. They were fight- 
 ing each other for the affections of Nero. 
 The peculiarities of that emperor were 
 such that in this contest Octavia was 
 hopelessly handicapped by the fact that 
 she was his wife. He therefore had her 
 murdered in a particularly gruesome way, 
 and her untimely fate excited the com- 
 passion of the city. The incident was 
 an al fresco painting of the miniature 
 squabble at Philippi. 
 
 But there is another passage in the 
 epistle which has perplexed commenta- 
 tors. It is the sharp and sudden and 
 apparently uncalled-for reference, in the 
 opening of the third chapter, to the in- 
 fluence of the Jews. Dr. A. C. McGif- 
 fert (page 388 of " The Apostolic 
 Age ") has stated the difficulties of the 
 passage with great force and suggested a 
 way of escape from them. 
 
 It seems to me that they vanish at 
 
76 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 the name of Poppaea. That villain- 
 ous woman, if she were not a Jewish 
 proselyte, was certainly a partisan of the 
 Jews. She was an intimate friend of a 
 Jewish actor named Aliturius, " much 
 beloved by Nero,** says Josephus, and 
 to her influence over the emperor that 
 historian attributes the success of the 
 mission upon which he was sent to 
 Rome. If, as is probable, she was used 
 by other Jews as she had been by Jose- 
 phus and Aliturius, the fact explains, 
 not only PauFs outbreak of indignation, 
 but also some of the hostilities to Christ 
 in Nero's " palace," referred to in the 
 first chapter of the epistle. 
 
 The walls of a building excavated in 
 1857, which seems to have been a train- 
 ing school for court pages, were found 
 covered with rude pictures and inscrip- 
 tions scratched upon them with nails or 
 knives. Some of these express the im- 
 patience of schoolboys with their tasks. 
 
PHILIPPI 77 
 
 There Is a sketch in outline of a donkey- 
 turning a mill, and beneath it the words : 
 " Work, work, little donkey, as I have 
 worked myself, and thou shalt be re- 
 warded for it." 
 
 There Is another which illustrates the 
 first chapter of Phlllpplans. It is the 
 rough outline of a man with an ass*s head 
 stretched upon a cross. Beside It stands 
 a youth in the attitude of prayer, and 
 beneath is written, "Alexaminos wor- 
 ships his God." ' 
 
 Consider what your feelings would be 
 in an atmosphere reeking with such 
 contemptuous mockery of your Saviour, 
 and then read Paul's words penned while 
 he breathed It : — 
 
 " Some Indeed preach Christ even of 
 envy and strife; and some also of good 
 will : the one do it of love, knowing that 
 I am set for the defence of the gospel : 
 but the other proclaim Christ of faction, 
 
 * For these and other graffiti, see Lanciani. 
 
78 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 not sincerely, thinking to raise up afflic- 
 tion for me in my bonds. What then ? 
 only that in every way, whether in pre- 
 tence or in truth, Christ is proclaimed ; 
 and therein I rejoice, yea, and will re- 
 joice. . , . Wherefore also God highly 
 exalted him, and gave unto him the name 
 which is above every name ; that at the 
 name of Jesus every knee should bow, 
 of things in heaven and things on ear4:h 
 and things under the earth, and that 
 every tongue should confess that Jesus 
 Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the 
 Father." 
 
IV 
 
 THESSALONICA 
 
 THE CITY OF THE SUFFERERS 
 
 If you lay your right hand palm down- 
 ward on the table, the four fingers touch- 
 ing each other and the extended thumb 
 crooked upward at its second joint, the 
 part between the wrist and the line 
 formed by the tip of your thumb and 
 the second joints of your fingers will 
 serve for a map of the iEgean Sea. 
 
 At the second joint of your little fin- 
 ger were the Troy of Homer and the 
 Troas of St. Paul. The north shore, 
 formed by the corresponding joints of 
 your three other fingers, was the coast 
 of Thrace and Macedonia. Should your 
 fingers here change from water into land, 
 they would pass through those pro- 
 vinces, and their nails would represent 
 
8o CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 the Balkans, which bound Bulgaria on 
 the south. 
 
 Your thumb is the Thermaic Gulf, 
 and the open space between it and your 
 forefinger a peninsula which has been 
 distinguished by the grave of Euripi- 
 des, the cradle of Aristotle, the canal 
 dug by Xerxes to get his scoundrels 
 dry-shod into Greece, and by the largest 
 and most splendid group of monasteries 
 ever known. The peninsula is a comb 
 with three teeth thrust southward into 
 the sea. Each tooth is thirty miles long, 
 and the eastern of the three terminates 
 in Mt. Athos, the terror of sailors in 
 ancient times. The seven thousand 
 monks who occupy the territory it de- 
 fends, though zealous worshipers of 
 the Virgin, are so fearful of all other 
 females that they will not allow a cow, 
 a hen, or even a she-cat, much less a 
 woman, to enter their domain. 
 
 At the tip of your thumb was a city. 
 
THESSALONICA 8i 
 
 called from immemorial time on account 
 of the Hot Springs near it, " Therma/* 
 It was the first European fortress occu- 
 pied by Xerxes. In a later age it was 
 renamed, to honor the half-sister of Alex- 
 ander the Great, " Thessalonica." Like 
 the triumphal arch which once adorned 
 its eastern entrance, its introductory syl- 
 lable has perished, so that it is known 
 to-day as Salonica. 
 
 A little outside the base of your thumb, 
 in clear view from the upper streets of 
 this city, rising nine thousand feet above 
 the sea, stands Mt. Olympus. Its glit- 
 tering dome of snow was the throne 
 before which, in Homer's time, Jove 
 gathered in council the deities of Greece. 
 Dense forests at the mountain's base con- 
 cealed the Pierian Spring, beside which 
 the Muses were born and Orpheus first 
 saw the light. 
 
 Close to the southeast of Olympus, 
 and also visible from Thessalonica, 
 
82 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 stands Mt. Ossa. The gorge between 
 the two, named, either from the steep- 
 ness of its sides or because it was made 
 by a single stroke of Neptune's trident, 
 " The Cut/* or in Greek, " Tempe," is 
 the most celebrated valley in the world. 
 Here Orpheus practiced the melodies 
 which drew the enraptured trees to fol- 
 low him and opened the gates of death 
 before him. Here Apollo made atone- 
 ment for slaying the Python and plucked 
 the branch which, planted beside the 
 Castalian Spring, grew into the sacred 
 laurel of Delphi. 
 
 From Thessalonica, therefore, the 
 Apostle who proclaimed another king 
 than Caesar first saw the citadel of those 
 shadowy deities who were to vanish 
 before the unknown God he came to 
 declare. 
 
 I. Having located our city, let us 
 enter it. St. Paul would not recognize 
 it now. Scarcely more than the site on 
 
THESSALONICA 83 
 
 which it stands remains unchanged. For 
 a little distance from the gulf the ground 
 slopes gently upward, then rises more 
 abruptly. The ancient walls can still be 
 traced. They were six miles in circuit, 
 and were flanked with frequent towers. 
 The north wall formed a horseshoe curv- 
 ing to the north ; the south wall, in a line 
 parallel to the water and almost touch- 
 ing it, joined the calks of the shoe, which 
 were defensive towers of great strength. 
 A broad avenue running parallel to the 
 water wall bisected the city. This avenue 
 formed a part of that military highway, 
 named the " Egnation," by which the 
 Hellespont was joined to the Adriatic, 
 and Thessalonica was the most precious 
 pearl upon the strand. Just inside the 
 western wall this main street was spanned 
 by a triumphal arch, probably erected by 
 Octavius, to commemorate the victory 
 at Philippi. The arch has disappeared, 
 but its foundations remain. They have 
 
84 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 been excavated, and the names of the city 
 magistrates inscribed upon them bear 
 the title " Politarch/* In the Book of 
 Acts the same title is given them. As 
 that title has been found nowhere else 
 in ancient literature or on ancient monu- 
 ments, the coincidence attests the accu- 
 racy of the author of the book. Two 
 centuries after Paul a second arch was 
 raised over the same street near the east 
 wall, probably to honor Constantine*s 
 victory over the Sarmatians. Not far 
 north of the spot upon which this arch 
 was placed, it is in the highest degree 
 probable that there stood in the days of 
 the Apostle a small temple for the mys- 
 terious worship of the Kabiri. What 
 that worship was is not known. We can 
 say, however, that the parents of Alex- 
 ander the Great visited Samothrace to 
 take part in its mysteries, much as in 
 our time pilgrims go to Lourdes ; that 
 those who did that were decorated with 
 
THESSALONICA 85 
 
 a purple ribbon ; were believed to be 
 secured against all dangers at sea and 
 from certain perils on land ; that the 
 penalty for revealing what they had seen 
 in the mysteries was death ; and that 
 there is good evidence for believing that 
 the majestic structure erected in the reign 
 of Trajan was built over the little tem- 
 ple or shrine, which advertised to the 
 eyes of St. Paul the existence of the cult. 
 Trajan's Temple, copied from the Pan- 
 theon, was an immense dome springing 
 from the ground, and could be entered 
 only by subterranean approaches, as 
 neither door nor window broke its vast 
 expanse save the one round opening at 
 the top, through which the sunbeams fell 
 and the smoke of sacrifice ascended. 
 
 A line drawn due south from this 
 structure would have bisected the rich 
 and aristocratic quarter of the city. 
 Here stood the Hippodrome, of which 
 there will be matters of importance to re- 
 
86 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 port anon. It was an ellipse of immense 
 size, much larger than the Coliseum, but 
 more like the Flavian Amphitheatre than 
 the Circus Maximus. A subterranean 
 gallery similar to that through which the 
 Roman emperors passed to their throne 
 in the Coliseum connected it with the 
 celebrated palace of Diocletian. 
 
 Gardens as beautiful as those which 
 encircled Athens in her prime and far 
 more extensive surrounded the whole 
 city except on the water front. 
 
 II. For more than two millenniums, 
 Thessalonica has been an important 
 centre of influence, and is still the sec- 
 ond city of European Turkey. During 
 the period marked by the most venom- 
 ous quarreling over creeds which has 
 ever disgraced the Christian church, it 
 never ceased to be called "the ortho- 
 dox city," and for centuries was the 
 Gibraltar of the Greek empire against 
 northern barbarians. 
 
THESSALONICA 87 
 
 The little company of Thessalonians 
 won to Christ by the preaching of St. 
 Paul were by some cause subjected to 
 exceptional trials. Aware of this, the 
 Apostle wrote them a letter to hearten 
 them in their " much affliction." He 
 urged them to wait patiently for the 
 Saviour. They thought he meant that 
 Christ would soon appear in visible form 
 and set them free by physical force. To 
 correct that impression he sent them a 
 second letter. 
 
 These two epistles are the earliest 
 writings in the New Testament. They 
 have a special interest in our time for this 
 reason : the church at Thessalonica was 
 composed of " working " people. The 
 letters contained the advice of an Apos- 
 tle who was also a skilled workman to 
 such of them as, driven by oppression 
 or allured by baseless expectations, were 
 starting toward the excesses of a mod- 
 ern strike. 
 
88 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 In the first letter, moved probably by 
 reports which had reached his ears, he 
 had written, " We beseech you, breth- 
 ren . . . that ye be ambitious to be 
 quiet, and to do your own business, and 
 to work with your own hands . . . that 
 ye may walk honestly toward them that 
 are without ; " that is, toward the gen- 
 eral public. But as this advice appeared 
 to have been ineffectual, he wrote in 
 the second letter, " When we were with 
 you, this we commanded you, that if 
 any would not work, neither should he 
 eat. For we hear that there are some 
 which walk among you disorderly, work- 
 ing not at all, but are busybodies." 
 That is, " busybodies who do no busi- 
 ness," which seems to be Greek both for 
 certain types of " walking delegates " 
 and for their counterparts in those cap- 
 italists without capital who are called 
 " promoters." 
 
 III. When St. Paul arrived at Thessa- 
 
THESSALONICA 89 
 
 lonica, the struggle between Roman im- 
 perialism and the visible church which 
 ended when the decree of Constantine 
 wrote the name of Christ upon the pagan 
 Sunday had just begun. The imperial 
 rescript banishing all Jews from Rome 
 had been issued. The record of it by- 
 Suetonius is one of the only two pas- 
 sages in pagan literature containing the 
 name of Christ, and Suetonius gets it 
 wrong. " Claudius," he says, " banished 
 from Rome all the Jews who were con- 
 tinually making disturbances at the in- 
 stigation of one Chrestos." 
 
 Neither emperor nor historian ever 
 learned to distinguish Christians from 
 Jews. Both supposed Christ to be a 
 political agitator alive in the year 52. 
 Some of the exiles fled to Thessalonica. 
 St. Paul was probably mistaken for one 
 of them. Certainly the charge urged by 
 Suetonius was raised against him there as 
 it had been at Philippi, " These all do 
 
90 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying 
 that there is another king, one Jesus." 
 So cried the Apostle's countrymen. To 
 denounce him and his companions as 
 among those at whom the imperial decree 
 was aimed would help to prove their 
 own loyalty. Policy sharpened the spear 
 which bigotry forged. The accusation 
 and the impression it made upon the 
 magistrates warned the Apostle that 
 Christians would find in the Roman 
 government itself, which had been their 
 protector, their fiercest foe. The warn- 
 ing was confirmed at Corinth. For there, 
 while writing to the Thessalonians, he 
 was the guest of a family exiled by 
 Claudius. Their conversation must have 
 helped him to perceive the approaching 
 storm which a few years later burst in 
 the appalling persecution of Nero. There 
 was cause enough for those exhortations 
 by which he strove to brace the suffer- 
 ers of Thessalonica, not only against ex- 
 
THESSALONICA 91 
 
 isting trials, but against the more fright- 
 ful terrors of the future. 
 
 If asked to prove the general need 
 of the comfort wherewith he comforted 
 them and its efficacy also, I would be- 
 gin by exhibiting four photographs of 
 scenes in their city. 
 
 I. The first appeared a century be- 
 fore St. Paul entered the home of Jason. 
 It shows a gentleman forty-two years old 
 in an upper chamber of one of the aristo- 
 cratic dwellings of Thessalonica. He is 
 surrounded by every luxury wealth can 
 procure, for he is the guest of a rich and 
 devoted adherent. He is tall, slender, 
 graceful, and has the eye of an eagle. 
 His face, still familiar to educated men, 
 shows signs of prodigious mental powers. 
 He is writing. He has finished a letter 
 to his wife at Rome, another to his bro- 
 ther, and is inditing a third to his most 
 intimate friend. If we believe what he 
 writes, and there is no reason for doubt- 
 
92 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 ing it, his eyes are blinded and his parch- 
 ment blotted by tears. He pours out 
 wailings which a spoiled child of twelve 
 might well be ashamed to utter. The 
 whining of Napoleon at St. Helena seems 
 manly beside them. " If you saw me," 
 he declares, " you would not see me, not 
 even a trace of me, not a shadow, but the 
 image of a breathing corpse. Would that 
 before this you had seen me dead ! " 
 
 " Why did I not kill myself? " he ex- 
 claims again and again. 
 
 He interrupts his self-accusations for 
 not committing suicide only to upbraid 
 the friends who had risked their lives for 
 his sake. He reiterates that life has no 
 joy left for him ; that he is without hope 
 in the world ; that his grief is more than 
 he can bear. He walks the floor, wrings 
 his hands, breaks into sobs and outcries ; 
 not only does this, but is not ashamed to 
 say that he does it. For he too has, like 
 the cheery host and hostess of St. Paul, 
 
THESSALONICA 93 
 
 been banished from Rome. He has lost 
 office and a part of his wealth, and the 
 flattery of the populace. He is still 
 lapped in luxury. He is among devoted 
 friends, yet his despair is abject. 
 
 This broken-hearted sufferer was the 
 most cultivated man, the most brilliant 
 genius then living. He had mastered 
 all the philosophies of earth ; could write 
 books telling us how to grow old grace- 
 fully, and how to endure the ills of life 
 serenely — books which are still text- 
 books in our colleges. He was one of 
 the two most celebrated orators who 
 have ever lived, and he had the conso- 
 lation of believing that he had saved his 
 country from destruction. But though 
 a master of all the world's knowledge 
 and wisdom, he never learned the secret 
 which strengthened St. Paul to " endure 
 all things." 
 
 You have recognized Marcus Tullius 
 Cicero. 
 
94 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 a. The second picture is, I appre- 
 hend, largely one of the imagination. It 
 can scarcely be wholly so. There is in 
 the Museum of Constantinople a bronze 
 medal struck in the fourth century which 
 needs to be accounted for. It bears the 
 head of a common Roman soldier with 
 the name " Demetrius." ' Moreover, 
 something remarkable must have oc- 
 curred to start the legends which per- 
 petuate that soldier's memory, and to 
 enthrone him rather than St. Paul as the 
 patron saint of Thessalonica. But even 
 were it wholly without foundation in fact, 
 the tale of the Bollandists would repre- 
 sent so vividly and so accurately scenes 
 often witnessed by the early church as 
 to make it worth repeating. 
 
 Scene. The Amphitheatre of Thessa- 
 lonica. 
 
 Time. 303 a. d. 
 
 ' Professor Ramsay holds that Demetrius is only 
 a Christianized name of pagan Demeter. 
 
THESSALONICA 95 
 
 The tiers are crowded. A private sol- 
 dier stripped of his arms stands naked 
 in the arena. His name is Demetrius. 
 A ring of soldiers surrounds him. Each 
 of them holds a spear pointed at his 
 heart. A voice of command asks, " Will 
 you curse Jesus Christ ? " 
 
 To those far off it sounded like thun- 
 der. To those who saw his face it seemed 
 that an angel spoke to him. For at the 
 name Jesus, to which every knee shall 
 bow, he kneels and a glory flashes from 
 his countenance, while he replies : — 
 
 " Christ is Lord ! " 
 
 The multitude gnash their teeth. The 
 spears pierce his heart. But a great joy 
 fills his soul. He knows little else, but 
 he has the knowledge which strength- 
 ened St. Paul to " endure all things." 
 
 A few years passed and then — this 
 is authentic history — whenever foes 
 invaded the city, its citizens comforted 
 one another with these words, "They 
 
96 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 cannot harm us, for Demetrius will pro- 
 tect us." And when, as occurred four 
 times to her, the city was captured, 
 sacked, and burned, her streets re- 
 sounded with this wail of despair, — 
 
 " Woe ! Woe ! Repent ! Our sins have 
 driven Demetrius from us." 
 
 3. It is the year 324 a. d. The sov- 
 ereignty of the world has been divided 
 between two brothers-in-law, Constan- 
 tine is ruler of the West, Licinius of the 
 East. Constantine has bowed his knee 
 to the name of Christ. Licinius hates 
 the name with a dull, brutal, implacable 
 malignity. The battle of Scutari has 
 finally made Constantine sole emperor. 
 Sparing the life of his rival, he has 
 banished him to Thessalonica. Here, 
 after ruling half the world for sixteen 
 years, stripped of every dignity, impo- 
 tent, friendless, without a follower, 
 gnashing his teeth upon the Christians 
 whom he dares not even insult, the de- 
 
THESSALONICA 97 
 
 posed potentate gnawed his own heart 
 till, crazed by despair, he made the futile 
 clutch at power for which his life paid 
 the penalty. 
 
 4. The fourth picture represents a 
 diamond of finest water set in black 
 enamel. It cannot be photographed. 
 The gem is too brilliant, the setting too 
 dark for art to reproduce. This may be 
 the reason why it is so little known, for 
 the facts are uncontroverted. 
 
 When Thessalonica had become an 
 almost perfect specimen of all that a 
 Christian community ought not to be, 
 there appeared in it an almost perfect 
 specimen of all that a Christian ought 
 to be. 
 
 History can show few sharper con- 
 trasts than that between western and 
 eastern Christendom during the twelfth 
 century. It was more radical than that 
 between either and those Mussulmans 
 against whom both had joined hands 
 
98 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 but not hearts. Throughout western 
 Europe the ideal of Christian manhood 
 was a brutal prize fighter, who neither 
 feared God nor regarded man, enslaved 
 by a religion which made him tremble 
 before an unseen being whom he called 
 God, and whom the scriptures call the 
 devil. The only virtue worshiped was 
 physical courage. The only vice de- 
 spised was physical cowardice. 
 
 The Greeks, on the other hand, had 
 become a congregation of cowards. They 
 despised the courage of the Latins as 
 stupid savagery ; considered deceit and 
 treachery weapons which distinguished 
 men from brutes, and though voluble in 
 professions of loyalty to Christ, had no 
 religion at all. The diplomacy of Rome 
 was threats enforced by spears. The 
 diplomacy of Constantinople was lies 
 supplemented by poisoned wine and 
 assassin's daggers. Thessalonica was a 
 nest of debauched manikins, fighting 
 
THESSALONICA 99 
 
 each other over trivial points of doctrine 
 as angry apes contend for the straws in 
 their cage. Her wealth was no less 
 enormous than her profligacy. She was 
 more depraved than even Constantino- 
 ple, because her proximity to the West 
 had kept smouldering in her heart a su- 
 perstitious worship of Demetrius which 
 made her in some degree conscious of 
 her degradation, and put her in the class 
 of those who know their Master's will 
 and do it not. 
 
 In 1 1 85, when Norman William II 
 of Sicily besieged the city, Eustathius 
 was its bishop. Though incomparably 
 the most learned man of his time, his 
 character eclipsed his learning. In a 
 council convened by the Byzantine 
 emperor for the sole purpose of en- 
 forcing a treacherous and secret league 
 with the Mussulmans against the west- 
 ern Christians, he had single-handed 
 thwarted the imperial purpose. In order 
 
100 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 to nullify his influence, the emperor, 
 with fury in his heart and flattery on 
 his lips, sent him from court to the See 
 of Thessalonica. There his sturdy hon- 
 esty and the invincible skill with which 
 he fought a nefarious municipal ring 
 that had clutched the city's throat pro- 
 voked an opposition which drove him 
 into exile. No sooner had he left than 
 the men who had driven him away be- 
 gan to fight each other with a fury that 
 threatened to make their city a sham- 
 bles. To save it from suicide they sent a 
 delegation who besought him on their 
 knees to return. He instantly complied 
 and his return brought peace. 
 
 In religion his attacks upon supersti- 
 tion and hypocrisy were equally effec- 
 tive. His see included the monasteries 
 of Athos. These were filled with lazy 
 beggars, some of whom had entered 
 them for loaves and fishes, some for 
 the sake of being called " Rabbi." To 
 
THESSALONICA loi 
 
 these he said, " You are hypocrites 
 from head to foot." Others, and their 
 name was legion, who were seeking to 
 earn heaven by passing their lives on 
 treetops, standing on pillars, coffining 
 themselves in iron coats, or spending 
 their days in caves where no ray of light 
 could reach them, he treated more ten- 
 derly. Though they were counted holy 
 men, he said to them and of them, "Ye 
 are deceivers of the people and rebels 
 against God. Christ said his yoke was 
 easy and his burden light, but ye dare 
 to teach that his yoke is hard and his 
 burden heavy. Christ told his disciples 
 to go into the world and ye have fled 
 out of the world." 
 
 In this marvelous man, who has been 
 too little remembered, were combined 
 the devotion of St. Francis, the bravery 
 of Huss, the energy of Luther, and the 
 executive ability of Loyola. He was as 
 far in advance of his age as Bruno was 
 
102 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 of his, but he enforced his opinions with 
 a tact that not only saved him from 
 martyrdom, but made them effective. 
 
 When the Norman fleet approached, 
 Eustathius strove in vain to make the 
 people appreciate their danger. They 
 would not lift a finger for defense. They 
 seemed to despise the Franks more than 
 they hated them. There was also, it is 
 probable, some sincerity in their answer 
 to the bishop's exhortations, " Deme- 
 trius will sink their ships." 
 
 The bishop's reputation was such that 
 before attacking the city the Franks sent 
 word entreating him to leave the place 
 before they wreaked upon it the ven- 
 geance its sins had provoked from out- 
 raged Deity, because if by any accident 
 he should be slain in the assault " the 
 light of the world would be put out." 
 
 His reply was of course that the shep- 
 herd must not fly when the wolves ap- 
 proach. 
 
THESSALONICA 103 
 
 The massacre which ensued ranks 
 among the unique and conspicuous hor- 
 rors of history. 
 
 The coward Greeks attempted no 
 resistance. Instead of defending their 
 strong walls, they rushed into their 
 churches shrieking prayers to Demetrius 
 or increasing the panic by their cries 
 " Woe ! woe 1 Demetrius has forsaken 
 us 1 
 
 The Norman soldiers spared neither 
 sex nor age. There have been few 
 manifestations of the deviHshness of reli- 
 gious animosities equal to the following. 
 Franks and Greeks each counted the 
 other heretics. The Greek Church de- 
 clared itself the true New Jerusalem. 
 The Franks mocked that claim. To 
 ridicule it, probably informed by their 
 priests of the words in the Apocalypse 
 "without are dogs and sorcerers," the 
 soldiers gathered around the churches 
 in which the quaking fugitives were 
 
104 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 supplicating the God in whose name 
 these same soldiers were fighting ; stood 
 for a while in mocking irony barking 
 like dogs, then rushed in and slaugh- 
 tered the suppliants before their altars. 
 
 During these horrors, Eustathius, com- 
 manding, entreating, catching arms up- 
 lifted to strike, throwing himself as a 
 shield before the defenseless, seemed 
 almost omnipresent ; and though the 
 death work lasted three hours, no acci- 
 dent harmed him, and when the mur- 
 derers paused to breathe, his eloquence 
 moved their leaders to stop the mas- 
 sacre and accept a ransom for the city. 
 
 IV. The lamentations of Cicero, the 
 triumph of Demetrius, the despair of 
 Licinius, and the heroism of Eustathius 
 illustrate the universal need of guidance 
 to that source of strength to which St. 
 Paul pointed eight times in his two short 
 letters to the Thessalonians. But they 
 are, among the facts which justify the title 
 
THESSALONICA 105 
 
 of this paper, as drops in a gallon of 
 misery. 
 
 During four centuries Thessalonica 
 was the main bulwark of the Byzantine 
 Empire in Saracenic, Gothic, and Scla- 
 vonic wars. Almost constantly under fire, 
 she bore the brunt of those invasions. 
 She was captured, pillaged, burned, by 
 Egyptians, Latins, Turks. Twice she 
 was razed almost to the ground. Yet 
 after every devastation she revived as 
 a plant in spring. When in 904 a. d., 
 after sacking and burning her, the Arabs 
 of the Nile carried twenty-two thousand 
 of her choicest youths and maidens into 
 slavery, it seemed that she must cease to 
 be. But though cast down she was not 
 destroyed, and two centuries later she 
 appeared as rich and beautiful as ever. 
 
 Her most widely known tribulation 
 affords a signal illustration of the fact 
 that the Power in whom Paul trusted to 
 bring good out of evil sometimes sends 
 
io6 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 his best blessings by the hands of sor- 
 row. 
 
 Thessalonica had been the favorite 
 residence of the Emperor Theodosius. 
 Four years he had held it against the 
 repeated assaults of the Ostrogoths, and 
 even after assuming the purple he was 
 loath to leave the place. Here he united 
 with the church. In the winter of 370 
 an illness brought him to the door of 
 death. Though a Christian by inherit- 
 ance and conviction, he had not been 
 baptized, but now he asked and received 
 baptism into the name of Him who 
 came, not to destroy men's lives, but to 
 save them. Mark how he fulfilled his 
 vows. 
 
 Chariot racing was becoming the fa- 
 vorite sport of the Greek cities. It had 
 not yet reached the popularity it attained 
 in the time of Justinian, when the colors 
 worn by rival charioteers became badges 
 dividing into rancorous factions, not 
 
THESSALONICA 107 
 
 only the betting rings, but the state and 
 the church. Beginning in the circus, it 
 finally severed families, ruptured the 
 court, rent the church. In the conflicts 
 between the two parties, civilians, sol- 
 diers, emperors, bishops, took part with 
 furious passion. Fathers fought their 
 sons, sons slew their fathers, and women 
 with weapons in their hands battled on 
 one side or the other. No man dreamed 
 of winning office in either church or state 
 without the support of one of these fac- 
 tions. 
 
 When Justinian was crowned, the 
 Greens were believed to favor the cause 
 of his predecessor. The Blues, there- 
 fore, espoused that of the new emperor. 
 Moved by gratitude or fear, he allowed 
 them a license compared with which the 
 most odious excesses of modern political 
 thugs seem virtuous. Men wearing the 
 blue ribbon rioted, robbed, murdered, 
 and set fire to houses with impunity. 
 
io8 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 Five years that state of things continued. 
 It ended in an insurrection which nearly- 
 cost Justinian his throne and his life, 
 and was not suppressed until the palace, 
 with a large part of the capital, lay in 
 ashes and thirty thousand citizens had 
 been slain by Belisarius. 
 
 This silly and fatal fashion had seized 
 Thessalonica when in 390 her favorite 
 charioteer committed a pestilential crime. 
 Botheric, the imperial general in com- 
 mand of the garrison, imprisoned the 
 culprit. The populace clamored for his 
 release. To them the most disgusting 
 crimes seemed trifles compared with the 
 loss of a race to a rival city. The im- 
 prisonment of their favorite might mean 
 that. Botheric refused to release the 
 criminal. The race day arrived. The 
 people assembled. Their favorite did 
 not appear. In sudden fury they as- 
 saulted the garrison, which was small, 
 slew the general, with several of his sol- 
 
THESSALONICA 109 
 
 diers, and dragged their mutilated bodies 
 through the streets. 
 
 The emperor was in Italy. The report 
 of the outrage goaded him to madness. 
 He determined to retaliate without 
 form of law. By his orders the inhab- 
 itants of Thessalonica were invited in 
 the emperor's name to another race in 
 which it is probable they were given 
 to understand that their favorite would 
 reappear. They crowded the Hippo- 
 drome. Old men and young, women 
 and children, rich and poor, packed the 
 tiers of the immense inclosure. But they 
 saw no chariots. While they waited the 
 gates were shut. A flourish of trum- 
 pets. The spectators leaned forward at 
 the signal, expecting to see their favorite. 
 A very different sight met their view. 
 Archers and spearsmen who had been 
 concealed beneath the tiers marched into 
 the arena. Shooting their arrows and 
 hurling their spears into the dense masses 
 
no CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 of spectators, they began an indiscrimi- 
 nate massacre. They had been ordered 
 to spare no one. They obeyed their 
 orders. For more than three hours the 
 slaughter continued. Foreigners and 
 visitors were cut down with the rest. 
 
 A wealthy merchant from abroad who 
 was present with his two sons offered all 
 his possession for the life of one of them. 
 The offer was accepted. While the fa- 
 ther deliberated which son he should 
 save, the soldiers plunged their daggers 
 into the hearts of both and then slew 
 their parent. More than seven thou- 
 sand — some authorities say fifteen — 
 were slain. The guilt of the emperor 
 who allowed and almost certainly planned 
 the details of this horror was more atro- 
 cious because Thessalonica had been his 
 home, the victims of his vengeance had 
 been his neighbors and his friends. Yet 
 perhaps no single act since the Cruci- 
 fixion has been overruled to the accom- 
 
THESSALONICA m 
 
 plishment of so much good by impress- 
 ing upon the world the spirit of Christ 
 as this diabolical crime. 
 
 For this deed the world saw Caesar 
 himself excommunicated, compelled to 
 do eight months' penance, and even then 
 refused the Sacrament until, stripped 
 of every emblem of power, he had 
 lain all night upon the stones before 
 the altar of Milan Cathedral begging 
 forgiveness from Him "who came to 
 save men's lives." The sight of the 
 "foremost man in all this world,*' the 
 man who had power by a word to 
 kill or to spare whom he would of a 
 hundred million subjects, lying abject 
 as the poorest beggar because he had 
 broken a command of Christ, probably 
 impressed upon mankind the meaning 
 and the power of Christianity as they 
 had never been felt before. It was the 
 longest single leap toward true demo- 
 cracy ever made. 
 
112 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 Those sufferers of Thessalonica did 
 not die in vain. 
 
 V. Thessalonica is still, as I have 
 said, after the capital, the most impor- 
 tant city of European Turkey. Many of 
 her wealthiest citizens, though Moslems 
 in faith, are of Jewish descent, and their 
 history adds another to the mournful 
 memories of their home. Their ances- 
 tors were not the men who persecuted 
 Paul, but were themselves victims of a 
 persecution unique in its atrocity. 
 
 In 1492, while Columbus was seek- 
 ing a new world, a decree of Ferdinand 
 and Isabella condemned to death all 
 unbaptized Jews found after one hun- 
 dred and twenty days in their domin- 
 ions. For centuries Spain had been their 
 home. They had created most of her 
 wealth. One of them offered an enor- 
 mous sum to relieve her finances, which 
 were greatly embarrassed, if the monarchs 
 would adopt milder measures. While 
 
THESSALONICA 113 
 
 they hesitated between cupidity and what 
 they deemed their duty, Torquemada 
 entered their presence, and holding a 
 crucifix before them exclaimed, "Judas 
 sold his Master for thirty pieces of 
 silver. Sell Him again for a higher price 
 and give to God an account of your 
 bargain." 
 
 That decided the wavering sovereigns. 
 The Jews were driven out. Robbed of 
 all they possessed, they knew not whither 
 to fly. Portugal was, if possible, more 
 cruel than Spain. King Manuel's decree 
 required all Jewish children under four 
 years to be taken from their parents and 
 placed under Christian training, while 
 every Israelite above that age was driven 
 from the kingdom. Mothers threw their 
 offspring into the rivers or slew them 
 with their own hands, to save them from 
 what they thought eternal death. Do- 
 minican preachers proclaimed that the 
 pains of purgatory would be limited to 
 
114 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 a hundred days for every Christian who 
 killed a Jew. 
 
 Like their father from Ur, the de- 
 spoiled victims of theological frenzy went 
 forth not knowing whither they should 
 go. But they were true to their faith. 
 A shipload of the exiles, wrecked upon 
 the Barbary coast, escaped starvation by 
 eating the grass that grew wild upon the 
 shore. Though suffering the pangs of 
 hunger, they would not at first touch a 
 blade because it was the Sabbath, and 
 their law forbade the plucking of corn 
 upon that day. But when their rabbi 
 explained that there was no law against 
 cropping as the beasts do, the ravenous 
 zealots threw themselves upon their faces, 
 and keeping their hands behind them, 
 seized the green blades with their teeth. 
 
 Many of the exiles perished. Many 
 were enslaved at the ports where they 
 sought refuge. A considerable number 
 fled to Thessalonica. Here they were 
 
THESSALONICA 115 
 
 treated with a humanity that met them 
 nowhere else. Kind treatment in time 
 melted away the zeal which persecution 
 had intensified as icebergs are melted 
 when they drift into tropic seas ; and 
 the descendants of the Spanish refugees 
 gradually adopted the faith of their bene- 
 factors. 
 
 Of all the cities mentioned in the New 
 Testament, Thessalonica is the most 
 striking illustration of the Master's 
 words, " Blessed are they that mourn." 
 No other of them all has suffered so 
 much, yet she is the only one which 
 holds to-day a position of relative im- 
 portance equal to that she occupied when 
 the words were spoken. 
 
OLD CORINTH 
 
 THE CITY OF THE ATHLETES 
 
 The Acropolis or Citadel of Athens was 
 a quadrangular mass of rock rising a 
 hundred and fifty feet sheer on every 
 side except the west. The length of its 
 leveled top, a thousand feet from east to 
 west, measured twice the width. Midway 
 upon the northern verge the Ectheum, 
 a temple to Athena, presented the most 
 faultless specimen of Ionic grace the 
 world has seen. Directly opposite, upon 
 the southern verge, and dedicated to the 
 same divinity, the Parthenon embodied 
 the supreme achievement of Doric art. 
 
 Both buildings fronted the rising sun. 
 The space between them was, as the 
 whole of the Acropolis, covered thickly 
 with statues so lovely that a torso or 
 
OLD CORINTH 117 
 
 even an arm from one of them is counted 
 a treasure in modern museums. 
 
 Raised by a lofty pedestal above this 
 forest of sculpture, midway between her 
 two temples, and towering above them, 
 seventy feet in height, cast by Phidias 
 from the spoils of Marathon, facing west- 
 ward to overlook the city that trusted in 
 her care, armed with helmet, shield, and 
 spear to protect its people, stood the 
 bronze colossus of Athena, the goddess 
 of the mind. 
 
 Fifty-six miles to the west and plainly 
 visible through the clear air of Greece, 
 was the Acrocorinthus, or Citadel of 
 Corinth. 
 
 Upon its crest, dominating that city 
 as Athena dominated Athens, stood the 
 temple and statue of Aphrodite, the 
 goddess of the body. 
 
 The deity of Athens glancing scorn- 
 fully at the deity of Corinth seemed to 
 ' Wright's Ancient Cities, p. 155. 
 
ii8 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 say, " Seek first the powers of the intel- 
 lect as my Athenians do, and all things 
 needful shall be added unto you." 
 
 The deity of Corinth, flashing back 
 the scornful glance in sunny smiles, 
 seemed to reply, " Seek first the plea- 
 sures of the body — what ye shall eat 
 and what ye shall drink and wherewithal 
 ye shall be clothed — and all things 
 needful shall be yours." 
 
 Athens, loyal to her creed as the 
 magnet to the pole, ended in midnight 
 darkness, but left for her memorial a 
 cluster of names, poets, philosophers, 
 orators, and artists, unapproached for 
 brilliancy in the annals of our race. 
 
 Corinth, no less loyal to her creed, 
 ended in ruin still more complete, and 
 left as her legacy only a shameful night 
 unstarred by the name of a poet or phi- 
 losopher, scarcely of an artist or an ora- 
 tor, bright enough to hold the attention 
 of mankind; and — what Americans 
 
OLD CORINTH 119 
 
 cannot afford to forget — though she 
 was the wealthiest city of Greece, peo- 
 pled by merchant princes more magnifi- 
 cent than Tyre ever saw, the only one 
 of her citizens whose name is still fami- 
 liar was that penniless genius who had 
 not where to lay his head, and yet when 
 the emperor of the world asked him 
 " What can I do for you ? " was said 
 to have replied, " You can get out of 
 my sunlight.** 
 
 The histories of Athens and of Cor- 
 inth declare that intellectual power and 
 material prosperity are alike unable to 
 preserve communities which do not 
 obey the voice which said to them, as it 
 said to Jerusalem, " Seek first right- 
 eousness, and all things needful shall be 
 added unto you/* 
 
 The fate of Athens I have traced in 
 another paper.' The ruin of old Corinth 
 was more sudden and complete. 
 ' Ancient Cities, 
 
120 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 The Mediterranean, gnawing out from 
 the west the long and narrow Gulf of 
 Corinth, and from the southeast the 
 broader and shorter Saronic Gulf, has 
 nearly bitten Greece in two. Between 
 these gulfs a bar of rock three miles thick 
 holds its almost severed parts together. 
 The slight vessels of antiquity, placed 
 on frames with wooden rollers, were 
 drawn across the narrow bar, and for this 
 reason it was named "the place over 
 which things go," or in Greek, " the 
 isthmus." Nature marked the spot for 
 a commercial centre. While commerce 
 was confined almost wholly to the Medi- 
 terranean, the " isthmus " was relatively 
 more important than is Suez or Panama 
 to-day. 
 
 Eight miles west of its narrowest part 
 the isthmus broadens to six miles. 
 There stood Corinth. It was older than 
 Sparta,3@erlhan Athfins^ To picture its 
 appearance think of a heavily, puffily 
 
OLD CORINTH 121 
 
 upholstered chair with a very high back, 
 a very low seat, and no arms, so placed 
 as to face a little east of north. The 
 back is a huge crag^^ rising, not sheer 
 _but steep, more than eighteen hundred 
 feet. The seat is a gently sloping mass 
 — ^f rock thrust from the crag two hun- 
 dred feet above its base. Upon this seat 
 the city rested, and its walls, includ- 
 ing back of crag and seat of rock, were 
 about ten miles in circuit. Upon the 
 summit of the crag which formed the 
 Acrocorinthus rested a dainty temple of 
 Aphrodite. Near it, probably within the 
 temple precincts, a spring of water named 
 Peirene formed, with Siloa and Castalia, 
 one of the three most celebrated foun- 
 tains the world has known. The entire 
 water supply of the city till the time of 
 Hadrian came from this mountainous 
 crag. Its waters were artificially con- 
 ducted to three different reservoirs, each 
 inclosed and roofed with marble, and 
 
122 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 probably bearing at one or another time 
 the name " Peirene." Two of these 
 have been located by Professor Rich- 
 ardson. 
 
 Hadrian supplied a fourth reservoir 
 from a more distant source, and placed 
 upon its brink a winged horse of bronze 
 pouring the stream through an uplifted 
 ivory hoof. The significance of this de- 
 vice we shall presently consider. 
 
 The entire crag or mountain was ter- 
 raced and planted with trees and flowers, 
 so that viewed from the north it re- 
 sembled an immense bouquet, out of 
 which peered statues in marble and 
 bronze, marking the winding road that 
 led to the temple on its summit. A 
 broad way running north between mili- 
 tary walls joined the city with Lechaeum, 
 its harbor on the Corinthian Gulf; and a 
 second spacious avenue to the southeast, 
 bordered by pine groves, thick set with 
 stately mausoleums and statues of the 
 
OLD CORINTH 123 
 
 dead, conducted to Cenchreae, the harbor 
 on the Saronic Gulf. Tombs of men 
 honored in their day abounded here, but 
 the only personalities which gave it a dis- 
 tinction, still remembered, were two for- 
 eigners, — the pauper Diogenes, already 
 mentioned, who, though he drank water 
 only, lived in an empty wine cask at one 
 end of the avenue, and a workingman, a 
 tent-maker, who passed some months at 
 the other. 
 
 The harbor of Cenchreae lay between 
 two rocky promontories, each of which 
 was crowned by a temple. A colossal 
 bronze of the Greek Neptune, holding 
 in one hand a trident and in the other 
 a dolphin, rose from the water between 
 them. At Cenchreas lived the lady Phoebe, 
 who carried from Corinth the Epistle to 
 the Romans. But what gave earliest and 
 widest celebrity to Corinth remains to 
 be told. 
 
 We are sitting in the armless chair, 
 
124 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 facing nearly north, the Temple of Venus, 
 like a finial ornament, high overhead. 
 Extending the left hand a mile and a 
 half before us, we dip our fingers at Le- 
 chaeum in the Corinthian Gulf. Reach- 
 ing the right arm seven miles southeast, 
 we shake hands with Phoebe at Cen- 
 chreae. Turn your head halfway to the 
 right and note what is between your 
 arms. 
 
 From gulf to gulf, eight miles away, 
 curves the boundary. It is a military 
 wall built to keep Xerxes out of south- 
 ern Greece, and called " The Isthmian." 
 Just inside it is the great Temple of 
 Neptune, and near the latter the build- 
 ings used for the Isthmian games. The 
 avenue leading to it is fringed on one 
 side by a row of pine trees, on the other 
 by a row of statues facing them. These 
 grow longer every two years, for they 
 are memorials of the victors in the bien- 
 nial competitions. Next to having his 
 
OLD CORINTH 125 
 
 statue placed at Olympia, the highest 
 ambition of a Greek youth is to have it 
 here. If he wins the prize at Olympia 
 in running, boxing, wrestling, poetry, or 
 music, his native city will proclaim a 
 holiday to welcome him home. A breach 
 will be made in its walls for him to enter, 
 and when he has passed through it will 
 be closed, that none less worthy may 
 tread in his steps. Though he will hence- 
 forth belong to the highest aristocracy 
 of his country, his most valued reward 
 will be the knowledge that his statue 
 stands in the sacred grove of Olympia. 
 Second only to this was the glory of the 
 victor at Isthmia. 
 
 The history of Corinth shows no less 
 vividly than the history of Israel the 
 efforts of the unseen powers to save a 
 community from its peculiar dangers, 
 and the appalling obstinacy with which 
 those efforts may be resisted. Before 
 our Scriptures had been written Corinth 
 
126 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 received her bible. In form it was un- 
 like ours ; in substance it was similar. 
 How it was given, when or through 
 whom, no one knows. But it was there, 
 and it was adapted more accurately than 
 our Bible to the needs and conditions 
 of her people. Its chapters were painted 
 in pictures or carved in statues which 
 all men saw, and sung in hymns which 
 all men heard. By such means its con- 
 tents were made more familiar to the 
 inhabitants of Corinth than are the con- 
 tents of our Scriptures to the people 
 of Christendom. It warned them with 
 tremendous power to cast off the sins 
 they cherished, and exhorted them with 
 equal urgency to cherish the virtues 
 they rejected. 
 
 The temptations of Corinth were 
 those which assail with special force 
 commercial peoples. All her wealth, and 
 she was the wealthiest of Greek cities, 
 came from commerce. Merchants were 
 
OLD CORINTH 127 
 
 her princes. As in America, business 
 men were her sovereigns. 
 
 The first chapter in her bible, as fa- 
 miliar to all her children as the history 
 of Joseph is to those in our Sunday- 
 schools, told the story of Jason. When 
 Corinth was young, Jason was sent on 
 a divine business. It was the business 
 of all merchants. Somewhere, behind 
 barriers almost insuperable, hung a 
 golden fleece. In spite of all obstacles 
 he must get that fleece in an honorable 
 way and use it as the gods should di- 
 rect. He summoned the noblest men of 
 his day to help him. They came will- 
 ingly. In the ship Argo they started 
 upon the quest. They fought dragons 
 and conquered them. They battled with 
 hunger and heat and cold and conquered 
 them. Their struggles and well-earned 
 victories made them the worthiest and 
 strongest of the Greeks ; made them 
 the world's heroes. Then Jason re- 
 
128 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 tired to Corinth. He did not under- 
 stand that he had been sent after the 
 fleece that his struggles might make him 
 a hero. He thought only of the gold 
 he had won. Having gained that, he 
 laid up the good ship and left it to rot. 
 in the pine grove at Corinth, wasted ten 
 years of sovereignty in selfish luxury, 
 growing baser every year, and became 
 false to his wife, who in revenge mur- 
 dered his children. Sinking into deeper 
 and deeper degradation, the hero's life 
 ended in the sternest tragedy of Greek 
 mythology. " So must it be with every 
 one who fancies that his business is to 
 get money without discerning that his 
 real business is to make sure his strug- 
 gles after money hammer and carve him 
 into a man,'* said this chapter. 
 
 The second chapter, painted in many 
 pictures, one of them by Polignotus so 
 fine that it was placed beside the shrine 
 of the oracle at Delphi, described in 
 
OLD CORINTH 129 
 
 hymns which were sung in the sanctua- 
 ries of Corinth as the psalms of David 
 were sung in the temple at Jerusalem, 
 exhibited another king of Corinth. He 
 stands in a lake, but when he stoops to 
 drink, the water flies from his lips. 
 Luscious fruits hang over him, but when 
 he lifts his hand to pluck them, the 
 boughs spring upward beyond his reach. 
 He is tortured by thirst and hunger, 
 but he cannot die. But why is Tanta- 
 lus tormented thus ? He had been in- 
 trusted with a treasure of gold — observe, 
 it is always gold that seduces in these 
 Corinthian lessons — and bidden to 
 guard it for Zeus. But he coveted the 
 gold, kept it for himself, lied about it, 
 when required to restore it declared he 
 did not have it. He fancied the treasure 
 could satisfy his desires, but found that 
 it aggravated them. " The first million, 
 which was to be more than enough, 
 served only to triple the craving for the 
 
130 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 second million, and so on and on with 
 every one who grows careless of his 
 work in thinking of his wages," says 
 this chapter. Who wrote it ? I cannot 
 conceive unless it were He who said, 
 " Blessed are they that hunger and thirst 
 after righteousness : for they shall be 
 filled." 
 
 The third chapter is an extract from 
 the biography of another king of Cor- 
 inth. 
 
 "Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone.*' 
 
 But when he has almost reached the 
 top it slips by him, darts swiftly down, 
 and the weary man must begin his task 
 anew. And who is this ? " Sisyphus ! " 
 every child in Corinth would have an- 
 swered. " He used to cheat the mer- 
 chants who came here to trade. Some 
 say he rolled stones down the Citadel 
 upon them and then stole their money 
 from the mangled bodies, and now he 
 
OLD CORINTH 131 
 
 has to roll stones forever, though no 
 longer down hill." But many a modern 
 man who has spent his life cornering 
 the markets and ended in the poor- 
 house has felt, " It is I, it is I ! " 
 
 The caption of the fourth chapter I 
 have already shown. It was written by 
 the Emperor Hadrian and placed where 
 every eye could read it. 
 
 In 1896 Professor R. B. Richardson 
 while excavating found a large number 
 of small images of horses and horses' 
 heads. They helped him to locate the 
 great temple the foundations of which 
 he discovered, for he knew they were vo- 
 tive offerings. These offerings brought 
 to the sanctuary by devout Corinthians 
 more than two millenniums ago were to 
 them in a way what hymn and prayer 
 books are to us. They testify that the 
 story of the horse was rooted in the 
 minds of those worshipers as deeply as 
 the memory of the Madonna in the 
 
132 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 mind of mediaeval Europe. And this 
 is made still more apparent by the fact 
 that when the city had been completely 
 destroyed and its site had remained for 
 more than a century a desert, two hun- 
 dred years after Julius Caesar rebuilt it 
 Hadrian found the legend of the horse 
 still so familiar that he placed at the 
 new reservoir a bronze of the winged 
 steed delivering the stream from an up- 
 lifted ivory hoof; for he knew that all 
 in the city would understand its signifi- 
 cance and hear it calling " Ho, every 
 one that thirsteth ! " 
 
 This is the story written in those clay 
 hymnals, stamped on the coins, repeated 
 in pictures, statues, poems before the 
 eyes and in the ears of Corinth for cen- 
 turies, and finally cast in bronze by 
 Hadrian. 
 
 A monster breathing fire and devour- 
 ing men ravaged a distant land. No one 
 could stand before it, for scales of brass 
 
OLD CORINTH 133 
 
 covered its body and granite was as 
 butter in its claws. At last a prince 
 of Corinth, — Bellerophon by name, — 
 moved with compassion for the afflicted 
 land, watched at night by the spring of 
 Peirene. In his hand was a bridle. No- 
 tice the material ; it is gold this time also, 
 but gold used as it should be. While 
 men slept — it is the watchers only who 
 see such things — the winged courser of 
 Zeus descended light as a snowflake to 
 drink at the holy fountain. The prince 
 laid his hand upon the steed, put the 
 gold bridle on its head, and guiding by 
 that was carried swift as thought to the 
 land where the Chimaera lay. Hovering 
 over it he slew the monster with arrows 
 shot from above. Mind you, only by 
 weapons sent from that direction can 
 such creatures be killed. 
 
 Thus by the sight of their ideal hero, 
 whenever at market they glanced at 
 coins on which his image was stamped. 
 
134 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 or walked the streets, or entered the 
 theatre, no less than when they went to 
 church, the Corinthians were warned to 
 use their wealth in such wise that it 
 should guide aright the celestial coursers 
 — the noble aspirations, the generous 
 impulses — sent from heaven to slay 
 the beasts that devour men. Thus " Go 
 ye into all the world and preach the gos- 
 pel to every creature '* was stamped upon 
 the coins with which they bought their 
 daily bread. But their history shows that 
 wherever they sent one angel they sent 
 seven fiends, with every Bible as it were 
 a cargo of whiskey, so that in Paul's age 
 " to Corinthianize " meant in all lan- 
 guages that used the word " to go to the 
 devil." 
 
 For the people of Corinth heeded 
 their bible about as much as we heed 
 ours — no more, no less. Two facts will 
 make this plain. 
 
 I. Their riches came from the sea. It 
 
OLD CORINTH 135 
 
 was natural, therefore, that they should 
 worship the god of the ocean. At first 
 they did so. Their oldest temple was 
 built to Neptune. But they turned from 
 the manly god who taught them to 
 earn wealth to the flattering goddess 
 who taught them to squander it, first 
 in luxury, next in folly, and last in 
 unspeakable debauchery. The Temple 
 of Neptune remained at the base, but 
 the Temple of Venus they put upon 
 the summit of their citadel. There it 
 advertised to all men that religion of 
 sumptuous and sickening depravity for 
 which Corinth became chiefly celebrated. 
 That cult was the most conspicuous 
 characteristic of the place, and from it 
 the title of this paper should be taken 
 if it were possible to make any truthful 
 description of that characteristic fit for 
 modern eyes. 
 
 II. How old Corinth obeyed her 
 bible is also shown by the Isthmian 
 
136 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 games, though their history was not 
 completed until she had been destroyed, 
 rebuilt, and made the " City of Par- 
 venus.** 
 
 Those games were at first religious 
 rites. He who taught Paul that men's 
 bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit 
 had long before revealed the same fact 
 to Corinth. The piety and genius of 
 Greece founded and fostered, in honor 
 of the gods, these competitions which 
 strengthened both body and mind. 
 Only honorable men were permitted to 
 enter them. That stadium hard by the 
 Temple of Neptune was built by those 
 who in contributing to its cost felt as 
 we feel when we help to build a church. 
 That row of marble cottages for the 
 athletes and the magnificent gymnasium 
 for their practice were erected by the 
 same kind of devotion which erected the 
 Minster of Cologne and the Church of 
 St. Peter. 
 
OLD CORINTH 137 
 
 Thirty days before the games began 
 each applicant for the contests was re- 
 quired to appear before a court of judges 
 chosen from the noblest in the nation, 
 and, after sacrifices to the gods, make 
 oath that he was of pure Greek lineage ; 
 that he had never committed an act of 
 impiety ; that he had never been con- 
 victed of a crime, and that he had 
 trained faithfully ten months for the 
 event. For thirty days more he must 
 train in the Isthmian gymnasium, under 
 the eye of the president, an official hon- 
 ored more highly than is the president 
 of any university in our country. 
 
 The eventful day arrives. The foot 
 race is called. " They that run in a race 
 run all, but one receiveth the prize." 
 And what is the prize ? A crown of 
 parsley leaves, in later years of pine, but 
 never a penny of money. His prize is 
 the green crown testifying that its wearer 
 has won honor for his native city, and 
 
138 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 telling him that his name will be sung 
 by poets and his statue placed among 
 those of the renowned. 
 
 While these remained the sole re- 
 wards, kings sought admission to the 
 contests and the best men in Greece re- 
 garded the race-course and the boxing- 
 ring as Paul regarded that high career 
 which he described by reference to them. 
 
 But a change came. Neither money 
 nor anything that had a money value 
 was contended for at the Isthmian games. 
 Their popularity, however, became so 
 great that they were imitated throughout 
 Asia Minor. The Isthmian victors were 
 sought for as coaches. Great sums were 
 given them for service in that capacity. 
 They yielded to the temptation which 
 conquered Jason, Tantalus, and Sisy- 
 phus. Victory at Isthmia was sought 
 as a lever with which to raise money at 
 Ephesus and Antioch. Then the glory 
 of Greek athletics passed into eclipse. 
 
OLD CORINTH 139 
 
 Then came the period when the wise 
 and the good regarded them as we regard 
 the prize-ring, and when, glancing at 
 Corinth, they scarcely knew whether they 
 most despised its bullies striking with 
 brass knuckles in the arena or its Syba- 
 rites dancing with tinkling cymbals in 
 the courts of Aphrodite. 
 
VI 
 NEW CORINTH 
 
 THE CITY OF THE PARVENUS 
 
 The year 146 b. c. was blackened by- 
 two of the foulest deeds Rome ever per- 
 petrated. Both of them were wrought 
 by cupidity masking as patriotism. The 
 patriotism was of that kind which Dr. 
 Johnston branded as the last refuge of 
 scoundrels. 
 
 Carthage had been the rival of Rome. 
 She was that no longer. Her navy de- 
 stroyed, her army effaced, her condition 
 was such that Cato's apprehensions of a 
 second Hannibal had excited smiles in 
 the Senate. But the merchants and bank- 
 ers whom Cato despised brought about 
 what his efforts failed to accomplish. 
 Envious of her wealth and jealous of her 
 commercial superiority, they persuaded 
 
NEW CORINTH 141 
 
 the Conscript Fathers that Carthage 
 should be exterminated. Sorely against 
 his will Scipio was forced to destroy her. 
 After a defense as heroic as it was hope- 
 less, the splendid metropolis of Africa 
 ceased to exist. Neither wall nor build- 
 ing was left to mark its site. 
 
 " Scipio, however, whom nature had 
 designed for a nobler part than that of 
 an executioner, gazed with horror on his 
 own work ; and instead of the joy of 
 victory the victor himself was haunted 
 by a presentiment of the retribution that 
 would inevitably follow such a mis- 
 deed." ' 
 
 Upon Corinth that same year Rome 
 committed a deed no less vile. That city 
 also was a competitor, feared by the 
 would-be monopolists of the Tiber, and 
 their machinations eventuated in her ruin. 
 It was as if England should grow strong 
 enough and wicked enough to blot out 
 * Mommsen. 
 
142 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 Hamburg and New York in order to 
 appropriate their trade. 
 
 *« The mills of God grind slowly. 
 But they grind exceeding small." 
 
 These two iniquities, which, when un- 
 dertaken, seemed to the majority expe- 
 dient, are conspicuous among the causes 
 of the " decline and fall of the Roman 
 Empire." 
 
 It was the absence from North Africa 
 of a strong civilized power which en- 
 abled the Vandals to establish themselves 
 there, from that base to storm and pil- 
 lage the Seven Hills and open the door 
 for the Ostrogoths. Had Rome dealt 
 honorably with Carthage, there would in 
 all human probability have been such a 
 power when it was sorely needed. Gen- 
 seric and Theodoric were the divine re- 
 ply to Scipio i^milianus, long delayed 
 but convincing when it came. 
 
 Yet Rome was not killed by spears. 
 
NEW CORINTH 143 
 
 She died of the plague. The seeds of it 
 were brought by her victorious soldiers 
 from Corinth and scattered over the 
 whole of Italy. Great Rome murdered 
 little Corinth easily by a single blow, but 
 in dealing the blow she caught from her 
 victim the disease which killed her. It 
 would have been well for her had she 
 remembered where it was that Ulysses 
 went to get poison for his arrows. 
 
 Before b. c. 146 Athens had died, 
 Sparta had died, Thebes had died ; that 
 is, if death is the flight of the spirit from 
 the body. Each of these cities left a 
 legacy of splendid deeds. The body of 
 Corinth, like the others, still lingered. 
 If accumulating money and using it so 
 as to make the whole earth a pander to 
 guilty passions while piety and patriot- 
 ism steadily decay be prosperity, she was 
 prosperous. If to fester with a moral 
 leprosy so conspicuous that when any 
 man in any nation between Spain and 
 
144 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 the Euphrates becomes eminent as a 
 cheat or a debaucher his neighbors say 
 " he has Corinthianized," be livings Cor- 
 inth lived on, growing richer every year ; 
 making herself a coffin of gold studded 
 with jewels, and thinking it a throne. 
 
 It is not surprising that when Greece, 
 forgetting the days of her grandeur, ca- 
 ressed the ears of Midas as fondly as 
 Titania stroked those of Bottom, she 
 put the wealthiest of her cities at the 
 head of her confederacy. Corinth had 
 money in abundance. What matter that 
 she had little else but vices ? 
 
 In proportion as men grow worthless 
 they generally grow arrogant. So it 
 was with Corinth. Roman ambassadors 
 brought her a message she did not like. 
 Without considering that they repre- 
 sented swords and spears and shields and 
 veteran legions to which she could op- 
 pose only flowers and perfumes and 
 pictures and dancing girls, she leered at 
 
NEW CORINTH 145 
 
 them with senile insults ; drove them 
 from the council chamber with yells of 
 rage and flung filth of the streets upon 
 them. Rome rejoiced when she heard 
 of this. It brought the opportunity she 
 craved. Her reply was Lucius Mum- 
 miuSjwith orders to destroy the city which 
 had insulted Roman ambassadors (in 
 large letters) and diminished Roman 
 trade (in very small ones, since the sting 
 of the wasp is scarcely visible to the 
 naked eye) . H e did the work thoroughly. 
 Temples, palaces, gardens were de- 
 spoiled. All property, public and private, 
 was confiscated. A vast number of ves- 
 sels laden with treasures of art were sent 
 to the Tiber. The citizens were sold 
 into slavery. The walls were leveled. 
 Every building but one within their cir- 
 cuit was razed. The ruins were fired. 
 
 The devastation continued until the 
 most gorgeous city in Greece, perhaps 
 in the world, became a heap. Roman 
 
146 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 soldiers tore from the walls of temples 
 and palaces pictures each worth a prince's 
 ransom, and flung them on the ground 
 for dice-boards, on which they gambled 
 for female captives. The general ap- 
 praised the spoils so accurately that he 
 issued orders, in all seriousness, requir- 
 ing captains of transports freighted with 
 pictures by Polignotus and statues by 
 Phidias and Praxiteles to replace every 
 object missed from their cargoes. In a 
 triumph more magnificent than Rome 
 had ever witnessed, the treasures of Cor- 
 inth were carried to the capital. The 
 Imperial City thought she had conquered 
 Greece. The reverse was true. Greece 
 had begun to conquer her. The Hel- 
 lenizing of Italy dates from the triumph 
 of Mummius. The keenest-eyed of 
 Roman historians wrote : — 
 
 "The first result of the victory of 
 Mummius was the death of faith and 
 morality in Rome." 
 
NEW CORINTH 147 
 
 Greek manners followed Greek wealth, 
 Grecian luxury supplanted Roman sim- 
 plicity, Greek skepticism drove out 
 Roman faith, Greek vices corrupted 
 Roman virtues. Thus the incurable 
 cancer of which Rome ultimately per- 
 ished began its work. The poison into 
 which the wise man of Ithaca had tried 
 to dip the arrows to be aimed at his ene- 
 mies was taken by Rpman fools to flavor 
 their daily food. 
 
 For a hundred years Corinth remained 
 a desert. No human creature dwelt on 
 its abandoned site. The only persons to 
 be seen where the busiest mart in the 
 world had been were paupers scratching 
 the ground for bits of Corinthian brass, 
 as fellahs and Arabs to-day search the 
 deserted mounds beside the Nile and 
 the Euphrates ; for the burning of Cor- 
 inth, melting the vast number of gold, 
 silver, and bronze statues which remained 
 even after Attalus had filled with them 
 
148 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 the galleries of Pergamos, and Mum- 
 mius had sent to Rome as many of them 
 as he had ships to carry, produced a new 
 amalgam named " Corinthian brass," 
 which was valued more highly than 
 gold/ 
 
 A hundred years after Mummius, 
 Julius Caesar, alert to the commercial 
 opportunities of the location, founded a 
 second city on the ancient site. He peo- 
 pled it with emancipated slaves. They 
 were of various nationalities and diverse 
 languages, but from such unpromising 
 material his genius evolved a metropolis 
 which reproduced in coarser colors the 
 history of its predecessor. This was the 
 city in which Paul wrote the Epistle to 
 
 » The doors of the " Gate Beautiful *' in Herod's 
 temple are said to have been of this material. It is 
 probable that the stalk of that false vine drooping 
 with clusters of emeralds and rubies, with which our 
 Lord seems to have contrasted himself in speaking 
 of the **true" vine of which his disciples are the 
 branches, was also of the same. 
 
NEW CORINTH 149 
 
 the Romans. For obvious reasons I call 
 it "The City of the Parvenus." In ap- 
 pearance it seems to have been a repro- 
 duction of ancient Corinth so far as a 
 stone-mason can reproduce a statue by- 
 Phidias, or a sign painter a picture by 
 Raphael. It copied the manners of Old 
 Corinth so far as a washerwoman sud- 
 denly enriched can imitate the graces of 
 Agnes Sorel or a bootblack ape the cour- 
 tesies of Chesterfield. The morals of the 
 old aristocracy were more easily adopted. 
 New Corinth may be named — I think 
 Robertson called it so — the door-mat 
 upon which foreigners wiped their feet 
 before entering the enchanted land. De- 
 praved as Greek manners became, they 
 remained always dainty, elegant, refined. 
 Gorgeous as Roman manners became, 
 they never ceased to be clumsy, arrogant, 
 and coarse. The depravity of Greece 
 married the brutality of Rome, and their 
 offspring was New Corinth. This was 
 
150 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 the city in which Paul spent eighteen 
 months. The Judseans tried to drive 
 him from it by violence, as he had been 
 driven from Philippi, but the Roman 
 governor suppressed the riot, and the 
 mob gave its leaders a drubbing at the 
 whipping-post. The incident reeks of 
 lynch law, as was to be expected in such 
 a place. At Corinth the Apostle was al- 
 most mastered by a depression of spirits 
 which threatened to paralyze his useful- 
 ness. There is little doubt that it was 
 caused by the sight of the depravities 
 around him. They made his work seem 
 hopeless. The appalling catalogue of 
 vices in the first chapter of Romans he 
 wrote here. It is only a description of 
 what was going on before his eyes. 
 
 And now let us open a few of the 
 windows in the epistles to the Corin- 
 thians, through which glimpses of the 
 city may be seen. No other letter in 
 the New Testament is so full of local 
 
NEW CORINTH 151 
 
 color as the first of these. No other is 
 so minutely adapted to the special needs 
 of its original recipients, yet it is the only 
 one addressed to " all that call upon the 
 name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every 
 place," and more than all of PauFs other 
 epistles combined, it has served as a 
 church manual in all times and regions. 
 
 I. Some of the allusions by which the 
 Apostle describes his own work and feel- 
 ings : — 
 
 The two strands binding the new 
 city to the old one were the Isthmian 
 games and the Venus cult. Through all 
 vicissitudes except during the century 
 of its complete desolation, when they 
 were held a few miles away, the Isthmian 
 games continued at Corinth. Therefore 
 Paul was sure to be understood by the 
 Corinthians when he wrote them that 
 he was a boxer, not beating the air, but 
 hitting straight from the shoulder as the 
 Isthmian athletes did ; a runner, running 
 
152 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 as the Isthmian athletes ran. He de- 
 clared that he disciplined himself as the 
 Isthmian athletes had to do before they 
 could be admitted to the competitions, 
 lest while he preached to others he 
 should become a "cast-away," which 
 was the technical term for one who 
 failed to pass the Isthmian examinations. 
 Again, at Isthmia Roman gladiatorial 
 shows first entered Greece. Therefore 
 the Corinthians would understand the 
 " Morituri Salutamus " in i Corinthians 
 iv, 9. He declared he had been made "a 
 spectacle " both to angels and men. 
 
 One of the most conspicuous build- 
 ings in Corinth was its theatre. Profes- 
 sor Richardson has recovered its site. It 
 was one of the three objects first seen by 
 visitors whether they approached from 
 the north by Lechaeum harbor, from the 
 east by Cenchreae, or by the northeast 
 from Athens, and it stood unroofed, 
 open to the sky. May it not be that 
 
NEW CORINTH 153 
 
 the recollection of this structure moved 
 the Apostle to employ the word " the- 
 atre " in the more picturesque but less 
 usual sense of " spectacle ? " 
 
 He describes himself and his fellow 
 disciples — or perhaps he tactfully refers 
 to himself only — as the " offscourings 
 of the earth ; " weak, helpless, worthless 
 except for the sustaining power of Christ. 
 The epithet was an accurate description 
 — familiar too — of the rabble which 
 Julius Caesar had sent to people New 
 Corinth, but which his genius had 
 moulded into a great and splendid city. 
 
 Was not the Apostle thinking of the 
 appalling doom of Old Corinth when, in 
 the Second Epistle, he wrote the poignant 
 entreaty which seems to press home the 
 whole contents of his letter, " Now then 
 we are ambassadors for Christ, as though 
 God did beseech you by us : we pray 
 you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to 
 God." 
 
154 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 II. Note some of the allusions used 
 to describe Christ and his church. The 
 oldest building in Corinth was a Doric 
 temple, of which until the earthquake 
 of A. D. 1858 five stately columns re- 
 mained. Three I believe are still erect, 
 the only work of human hands remain- 
 ing above ground to mark the ancient 
 site. Through the effacing devastations 
 which had annihilated other structures 
 this temple had stood in solitary gran- 
 deur ; not of course unscathed, but 
 damaged so slightly that it had been 
 repaired and appeared in New Corinth 
 almost as superb as it had been in the 
 elder city. Thus it repeated to every 
 Corinthian who should read them the 
 words, " Other foundation (enduring 
 foundation) can no man lay than that 
 which is laid, which is Jesus Christ." 
 Every man's work shall be tried by fire 
 as that temple has been, and if any man's 
 work abide (as it has done) " he shall 
 
NEW CORINTH 155 
 
 receive a reward." As is your temple so 
 is Christ's church. It, too, shall outlast 
 all fires. 
 
 In another way I think he repeated 
 the same truth, though this I suggest 
 with hesitation. 
 
 The most remarkable feature in the to- 
 pography of Corinth was its rock citadel, 
 towering behind the city and supplying 
 all the water it had. 
 
 " Our fathers," wrote Paul, " drank 
 of a spiritual rock that followed them ; 
 and the rock was Christ." 
 
 Attempts have been made to explain 
 the figure by reference to a late rabbini- 
 cal legend that the rock smitten by 
 Moses, or a part of it, moved in the wake 
 of the Israelites on their way to Pales- 
 tine and supplied them with water. 
 That suggestion seems to me absurd. 
 The natural meaning of the word used 
 by Paul is "cliff" rather than "rock," 
 and the allusion sounds to me Hke a 
 
156 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 reminiscence of the Acrocorinthus. As 
 that cliff supplies the city before it, so 
 Christ follows his people always to give 
 them " living water." 
 
 Again, the little plain not far north- 
 west of the city was one of the most 
 fertile in Greece. As such it was pro- 
 verbial. A Greek who had a farm to sell 
 would be likely to say, " It is as rich as 
 the plain of Sicyon." On every other 
 side of Corinth the land was notoriously 
 barren. Remember this when you read 
 what the Apostle wrote about sowing 
 and reaping. An oasis attracts more at- 
 tention than a prairie. 
 
 III. But the three most familiar pas- 
 sages in all Paulas writings, the three 
 which we all know by heart, are the 
 13 th of First Corinthians, which treats of 
 love, the 15th of the same epistle, and 
 the 5th of Second Corinthians, which 
 affirm the resurrection of the body. 
 How came they to be written ? 
 
NEW CORINTH 157 
 
 We have seen that Corinth adored the 
 goddess of the body as Athens adored 
 the deity of mind. The message given 
 to Corinth was this, " Worship God with 
 your bodies." She did not long obey it. 
 She soon made the servant the master, 
 and began to worship the body itself. 
 Hence came her depravities and her ruin. 
 Post-apostolic teachers, when they found 
 communities traveling that same bad 
 road, tried to save them by preaching 
 asceticism, that is, by contempt and abuse 
 of the body. Their doctrine was, " You 
 have pampered your bodies and become 
 vile. Reverse this and grow good. 
 Starve your bodies, scourge them, walk 
 on nails, go into monasteries. That is 
 the road to sanctity." 
 
 Paul said no such thing. As he had 
 said to the men of Athens, " Whom 
 therefore ye ignorantly worship, him de- 
 clare I unto you," so he simply repeated 
 to the Corinthians their own original and 
 
158 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 acknowledged ' creed in an intelligible 
 way and urged them to obey the com- 
 mand given them in the beginning. He 
 said to them, as the Isthmian games had 
 said before they were perverted, " Glorify 
 God in your body." " Whether there- 
 fore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever " 
 bodily act "ye do, do all to the glory of 
 God." For this purpose the Isthmian 
 games were instituted, and for this even 
 the worship of Aphrodite was begun. 
 Through forgetting that purpose the 
 Aphrodite cult had become a cesspool 
 that may not be described. A thousand 
 sirens alluring to ruin were the priest- 
 esses that ministered at her temple in 
 Old Corinth, and there the nameless in- 
 famies catalogued in the Epistle to the 
 Romans had set the fashions which New 
 Corinth followed. So far had this gone 
 that the Apostle wrote two whole chap- 
 ters for an antiseptic to the sewage which 
 had oozed from the Temple of Venus 
 
NEW CORINTH 159 
 
 into the church of Christ, and was 
 obliged to bid the Christian women of 
 Corinth keep silence even in the meet- 
 ings of believers, lest they should be 
 mistaken for priestesses of shame. 
 
 It was because the Corinthians had 
 perverted the Lord's Supper into an im- 
 itation of the Venus cult orgies, where 
 gluttony and drunkenness were rife, that 
 he warned them against celebrating it in 
 a manner so unworthy. 
 
 All this shamefulness was practiced 
 under the name of love. How did Paul 
 fight it ? 
 
 " If I speak with the tongues of men 
 and of angels, but have not love, I am 
 become sounding brass, or a clanging 
 cymbal." 
 
 "Faith, hope, love, . . . and the great- 
 est of these is love ! " The false must 
 fly when the true appears. To discredit 
 the counterfeit he shows the genuine 
 bill. 
 
i6o CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 We come now to the 15th of First 
 and the 5th of Second Corinthians. 
 
 Remember that both Old and New 
 Corinth worshiped the goddess of the 
 body, that the Isthmian games were es- 
 tablished to honor Deity by the develop- 
 ment of physical strength and beauty, 
 that the Venus cult sprang from the 
 same root. 
 
 Observe how often and with what 
 emphasis in the two epistles Paul refers 
 to the body, — to its purposes, its dig- 
 nity, the honor divinely put upon it, 
 and the duty of not obeying but con- 
 trolling its impulses. " Glorify God with 
 your bodies " may almost be called the 
 theme of which the two epistles form the 
 symphony. In that culminating chapter 
 wherein the Apostle turns the powers of 
 the world to come upon the wheels of 
 present duty, and, reading the writings 
 of time by the light of eternity, exclaims, 
 " O death, where is thy sting," his text 
 
NEW CORINTH i6i 
 
 is not the immortal spirit, but the mortal 
 body. He urges men so to live that their 
 " mortal bodies " may be, as their Maker 
 means them to be, germs of immortal 
 ones ; spiritual bodies that shall be to 
 these of flesh and blood as tulips to their 
 bulbs or roses to their seeds. Thus again 
 he recalls the Corinthians to their origi- 
 nal creed, given them long before by the 
 same Power who spake through his lips 
 and pen. They had perverted the mes- 
 sage beyond the recognition of any eye 
 unopened by the Spirit who had caught 
 it in the beginning. 
 
 Your bodies, wrote Paul, are temples 
 of the Holy Spirit. If we glorify Him 
 in them, this corruptible shall put on 
 incorruption, and death shall be swal- 
 lowed up in victory. So the Apostle 
 seems to me to teach. 
 
 That truth, written in Hebrew liter- 
 ature by Isaiah, had been carved by un- 
 known architects, and to a seer's eyes was 
 
i62 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 still legible upon the foundation stones 
 of the temples of Poseidon and Aphro- 
 dite. 
 
 ^' For we know," reiterates the Apos- 
 tle, substituting for the figure of plant 
 life passing out of its seed shell into a 
 glorified body, that of a man moving out 
 of a tent pitched for a night into a pal- 
 ace constructed for eternity, " that if our 
 earthly house of this tabernacle were dis- 
 solved, we have a building of God, an 
 house not made with hands, eternal in the 
 heavens." 
 
VII 
 COLOSSI 
 
 THE CITY OF THE SLAVE 
 
 Some ninety miles eastward from Ephe- 
 sus the river Lycos joins the Meander 
 on its way to the JEgea.n, Here high 
 mountains approaching each other from 
 the north and the south leave a narrow 
 passage for the commingled waters, then 
 retreat and come close together again ten 
 miles farther east. The plain they inclose 
 is the Lycos valley. In shape it resembles 
 an obtuse-angled triangle. The moun- 
 tains which rim it are rugged, and some 
 of their peaks rise more than eight thou- 
 sand feet above the sea. Upon this plain 
 were three cities grouped by St. Paul 
 almost as parts of a single metropolis. 
 
 At the northwest angle of the valley 
 upon the 'mountain-side was Hierapolis, 
 
1 64 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 or in English the " Sacred City." It was 
 celebrated for a cave of superb stalactites 
 and a mephitic spring the vapors from 
 which were believed to inspire priests and 
 poison laymen. Here was a great tem- 
 ple to Cybele which long before Paul's 
 day had been a centre of Phrygian wor- 
 ship. Here, too, in later times dwelt 
 Bishop Papias, believed by some — 
 though probably on insufficient grounds 
 — to have been the amanuensis of " the 
 disciple whom Jesus loved." Here, too, 
 there is some reason to think that the 
 four daughters of Philip the Evangelist 
 " which did prophesy " spent their last 
 days. What, however, gives the place its 
 chief interest for us is an uncontroverted 
 fact to be mentioned presently. 
 
 Six miles south of Hierapolis, at the 
 southwest angle of the plain, south also 
 of the Lycos, was a city named originally 
 "Jove's-town," but renamed after his 
 wife, by one of the Seleucids, " Laodicea." 
 
COLOSSiE 165 
 
 An emporium of trade, possessing a 
 widely celebrated sanitarium or Temple 
 of iEsculapius, the priests of which were 
 believed to have the secret for manu- 
 facturing an eye-salve of unequaled vir- 
 tue, the wealthiest and most luxurious 
 city between Ephesus and Antioch, Lao- 
 dicea is remembered only on account of 
 the caustic letter drawn from the author 
 of the Apocalypse by the laxity of her 
 Christians. 
 
 At the southeast angle of the plain, 
 ten miles east-southeast of Laodicea, 
 was Colossae. It was perched upon a 
 shelf or foothill where the Lycos had 
 cut a gorge through the mountain ridge. 
 The gorge, steep and narrow, bisected the 
 city, and is said by Professor Ramsay to 
 be two and a half miles long, varying in 
 width between one hundred and fifty 
 and two hundred and fifty feet. The 
 " Royal Road " which connected Smyrna 
 and Ephesus with Persia ran through 
 
i66 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 the Lycos valley and gave importance 
 to each of its three cities. 
 
 For a long time Colossae was the 
 most considerable of the three, but in 
 the time of Paul Laodicea had taken 
 precedence and Colossae was compara- 
 tively insignificant. At that time it was 
 the home of a certain good-for-nothing 
 slave, a thief and a vagabond, and of his 
 master, a refined Christian gentleman. 
 This fact alone has given it distinction 
 for all ages. Providence has used the 
 insignificance of the place as art has 
 employed the monotony of the Nile to 
 emphasize the grandeur of the pyramids. 
 Paul has brought it about that we must 
 think of Colossae because the name is in 
 the New Testament, and that in think- 
 ing of Colossae nothing shall distract our 
 attention from two facts more important 
 for us to know than anything taught by 
 the splendors of Ephesus. Those facts 
 are : — 
 
COLOSSI 167 
 
 I. How the Christian church was 
 cradled, fostered, and made the strongest 
 power in the world. 
 
 II. How it attacked and destroyed 
 the most malignant social and political 
 disease of antiquity, a disease which ap- 
 peared to such men as Cicero, Epictetus, 
 and Juvenal to be both deadly and in- 
 curable. 
 
 There are times when Christian pa- 
 triots lose heart as they pause to take 
 breath in their conflicts with the worship 
 of Mammon. A glance backward should 
 revive their faith. 
 
 In the year a. d. 35 the wealth, the 
 fashion, the intellectual life of the world, 
 all its literature, all its science, all its art, 
 all its philosophy, all its religions, all its 
 business, all its soldiers, all its ships, both 
 of commerce and of war, all its amuse- 
 ments, all its statesmen, all its politi- 
 cians, all its rulers, all its lawyers, and 
 most important of all, its little children 
 
1 68 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 were precisely as they would have been 
 if no sermon had been preached on the 
 mountain and no voice had prayed, 
 " Father ! forgive them.** 
 
 Three centuries later all was changed. 
 The powers of the state were nominally 
 Christian ; the world's ships were steered 
 by the pilots of Galilee, its buildings 
 constructed by the carpenter of Naza- 
 reth, its costliest marbles inscribed with 
 his name. How did the change come to 
 pass ? The two epistles sent by Paul to 
 Colossae reveal the secret. 
 
 St. Paul is a prisoner at Rome. Near 
 three hundred thousand persons are in 
 the great circus of that city. Some are 
 swearing, some are betting, some are 
 fighting. All are alert with excitement, 
 for it is race day. The most admired 
 men in Rome are the jockeys who will 
 soon appear, one wearing a white, one a 
 red, one a blue, but the favorite a green 
 cap. It is some years before the advent 
 
COLOSStE 169 
 
 of the charioteer Diodes, whose skill as 
 a whip brought him a fortune so great 
 that he left his son a million and a quar- 
 ter pounds sterling, but it is nearing the 
 time when Juvenal declared a jockey- 
 could earn a hundred-fold more than a 
 leading lawyer; the time of which he 
 wrote, "The whole of Rome has flocked 
 to the circus to-day, and the uproar 
 of the crowd can be heard miles away." 
 Caligula, by spending in the stables the 
 time he should have passed in the Sen- 
 ate, has made the society of jockeys more 
 envied than that of Conscript Fathers, 
 and Nero, though he began by pretend- 
 ing to frown upon that scandal, has cast 
 off disguises and taught the populace to 
 regard his sceptre as a trifle compared 
 with his whip. 
 
 On the Aventine, overlooking the 
 great circus and within sound of its tur- 
 moil, was a small house where dwelt a 
 man named Aquila with his wife Priscilla. 
 
170 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 They had met Paul at Corinth a few 
 years before, had been his hosts there, 
 and to Ephesus the three had journeyed 
 together. 
 
 And now in their little parlor at 
 Rome the man and his wife with a 
 few friends, among whom probably are 
 Pudens and his daughter Pudentia, are 
 praying for their imprisoned friend and 
 teacher. To human ears their prayers 
 would seem to float on the roar of the 
 circus as chips on the maelstrom. They 
 are praying to Christ, and Rome does 
 not know that they are there. But when 
 the races are over they keep on praying. 
 Others join them, one by one, until the 
 little parlor is too small to hold their 
 number. A partition is knocked out. In 
 due time from this seed will grow what 
 we call a church. It is already what Paul 
 meant by that name. It is like the house 
 of Pudens which, after being buried by 
 the debris of centuries, will be excavated. 
 
COLOSS.E 171 
 
 and on its floor a mosaic found of the 
 Saviour holding a book upon which is 
 written, " The Lord, defender of the 
 house of Pudens." 
 
 Could any vision appear to most of 
 the contemporaries of Paul more fantas- 
 tic than one declaring that the prayer- 
 room of Aquila should supplant the 
 circus of Nero ? 
 
 While Paul in his prison was cheered 
 by the prayers of these humble people, 
 two visitors came to him. One was a well- 
 known traveler from the East named 
 Epaphras. He tells how a certain rich 
 man, Philemon, an acquaintance of both, 
 has, with his wife Apphia, established in 
 his home at Colossae such another prayer- 
 meeting as that of Aquila. " But," 
 Epaphras seems to have said, " you had 
 better write them a letter, for in spite of 
 all you told them some of those breth- 
 ren, influenced partly by the priests of 
 Hierapolis and still more by the Jews 
 
172 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 of Laodicea, are coming to think that 
 Christ is a hard master, and that they can 
 please him only by painful penances. 
 Instead of enjoying the liberty you 
 preached, they are acting as slaves of a 
 cruel lord." 
 
 So Paul wrote the Epistle to the Co- 
 lossians, but before he had finished it, 
 perhaps, another visitor appeared. He 
 is in rags, half starved, and looks like 
 a hunted hare. There may have been a 
 conversation something like this : — 
 
 " Who are you ? " 
 
 " My name is Onesimus. I am a slave. 
 I belong to Philemon of Colossae. I 
 robbed him and ran away. The police 
 are after me. I don't know what to do." 
 
 " Why have you come to me ? " 
 
 " I was with my master in Ephesus, 
 and heard what you said — and — and 
 I have nowhere else to go." 
 
 Some years ago my bell rang softly. 
 I opened the door. There stood a little 
 
COLOSSiE 173 
 
 girl. She was thinly clad and shivering, 
 for it was winter. Hungry too. 
 
 " Is this Minister Wright's house ? " 
 asked the waif. 
 
 "Yes!" 
 
 " Are you Minister Wright ? " 
 
 "Yes!" 
 
 " Take me." 
 
 She was cold and hungry, and, worse 
 than either, a lost child. She had heard, 
 perhaps in some mission school, that 
 Jesus loved little children, and with swift 
 childlike logic inferred that therefore 
 Christ's ministers must take care of them. 
 I named her my " Onesima," for she made 
 me understand how Paul felt when he 
 wrote that second letter to Colossae in 
 behalf of the slave who knew only that 
 he was lost, and that the Apostle was the 
 minister of One who came to seek and 
 to save that which was lost. 
 
 These two epistles, sent, the one to 
 Philemon and the other to the church 
 
174 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 which was in his house, both of them 
 full of affectionate greetings from the 
 little Christian Endeavor Society in 
 Rome, show how the early church, unre- 
 garded and unnoticed by the conspicuous 
 powers of the time, undermined and 
 supplanted them all by quietly training 
 fathers and mothers, masters and slaves 
 and little children, poor men and rich 
 men, in their homes and in their shops, 
 to try to " do these sayings of mine." 
 They show us how Christianity achieved 
 that task, apparently the most hopeless 
 ever set before men, the abolition of 
 slavery. 
 
 Outside of Palestine slavery was uni- 
 versal. The work of city and country 
 was done by slaves. They were not re- 
 garded as human. For them the laws 
 afforded no protection. Their enormous 
 numbers inspired general apprehension, 
 and many of the cruelties practiced upon 
 them by their masters were caused by the 
 
COLOSSiE 175 
 
 conviction that they could be kept in 
 subjection by fear alone. Thus, when a 
 certain slave slew with a small spear, 
 single-handed, a boar so fierce that the 
 hunters dared not face it, and thereby 
 saved the lives of some of them, his Ro- 
 man master had him crucified for carry- 
 ing a weapon, and Cicero remarked that 
 perhaps the master had been a little harsh, 
 but he would not venture an opinion. 
 When a slave was cut into mince meat 
 and thrown to the eels for dropping a 
 glass goblet, no indignation was expressed 
 by the guests at the banquet. 
 
 Two incidents which probably oc- 
 curred while Paul was a prisoner at 
 Rome may serve to show what slavery 
 in that city was. The first, cited by Cel- 
 sus and accepted by Origen as true, was 
 this. A slave boy born at Hierapolis, 
 the city near Colossae, as we have seen, 
 came into the possession of Epaphrodi- 
 tus, who, himself a slave, had become a 
 
176 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 freedman and was Nero*s most trusted 
 intimate. The child was weak and sickly, 
 and his master hated him. I suppose 
 his animosity was inspired by the inher- 
 ent malignity felt by vice toward virtue. 
 The master was amusing himself by tor- 
 turing the slave when the little fellow 
 said, " Master, you '11 break that leg if 
 you twist it any more." 
 
 Another wrench. The leg was broken. 
 Without a cry or the change of a feature 
 the child said : — 
 
 " There, I told you you would break 
 it!" 
 
 The boy was Epictetus. 
 
 Paul may have known of this, for it 
 occurred in " Caesar's household." 
 
 While Paul was a prisoner, a slave at 
 Rome killed his master Pedanius. It was 
 the law that all the slaves of the mur- 
 dered man should be slaughtered. Pe- 
 danius had four hundred, many of them 
 women and children. It was proposed 
 
COLOSSiE 177 
 
 to make an exception by sparing the 
 children. The proposal called forth an 
 impassioned speech from one of the 
 ablest senators, in which he said : — 
 
 "We have in our service whole na- 
 tions of slaves, the scum of mankind, 
 collected from all quarters of the earth : 
 a race of men who bring with them 
 foreign rites and the religion of their 
 country or no religion at all. In such a 
 conflux if the laws are silent what pro- 
 tection remains for the master ? " 
 
 This protest was effectual. The law 
 took its course. The four hundred — 
 men, women, and children — were slaugh- 
 tered. 
 
 At this time — let it be remem- 
 bered in honor of the Apostle — to give 
 food or shelter, to conceal or in any way 
 assist a fugitive slave was to incur the 
 penalty of death. This Paul knew when 
 Onesimus came to him. He did not 
 justify the suppliant for robbing his mas- 
 
178 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 ter or even for running away. He does 
 not seem even to have been aware that 
 slavery was wrong. He had just written 
 the letter in which he said, " Slaves, 
 obey in all things your masters accord- 
 ing to the flesh, not with eye service as 
 men pleasers, but in singleness of heart, 
 fearing God," as if he thought slavery 
 a divine institution. But he writes to 
 Philemon, the slave's master, reminding 
 him that the slave is a Christian, a 
 brother therefore, and that we are all 
 alike Christ's slaves and must treat our 
 slaves as Christ treats his. He speaks 
 of himself and Epaphras as " slaves of 
 Christ," but calls Onesimus " a brother 
 beloved." 
 
 To the slave he said in substance, 
 *' All things whatsoever ye would that 
 men should do to you, do ye even so 
 to them." To the master he said the 
 same. Through obedience to such teach- 
 ing, without help of human law, or even 
 
COLOSSI 179 
 
 protest against its iniquities, slavery dis- 
 appeared. 
 
 There is a bondage worse than that 
 of Onesimus. The slavery of the ergas- 
 tula was mild compared to that of the 
 palace. Well might Caligula have en- 
 vied Onesimus. That emperor, the son 
 of Germanicus, was the idol of Rome. 
 When he took the sceptre the Romans 
 called him their " star," their " darling." 
 They offered a hundred and sixty thou- 
 sand victims upon their altars, to pur- 
 chase blessings upon him from the gods 
 in whom they believed. They thronged 
 their temples, and scores of them offered 
 their lives to the unseen powers as a ran- 
 som for his. They inscribed his name 
 upon a shield of gold, and decreed that 
 upon an appointed day each year their 
 priests, their senators, and their noblest 
 young men and maidens should carry it 
 to the Capitol with pagans for his virtues 
 and prayers for his prosperity. When he 
 
i8o CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 ordered the heads to be removed from 
 the statues of the great gods and replaced 
 by copies of his own, put a gold image 
 of himself in the temple built for his 
 worship, and had it clothed each day in 
 robes like those he chose that day to 
 wear, no protest checked his arrogance. 
 His wealth was beyond computation. He 
 could form no wish within the power of 
 man to gratify which was not imme- 
 diately performed. Yet within the com- 
 pass of his empire there was probably no 
 other slave so wretched as he. 
 
 When it thunders this divine man 
 wraps his head in his cloth of gold and 
 creeps under the bed quaking for fear 
 of the gods he has supplanted. He 
 flies to Naples, and the smoke of Ve- 
 suvius terrifies him into spasms. Three 
 hours of the twenty-four are the most 
 he ever hopes to sleep, and during them 
 he is tortured by horrible dreams. In 
 them he hears the sea roaring, sees it 
 
COLOSSiE i8i 
 
 draw nearer and nearer while he vainly 
 attempts to fly, shrieks as he mistakes 
 his own cold sweat of fear for its waters. 
 He leaps from his bed and wanders 
 through the gorgeous corridors of his 
 palace. He dares not have them lighted, 
 for to his tortured brain assassination 
 seems to lurk behind every pillar, and 
 light will show the dagger where to 
 strike. He is not mad. De Quincey's 
 attempt to prove him so proves only the 
 insanity of vicious passions unrestrained. 
 His crimes are his only chains. They are 
 the furies which have built the prison 
 from which he cannot escape. In vain 
 he tries by superstitious rites to unlock 
 the iron gates of his penitentiary. 
 
 This terrified man is a colossal por- 
 trait of those among the Christians of 
 Colossas for whose help Paul wrote. 
 Conscience, long entranced by heathen 
 abominations, had been awakened by the 
 vision of Christ. How to appease it 
 
i82 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 became the absorbing quest of the neo- 
 phytes. Hierapolis had long been the 
 centre of a cult which taught that the 
 unseen powers could be propitiated by 
 ascetic tortures and in no other way. 
 In the whole circle of the Roman Em- 
 pire there was no other religious system 
 which called for self-torments and mu- 
 tilations so unspeakable as those de- 
 manded by Sabazius and Cybele. The 
 contact of Christianity with paganism 
 destroyed paganism, but it also modified 
 Christianity. In conquering the Roman 
 eagles it turned the dove of Bethabara 
 into a bird of prey. Constantine placed 
 the cross above the sword, but only to 
 make it a more effective weapon of war. 
 And when Liberius substituted Christ- 
 mas for the Saturnalia, the rioters, driven 
 from the cradle of Saturnus, reassembled 
 around the manger of Christ. To such 
 dangers Paul was unceasingly alert. 
 There can be little doubt that it was 
 
COLOSSI 183 
 
 largely the influence of Hierapolis which 
 opened the ears of Colossians to Juda- 
 izing teachers, who substituted forms 
 and penances for trust in the Father and 
 made them deaf to the " Come unto me." 
 
 The Epistle to Philemon was the un- 
 conscious proclamation of liberty to the 
 slave of circumstances. 
 
 The Epistle to the Colossians was the 
 conscious proclamation of liberty to the 
 slave of self. The former was under- 
 stood and obeyed centuries before Lu- 
 ther retaught the world the meaning of 
 the latter. 
 
VIII 
 ANCYRA 
 
 THE CITY OF THE WEATHERCOCKS 
 
 Until quite recently the province of 
 Central Asia Minor, marked on modern 
 maps "Angora," was regarded without 
 question as the Galatia of St. Paul. Cer- 
 tain scholars of repute now think that 
 it is not, and locate the " churches of 
 Galatia " addressed by the Apostle in a 
 region farther south. Those who care to 
 examine the arguments for and against 
 the new theory will find them stated with 
 fairness and force in the Encyclopedia 
 Biblica. I do not think they have over- 
 thrown or even seriously undermined 
 the long-accepted view. The correctness 
 of that view seems to me confirmed 
 by the facts which justify the title of 
 this paper — facts which show clearly 
 
ANCYRA 185 
 
 that the contents of the Epistle to the 
 Galatians answer to the known charac- 
 teristics of the North Galatians as a screw 
 fits into its matrix. 
 
 Ancyra was their capital city. The 
 word signifies an anchor. Tradition said 
 that Midas found an anchor buried in the 
 ground, built a city over it, and named 
 the place after his find. To readers who 
 recall the history of its people the name 
 will seem like an oak in a cornfield, 
 or like John the Baptist among reeds 
 shaken by the wind. 
 
 It is the business of an anchor to stand 
 fast against all currents ; of a weathercock 
 to move at the touch of every breeze. 
 Yet with equal fidelity to facts we may 
 call Ancyra an anchor or a weathercock, 
 since it has for millenniums held a race to 
 its place in history against forces work- 
 ing with tremendous power to efface it 
 from human sight and memory, yet has 
 shown conspicuously the peculiar quali- 
 
i86 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 ties of that race which are correctly repre- 
 sented by a weather vane. 
 
 " The prominent qualities of the Celtic 
 race/* says Mommsen, quoting Thierry, 
 " were personal bravery, in which they 
 excelled all nations ; an open, impetuous 
 temperament accessible to every impres- 
 sion ; much intelligence but at the same 
 time extreme mobility, want of perse- 
 verance, aversion to discipline and order ; 
 ostentation and perpetual discord — the 
 result of boundless vanity." " Such 
 qualities," adds Mommsen, " those of 
 good soldiers and bad citizens, explain 
 the historic fact that the Celts have 
 shaken all states and have founded 
 none." 
 
 Now the Epistle to the Galatians is a 
 protest against these qualities, which may 
 be summed up in the single word "fickle- 
 ness." Notice a few of the Apostle's vari- 
 ations upon that theme. 
 
 " I marvel that ye are so soon removed 
 
ANCYRA 187 
 
 from him that called you into the grace 
 of Christ unto another gospel/* 
 
 " O foolish Galatians, who hath be- 
 witched you, . . . before whose eyes 
 Jesus Christ hath been evidently set 
 forth, crucified among you ? " 
 
 "Stand fast therefore in the liberty 
 wherewith Christ hath made us free, 
 and be not entangled again with the 
 yoke of bondage." 
 
 He contrasts his own steadfastness 
 with their vacillations. 
 
 He asks them why it is that whereas 
 a little while ago they were ready to give 
 their eyes for him, they now regard him 
 as their enemy. 
 
 Thus the Apostle expressed the ver- 
 dict of history. 
 
 Ancyra lay some two hundred miles 
 east-southeast of Constantinople. Un- 
 der its modern name. Angora, it is cele- 
 brated for three things : the amount of 
 electricity in its atmosphere, which at 
 
i88 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 times makes a blanket seem a sheet of 
 flame ; the silky hair of its dogs, its 
 goats, and its cats ; the fact that these 
 animals when removed but thirty miles 
 from their birthplace change their coats 
 and become like other dogs and goats 
 and cats. 
 
 The inhabitants of the small region 
 named Galatia, or the " Gaul's Coun- 
 try," were as different from their neigh- 
 bors as is an outcrop of trap from the 
 field of quartz in which it appears. Their 
 district consisted of three cantons, of 
 which Ancyra, Pessinus, and Tavium 
 were the respective capitals. 
 
 Tavium was noted for its sacred 
 grove, — probably a memorial of Druid 
 worship changed to the service of Jupiter, 
 — which contained a colossal bronze of 
 Jove, and was to its canton, perhaps to 
 all three cantons, what the Cities of 
 Refuge were to Israel in the time of the 
 Judges, or Notre Dame to Paris during 
 
ANCYRA 189 
 
 the Middle Ages. Pessinus was distin- 
 guished by a temple to Cybele, in which 
 a black meteorite was adored as an 
 image of that goddess. Many thought 
 that the manner of its advent had given 
 name to the place, for " Pessinus " may 
 mean " fallen," and " from heaven " 
 might have been understood. 
 
 Ancyra, however, the largest and most 
 important of these capitals, may be 
 counted the " metropolis " or mother 
 city of Galatia, and is therefore selected 
 as representative of all those to whom 
 St. Paul's epistle was addressed. They 
 belonged to the same stock as the French 
 and Irish, and their history is a panorama 
 of the two most conspicuous traits of 
 Gallic character, — that passion for La 
 Gloire which mistook the bulletins of 
 Napoleon for the oracles of omnipotence, 
 and that fickleness which in eighteen 
 years changed its religion four times and 
 its government twelve. 
 
190 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 One of the pictures painted indelibly 
 upon my memory in childhood is that 
 of the Roman Senate in the year 391 b. c, 
 when the Gallic " Brennus " or " king " 
 had broken into Rome. The grand old 
 senators, who disdain to fly, sit calmly in 
 their accustomed places. Their white 
 beards flow over their magnificent offi- 
 cial robes. The gigantic warriors who 
 have rushed in with murderous intent, 
 awed by the sight, sink their swords, 
 afraid to strike, and whisper, " They are 
 not men. They are gods ! '* 
 
 My mother taught me to read in that 
 picture the triumph of mind over muscle. 
 She told me those Gauls were the most 
 terrific foemen Rome ever encountered. 
 So terrible were they that the date of 
 their invasion was recorded in the Roman 
 calendar as " The Black Day," and a 
 sinking fund was established in the Cap- 
 itol never to be used except for defense 
 against them. She taught me to under- 
 
ANCYRA 191 
 
 stand why it was that the equipment 
 of the Roman soldier was changed after 
 that invasion into a fashion adapted to 
 resist the Gallic style of attack, and thus 
 was born the Roman legion, which in 
 due time, like Alexander's phalanx, con- 
 quered the world. She told me how 
 
 The Roman matron long did tame 
 The froward child with Brennus* name. 
 And Italy's maidens long grew pale 
 When Brennus* sword inspired the tale. 
 
 Though unwelcome facts have tried 
 to blur the picture, they have but par- 
 tially succeeded, and it is hard for me to 
 feel the gratitude I owe to those who 
 have taught me that it was not senators 
 remaining in their chamber because they 
 disdained to fly, but old men sitting on 
 their doorsteps because they were too 
 weak to run away, and that though the 
 Gauls were for a moment awed by their 
 venerable appearance (criticism has not 
 yet, I believe, shaved off the august 
 
192 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 beards) or — what is more probable — 
 were restrained by pity for their feeble- 
 ness, they soon killed them, every one. 
 A hundred and eleven years after 
 Brennus's sword and the cackling geese, 
 another " Brennus *' or Gallic king burst 
 into Asia Minor and caused a reign of 
 terror there. When his fierce followers 
 had cast anchor in the district named 
 after them " Galatia," they continued to 
 be, until their power was broken by 
 Pergamos, the virtual arbiters in the con- 
 flicts which were perpetually arising be- 
 tween the rival kinglets of Asia Minor. 
 They rarely made war on their own ac- 
 count and did not enlarge their territory, 
 but lived in splendor by loaning their 
 arms to the sovereign who bid highest 
 for them. To-day they fought for Pon- 
 tus, to-morrow for Pergamos. They 
 changed their allies as they changed 
 their coats, and the power for which 
 they fought was usually assured of vie- 
 
ANCYRA 193 
 
 tory by the terror of their name. The 
 Pergamene marbles in the museum of 
 Berlin which a competent critic has pro- 
 nounced worthy the chisel of Phidias, 
 and the statue of the dying Gaul falsely 
 named " The dying Gladiator," which 
 adorns the Vatican, are memorials by 
 which Pergamos commemorated her vic- 
 tory over the arrogant Galatians. In spite 
 of this defeat their individual prowess 
 long remained preeminent. Four hun- 
 dred Galatian giants armed and equipped 
 with unequaled splendor formed the 
 body-guard of Cleopatra until, with 
 characteristic fickleness, they took a 
 similar position under Herod, her bit- 
 terest enemy. 
 
 When the Gauls entered Asia they 
 brought with them the religion of the 
 Druids, and practiced its mysteries in 
 the forests of the Dryads. Of these the 
 Sacred Grove at Tavium, with its bronze 
 Jupiter substituted for the branch of 
 
194 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 mistletoe, was a memorial. They changed 
 their creed as lightly as their descendants 
 adopted and discarded the teachings of 
 Paul. They worshiped Cybele with a 
 fervor which made their country her 
 Mecca, and led a Roman writer into the 
 mistake of thinking her priests were 
 called " Galli " because they were Gauls. 
 That veer of the weathercock anchored 
 it forever in the history of Rome. 
 
 The year 204 b. c. shed a deadly gloom 
 over Italy. Hannibal had devastated her 
 plains, and intrenched himself among 
 her mountains. The last Scipio of the 
 lion's brood was in Africa. The Roman 
 army retained for home defense was 
 threatened by pestilence, with annihila- 
 tion. Rome had passed nine days in fast- 
 ing, sacrifice, and prayer, but the unseen 
 powers gave no sign. The people had 
 almost wholly lost heart, when an appall- 
 ing visitation sharpened their apprehen- 
 sion into panic. A shower of meteorites. 
 
ANCYRA 195 
 
 such as no living Roman had ever seen, 
 descended. They thought the day of 
 doom had come. An obscure prophecy 
 in the Sibylline books suggested the only 
 hope of salvation. The fire from the sky 
 was interpreted to mean that the gods 
 would be appeased if the image of the 
 Great Mother which had fallen from 
 heaven at Pessinus were brought to Rome 
 and fitly honored there. Instantly an 
 embassy was sent to Galatia. Would 
 the priests of Cybele permit the object 
 of their adoration to be taken from its 
 shrine? More than upon their armies, 
 more than upon the genius of their Scipio, 
 the hopes of the Romans hung upon the 
 answer to that question. 
 
 What arguments were urged to per- 
 suade them is not known, but the rulers 
 of Pessinus answered " Yes ! " 
 
 With pomp of decorated galleys 
 and priestly pride the black stone was 
 brought to the Tiber. The most blame- 
 
196 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 less man and the most faultless woman 
 in the state must be discovered to receive 
 the treasure in the city's name. After 
 long debate the young Publius Scipio 
 was judged to be the most virtuous man 
 and Publia Quinta the worthiest woman. 
 Preparations for the reception had been 
 completed when, as Herodian reports, 
 an unexpected difficulty arose. The ves- 
 sel bearing the precious freight stuck fast 
 in the mud. All the resources of the 
 nation could not budge it, for Cybele 
 herself held it immovable. What should 
 be done ? A priestess of Vesta had been 
 sentenced to death for infidelity. She 
 prayed that her innocence might be sub- 
 mitted to the Great Mother for decision. 
 Her prayer was granted. Entering the 
 water, she unbound her girdle, fastened 
 it to the vessel's prow, drew it easily into 
 deep water, and was of course proved 
 spotless. 
 
 Without vouching for the truth of this 
 
ANCYRA 197 
 
 subordinate epis'ode, which was probably 
 invented to mitigate the jealousy between 
 the priests of Asia and those of Italy, by 
 showing that Cybele and Vesta were 
 friends, I return to undisputed history. 
 Scipio, followed by all the senators in 
 scarlet, and Quinta, leading the most illus- 
 trious dames of Rome in their best gowns, 
 met the ship at Ostia, took possession of 
 the sacred stone, and escorted it to the 
 capital. The ladies danced before it ; the 
 statesmen marched beside it to the shrine 
 prepared upon the Palatine. Thus began 
 the festival of the Roman Madonna 
 called the Megalesia. A temple of white 
 marble which twelve years were needed 
 to complete was erected for the shrine 
 of the goddess. An order of ministers 
 named from the Gallic priests was es- 
 tablished to serve her. For six days 
 every April the doors of the wealthy were 
 opened, revealing tables laden with food 
 and wine, around which images of 
 
198 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 the great gods were seated with Cybele. 
 Whosoever would might enter and par- 
 take without money and without price. 
 Prisoners were set free. Senators formed 
 processions to the temple. The noblest 
 matrons — even Vestals, it is believed — 
 danced before them. In front of all, the 
 black stone in a gilded chariot, to which 
 were harnessed lions of solid silver, was 
 drawn by priests who had bathed in 
 blood. Slaves were obliged to keep out 
 of sight. Plays illustrating the transpor- 
 tation of the image from Galatia were 
 performed in the theatres. The Imperial 
 City never bestowed a tithe of such hon- 
 ors upon Scipio for defeating Hannibal. 
 
 Momentous as the change of the Ga- 
 latians from the religion of the Druids 
 to the worship of Cybele proved to 
 Rome, another veer of the weathercock 
 is more significant to us. 
 
 The Emperor Augustus died in the 
 fourteenth year of our era. During his 
 
ANCYRA 199 
 
 reign more than in any other equal 
 length of time those subordinate forces 
 and facilities which cooperated with the 
 life of Christ to assure the victory of 
 Christianity were set in order. The 
 Augustan was not only the Elizabethan 
 age of Rome in literature, philosophy, 
 and art ; it was also the period which is 
 still the most important of all periods 
 for the student of Christianity to under- 
 stand. 
 
 Though by no means a slave to van- 
 ity, Augustus appreciated adequately the 
 importance of his achievements, and was 
 alive to the significance of most of the 
 forces working under him. The method 
 he took to perpetuate the memory of 
 them was unique. 
 
 The tomb he built upon the Campus 
 Martius would merit notice if for no 
 other reason than its beauty. It was a 
 drum of Carrara marble more than two 
 hundred feet in diameter, and higher 
 
200 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 than the reach of a man's hand. Upon 
 the roof, which was nearly flat, rested a 
 cone of earth covered to the top with 
 evergreens, its apex surmounted by a 
 bronze statue of himself. The whole 
 was surrounded by two concentric walls, 
 one of bronze, the other of marble, in- 
 closing between them gardens where 
 fountains played, streams rippled, flow- 
 ers bloomed, and birds sang. On each 
 side of the entrance, between the outer 
 wall of marble and the inner one of 
 bronze (which last was probably an orna- 
 mental balustrade), stood a lofty bronze 
 column. Upon these pillars the em- 
 peror's will, his expenditures, and those 
 acts of his reign which he considered the 
 most important were inscribed. How 
 priceless would this record be if we had 
 it ! But it perished. Scarce a vestige of 
 tomb, pillar, or inscription remains for 
 our instruction. What price would be 
 too great for a copy of those records ! 
 
ANCYRA 201 
 
 Well, copies of them may be found in 
 each of the three great libraries of Eu- 
 rope, but those who placed them there 
 brought them from Ancyra. 
 
 Augustus was the first Caesar whom 
 the Romans deified. When that new 
 cult was sprung upon the empire, the 
 people of Galatia, as was their wont, 
 adopted it with such swift and hot en- 
 thusiasm as made them recognized 
 throughout Asia, and by the emperor 
 himself for its stanchest devotees. As- 
 sisted by contributions from other pro- 
 vinces, they built a temple at Ancyra 
 for the worship of the new divinity, and 
 were granted, as a distinguishing mark 
 of imperial favor, the right to inscribe 
 upon its walls a copy of the records on 
 the bronze pillars at Rome. The letters 
 were cut deep into the marble through 
 a glaze of vermilion, each letter plated 
 with beaten gold. Though the temple 
 is a ruin, its walls stand. The gold is 
 
202 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 gone. The vermilion has faded or scaled 
 away. But the letters remain, a copy in 
 Latin with a Greek translation by its 
 side. To the fickleness of Galatians we 
 owe this treasure no less than the still 
 more precious Epistle of St. Paul. There 
 is One who can make a weathercock do 
 the work of an anchor. 
 
 Thus Ancyra was blown about by 
 every wind of doctrine, until under Con- 
 stantine Christianity became the religion 
 of the empire. Then of course she be- 
 came a stalwart for Christ. But presently 
 came a reaction. Julian, disgusted with 
 the quarrels of the church, educated 
 under conditions which forced his noble 
 nature to become familiar with the ar- 
 rogance and hypocrisy which had per- 
 meated the Christian profession, and 
 influenced in no small degree by cir- 
 cumstances alluded to in my paper on 
 Ephesus, headed a movement to efface 
 Christianity and restore the old gods. He 
 
ANCYRA 203 
 
 had tried to rebuild Jerusalem in order 
 to falsify the supposed predictions of 
 the Saviour, but had failed in the at- 
 tempt. Exploding fire damp and other 
 signs deemed supernatural had scared 
 away even those Jews whose zeal set 
 them digging into Mt. Moriah with 
 silver spades and carrying rubbish in 
 baskets of silver and gold, while their 
 ladies bore away its dust in aprons of 
 silk. He failed to restore even the walls 
 of the city which he meant to honor be- 
 cause it had rejected Christ. He had 
 not yet met the monk to whom he said, 
 " I am going to rebuild in the East the 
 temple of the fire-worshipers ; where is 
 your carpenter now ? " nor heard the 
 reply, " He is at the Euphrates making 
 a coffin for your Majesty." Though the 
 defeat and ruin which forced him to say, 
 " Galilean, thou hast conquered," were 
 approaching fast, for a little moment he 
 seemed to be moving toward success. 
 
204 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 With the celerity acquired by long 
 practice, Ancyra adopted Julian's views. 
 To express his appreciation of her nim- 
 bleness, before starting on the eastern 
 campaign which cost him his life, he hon- 
 ored her with an imperial visit. To com- 
 memorate his coming her people raised 
 a bronze pillar which remains to this day. 
 Fragments of their citadel upon which 
 they inscribed their indorsement of his 
 apostasy are also preserved, and the in- 
 scription is legible. 
 
 It would be unfair to omit mention of 
 what, as far as I know, is the only speci- 
 men of steadfastness ever exhibited in 
 Ancyra, and equally unfair to cover with 
 silence the only act of cruelty attributed 
 to Julian, though it has been attributed 
 to him on insufficient evidence. 
 
 In ;^62 A. D., when the emperor vis- 
 ited Ancyra, there was in that place a 
 presbyter conspicuous for the energy 
 of his rebukes to apostate Christians. 
 
ANCYRA 205 
 
 Day after day he tramped the streets 
 reechoing PauFs cry in trumpet tones: — 
 
 " O foolish Galatians, who hath be- 
 witched you, that ye should not obey 
 the truth? " " Who hath bewitched you? " 
 "Who hath bewitched you? " 
 
 The man was arrested and brought 
 before the emperor. Brave as Paul, but 
 without Paul's kindness or a trace of his 
 tact, he broke forth with a fury of in- 
 vective, arraigning the monarch for his 
 apostasy and threatening speedy ven- 
 geance from the Almighty upon him. 
 
 It is a fact that Basil was carried from 
 the imperial presence and pulled to 
 pieces with red-hot pincers, but there is 
 no proof that he died by the emperor's 
 order, or even that the emperor knew of 
 his fate until the devilish deed had been 
 done. There is also no evidence that 
 the steadfast man was a Galatian. 
 
 When Julian's death had ended his 
 crusade against the Cross, and Chris- 
 
2o6 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 tianity resumed her sceptre over the 
 state, the conduct of Ancyra justified 
 her reputation. She hastened back into 
 the fold. 
 
 The fifteenth century found her the 
 residence of Bajazet and probably the 
 stanchest fortress in his dominions. 
 Here was the stronghold of the armies 
 which terrorized Europe and kept Con- 
 stantinople for years in a state of virtual 
 siege, or rather of vassalage, since she 
 purchased her nominal independence by 
 large and frequent bribes. On the plain 
 before the city was fought, 1402 a. d., 
 the battle in which Tamerlane annihi- 
 lated the power of Bajazet. Whether the 
 conqueror imprisoned his vanquished 
 rival in an iron cage and exhibited him 
 as a sign of his triumph, as was for- 
 merly believed, is uncertain. 
 
 Tamerlane and Bajazet are gone, but 
 Ancyra stands. The temple she reared 
 to Augustus, then dedicated to Christ, 
 
ANCYRA 207 
 
 and at last converted into a mosque for 
 Allah, the pillar she raised to Julian 
 and the inscription on the fragments of 
 her ruined citadel, and, more than these, 
 the Epistle of Paul to her people, tell 
 us how easily, how swiftly, and how often 
 she turned to each shifting wind. 
 
 If you ask "What is her religion 
 now?" the answer is that apparently 
 tired of change, she seems at last to have 
 hit upon a new device to satisfy her 
 vacillating inclinations, and at present 
 attempts to be all things at once. For 
 here the Armenians have a large convent 
 where the archbishop and his suffragans 
 reside. Here the Roman Catholics main- 
 tain four churches, the Jews have their 
 synagogues, and the Mussulmans their 
 mosques. And here any one who dis- 
 covers an improved substitute for Chris- 
 tianity may hope to find it easier than 
 in most places to draw proselytes into 
 his camp. 
 
IX 
 TYANA 
 
 THE PAGAN BETHLEHEM 
 
 Some eighty miles a trifle west of north 
 from Tarsus, and separated from that 
 metropolis by a wall of mountains, stood 
 Tyana. A small city, neither rich nor 
 strong nor beautiful, it was before the 
 Christian era in no way distinguished. 
 The highway to the Orient passed its 
 walls, but commerce never paused to 
 make it an important market. No school 
 of art or science gave it the dignity which 
 exalted Tarsus and Alexandria. It con- 
 tained no buildings or statues which could 
 win admiration from travelers familiar 
 with the temples of Smyrna or the sculp- 
 tures of Pergamos. No springs exhaled 
 intoxicating vapors to shroud it in the 
 awe that hallowed Hierapolis. No myth- 
 
TYANA 209 
 
 ical traditions clothed it in the sacred 
 livery of Ephesus and Eleusis. No 
 monarch of renown like the founder of 
 Antioch had emptied his treasury by en- 
 duing it with splendors to perpetuate his 
 memory. Yet for more than two cen- 
 turies this insignificant city enjoyed a 
 celebrity wider probably than Bethlehem 
 had gained before the birth of Constan- 
 tine or Mecca before that of Amrou. A 
 single event was the cradle of its fame. 
 
 About the time when Joseph went up 
 to be enrolled with Mary, his espoused 
 wife, — for aught we know on the night 
 when the angels sang to the shepherds, 
 — Tyana gave birth to a marvelous man, 
 a man for whose worship many temples 
 were erected before a single building had 
 been raised in any part of the world for 
 the worship of Christ. The man's name 
 was Apollonius, and the place of his 
 birth became his surname, so that he 
 was called " Apollonius of Tyana," as 
 
210 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 the Saviour from the home of his child- 
 hood was known as "Jesus of Naza- 
 reth." 
 
 This man is the unsolved puzzle of 
 historians. All concede that his fasci- 
 nating and mysterious personality filled 
 an immense space in the early centuries, 
 and that his influence was incalculably 
 great ; but in their judgment of his char- 
 acter and the source of his influence I 
 have found no two writers in complete 
 agreement, and few who do not appear 
 to doubt their own conclusions. Between 
 the worshipers of Apollonius, or rather 
 between the worshipers of the mysterious 
 being who passed for Apollonius and the 
 worshipers of Christ, the subtlest and 
 most significant spiritual conflict of the 
 first three centuries was waged. In it 
 the pagan prophet appeared for a time 
 to have won the victory, though in fact 
 he had only prepared the way before the 
 face of our Saviour. 
 
TYANA 211 
 
 To describe that conflict is the pur- 
 pose of this paper. 
 
 The reports of Apollonius which have 
 reached us fall into three groups, — 
 facts, probabilities, and fictions. The 
 facts are few, the probabilities are im- 
 portant, the fictions, though incredible, 
 are significant, because they harmonize 
 completely with the facts and the proba- 
 bilities. 
 
 I. We know how the man looked. 
 His undoubted portrait preserved on 
 coin or medal is familiar to scholars. 
 The august face is bearded and crowned 
 with laurel as Christ was crowned with 
 thorns. The features are Greek and sug- 
 gest "the front of Jove himself." But 
 for the winning sweetness and gentleness 
 in the curves of the lips the face might 
 pass for the original of Neri's Jupiter 
 Tonans. 
 
 It is worthy of remark that the coun- 
 tenance of this inscrutable enigma should 
 
212 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 have been so carefully preserved and so 
 generally forgotten while no line of sculp- 
 ture or drawing exists that gives the faint- 
 est hint of the appearance of Him who 
 in so many million homes is loved as an 
 elder brother. 
 
 We know that ApoUonius was en- 
 rolled among the gods ; that temples in 
 various places were built for his worship, 
 and that for a long though indefinite 
 period he was the object of devout 
 adoration. Early in the third century 
 Caracalla visited Tyana, built and conse- 
 crated a temple to him there, granted 
 the right of Roman citizenship to the 
 inhabitants of the place, and constituted 
 it a " sacred city." Not many years later 
 Alexander Severus put the statue of 
 ApoUonius in his private oratory. The 
 implacable Aurelian, though exasperated 
 by the obstinacy with which Tyana had 
 opposed his arms, when, after a sternly 
 resisted siege, he captured it, treated the 
 
TYANA 213 
 
 inhabitants with distinguished honor and 
 shed no blood except that of the traitor 
 who betrayed the city into his hands. 
 There is no plausible explanation of a 
 clemency unparalleled elsewhere in the 
 career of that cruel conqueror, except 
 the explanation made by himself, that he 
 obeyed the command given him in a 
 vision by Apollonius. 
 
 It is certain that at the request of the 
 Empress Domna, the mother of Cara- 
 calla, Philostratos wrote a book which 
 some call a religious novel with Apol- 
 lonius for its hero, which others call his 
 " Memorabilia," but which his disci- 
 ples regarded as " the Gospel of Apollo- 
 nius," precisely as we name the writings 
 of the evangelists the " Gospels " or 
 " Good News " of Christ. The impossi- 
 bility of distmguishing sharply the facts 
 from the fictions in this book has veiled 
 in impenetrable mist the personality of 
 its hero. 
 
214 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 11. The probabilities. The evidence 
 in hand leaves no reasonable doubt that 
 Apollonius was not only a man of com- 
 manding genius, but that he was also a 
 character entitled, by purity of purpose 
 and unselfish desire to bless his fellow- 
 men both by deeds of beneficence and 
 by giving them truer conceptions of 
 deity and duty, to be classed with Soc- 
 rates and almost with St. Paul. Though 
 this seems to me certain, I put it among 
 the probabilities because one or two 
 writers of repute count him only the best 
 among that herd of self-seeking thauma- 
 turgists who thronged the first centu- 
 ries. 
 
 A collection of his letters said to have 
 been made by Hadrian still exists, but 
 critics are at odds about them. Whether 
 all of them, or some of them, or none of 
 them are genuine cannot be determined. 
 It seems certain that he was personally 
 known to Vespasian and Titus, the two 
 
TYANA 215 
 
 most excellent emperors between Au- 
 gustus and Trajan, and it is probable that 
 he exerted an appreciable influence upon 
 their policies. It seems indubitable that, 
 probably without knowing whence the 
 influence came, he was himself powerfully- 
 influenced by the teachings of Christ. 
 He was educated first at Tarsus and 
 afterward at i^gae, very near that place. 
 It is therefore not incredible that he met 
 Paul, perhaps saw him frequently, for 
 the two boys, though one was a Jew and 
 the other a Gentile, were both aristocrats, 
 each of them hungered after righteous- 
 ness, and each of them had that gift of 
 keen observation which nothing worth 
 noting in mice or men escapes. 
 
 III. The improbabilities. These, 
 though incredible to us, were believed by 
 his disciples as sincerely as the majority 
 of Christians to-day credit the miracles 
 of Christ. I cull a few of them from that 
 fascinating book which may be named 
 
2i6 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 " The Gospel of Apollonius according 
 to Philostratos/' 
 
 It would be superfluous to point out 
 the resemblances they bear to the facts 
 in our Saviour's life. 
 
 Apollonius had no mortal father, but 
 was born to an invisible deity. Swans 
 sang over his cradle songs which pro- 
 claimed the advent of a Saviour. When 
 a child he was taken by his parents to 
 Tarsus, where the learned doctors wel- 
 comed him. Repelled by the wickedness 
 of that splendid city, he begged and ob- 
 tained permission from his parents to 
 retire into the quiet village of JEgsc. 
 Here he grew up in obscurity, finding 
 favor with God and man. The rest of 
 his life he spent going about doing good, 
 teaching, healing, comforting those that 
 mourned. Though the heart of his in- 
 struction was that men should love their 
 neighbors as themselves and practice self- 
 denial for the benefit of their fellows, he 
 
TYANA 217 
 
 seems to have escaped all taint of that 
 vicious notion which had infected the 
 whole pagan world, and was beginning to 
 distemper Christianity with the belief 
 that it is meritorious to do disagreeable 
 things merely because one hates to. He 
 would go through fire to rescue the 
 burning, but he would not walk on nails 
 for no other reason than that they hurt. 
 On one occasion at Ephesus a flock 
 of sparrows lighted on a tree near the 
 place where he was preaching. Presently 
 another sparrow flew to them, uttering a 
 peculiar cry, whereupon they all darted 
 oflF together. " Watch the sparrows," he 
 exclaimed, " and learn from them. That 
 little bird has found some grain, and in- 
 stead of trying to eat it all himself has 
 called his fellows to share his wealth. If 
 you did the same you would be called 
 spendthrifts." With that he ended his 
 sermon and sent his hearers to " consider 
 the sparrows." They found the birds 
 
2i8 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 feasting upon wheat which a boy in the 
 street had spilled from his basket. 
 
 At Rome he met a procession bearing 
 to the grave the body of a nobleman's 
 young daughter. He bade the bearers 
 set down the bier, touched the corpse, 
 and spoke a few words in a low voice. 
 Immediately the maid opened her eyes, 
 arose, and returned to her father's house, 
 " as Alcestis did of old when recalled to 
 life by Hercules." Her relatives gave 
 him a thank offering of one hundred and 
 fifty thousand drachmas, which he settled 
 upon the damsel for a marriage portion. 
 
 The manner of his departure from this 
 world is variously reported, but all ac- 
 counts agree that it was not by death. 
 After his translation a young man who 
 did not believe in the immortality of the 
 soul, and was preaching a crusade against 
 those who did, visited Tyana. There 
 Apollonius appeared to him, convinced 
 him of his error, told him many things 
 
TYANA 219 
 
 of the life to come, and sent him forth 
 an eloquent advocate of the doctrine he 
 had before denounced. 
 
 Most of the teachings attributed by 
 Philostratos to Apollonius savor of the 
 New Testament. But to the New Tes- 
 tament they 
 
 " Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto 
 wine.** 
 
 Which of them were uttered by the sage, 
 and which were coined by his biographer, 
 it is not possible to say. Those, however, 
 whom Dr. Bushnell has failed to con- 
 vince that the character portrayed in the 
 gospels is beyond the power of the hu- 
 man imagination to invent, will probably 
 find their doubts dissolved by a compari- 
 son of Philostratos with Matthew, Mark, 
 or Luke. Philostratos possessed super- 
 lative culture, high moral sensibility, and 
 great literary skill. He had to help him a 
 very considerable familiarity with the say- 
 ings of Christ. Yet in trying to present 
 
220 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 a perfect character he has painted an ideal 
 which before Jesus of Nazareth flickers 
 as a thieved and gutted candle brought 
 into sunlight. 
 
 There is no evidence that Apollo- 
 nius trained disciples or attempted to 
 found a new school of either philosophy 
 or religion. He seems to have " gone 
 about doing good/* trying to learn and 
 to teach the truth without thinking of 
 his reputation or taking consciously any 
 measures to perpetuate his influence. 
 After his death, however, his fame grew 
 steadily. Early in the third century, when 
 he had long been worshiped, his influ- 
 ence was immensely increased by the act 
 of a broken-hearted woman. This is the 
 story : — 
 
 There lived at Emesa two sisters. 
 They were Syrian peasants. Their 
 names were Domna and Maesa. They 
 worshiped the sun, and both of them 
 seem to have been attached in some 
 
TYANA 221 
 
 capacity to the famous temple of that 
 divinity in their city. Domna had gained 
 celebrity for skill in astrology. A certain 
 widowed Roman general, a firm believer 
 in that pseudo-science, hearing that her 
 horoscope had marked her as the wife 
 of an emperor, sought out and married 
 her. 
 
 This general, the most gifted captain 
 of his age, cold, crafty, cruel, not like 
 Caligula with the cruelty of fitful passion, 
 but like Napoleon with the cruelty of 
 deliberate policy, unscrupulous, super- 
 stitious, and insatiably ambitious, became 
 in 193 A. D. by usurpation the Emperor 
 Septimius Severus. No small part of his 
 eminent achievements were due to his 
 wife, Domna, the peasant girl. She was 
 a woman of rare genius, strong will, and 
 ambition, almost equal to her husband's. 
 But she possessed what he lacked, a 
 heart. Her character was not good. In 
 our day it would seem extremely bad. 
 
222 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 But for a Roman empress in her time it 
 served well enough, and could not well 
 be criticised by society which had ac- 
 cepted Caligula as god and Faustina as 
 madonna. For a time husband and wife 
 lived in close amity, each leaning upon 
 the talents of the other. They had two 
 sons, CaracallaandGeta. But time, which 
 generally brings trouble to families where 
 selfishness usurps the place of affection, 
 had to be reckoned with. A favorite of 
 the emperor, named Plautianus, jealous 
 of Domna's influence, filled her hus- 
 band*s ears with slanders of his wife ; 
 made him believe that she had planned 
 to poison him. Her two sons, both cov- 
 eting the crown, hated each other with 
 a deadly hatred. She tried with all her 
 power to reconcile them, but her efforts 
 only made it more evident that each of 
 them was determined to assassinate his 
 brother. Their father, compelled to leave 
 Rome for Britain, took both sons with 
 
TYANA 223 
 
 him because he dared not leave them 
 behind. He died at York, probably 
 poisoned by the elder of the two. They 
 brought the ashes of their parent home. 
 On the way neither dared to eat a mor- 
 sel or drink a drop from the other's 
 hand that had not been tested and proved 
 free of poison. At Rome mother and 
 sons, each of the latter protected by 
 an armed guard from the dagger of his 
 brother, celebrated the apotheosis of 
 husband and father. When the obse- 
 quies were over the widow called into 
 the closet of her grief the two boys who 
 were to share the throne between them, 
 and said : — 
 
 " You find means, my sons, to divide 
 the earth and the seas between you, and 
 the streams between them, you say, di- 
 vide the two continents. But how will 
 you be able to divide your mother ? How 
 am I, your unhappy parent, to be torn 
 asunder and shared between you both ? 
 
224 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 There is but one way. First, sheathe 
 your swords in my breast and then let 
 my body be cut in two, that each prince 
 may bury half his mother in his own 
 territory. So shall I be equally parted 
 between you together with your empire 
 of earth and sea." 
 
 Though Domna may not have ex- 
 pressed her anguish in precisely these 
 words which Herodian attributes to her, 
 there is no doubt that they give a true 
 conception of her despair; for Herodian 
 was a contemporary, an honest reporter, 
 and knew whereof he affirmed. 
 
 The mother's pleadings were futile. 
 Caracalla, hiding Macbeth's treachery 
 beneath Iago*s hypocrisy, persuaded her 
 to invite his younger brother to meet him 
 in her private chamber for a friendly con- 
 ference. There he had concealed assas- 
 sins who stabbed Geta in her arms while 
 she vainly strove to make her body a 
 shield against their daggers. 
 
TYANA 225 
 
 Nor was this the bitterest drop in her 
 cup. After the cruel deed had been done, 
 because the anguish in her face inspired 
 the sympathy of courtiers, the fratri- 
 cide, by threats that if she refused to 
 obey him he would slay her with the 
 same weapon that had pierced the heart 
 of her son, compelled her to put on gay 
 garments, to dance, and to sing. 
 
 "When it is dark enough the stars 
 come out." It is not strange that in the 
 horror of this great darkness the tortured 
 woman gazed eagerly upon the only star 
 that shone in her sky. We are told that 
 she sought consolation in philosophy ; 
 that she spent whole days with its pro- 
 fessors. 
 
 For nearly two centuries the words of 
 Him who came into the world to "heal 
 the brokenhearted " had been slowly but 
 surely penetrating to wider and yet wider 
 horizons. Christianity was still the reli- 
 gion of the poor and the lowly, but the 
 
226 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 teachings of Christ had permeated the air. 
 They had been whispered in kitchens, 
 shouted from the stakes of martyrs, 
 scoffed at in palaces, murmured in hov- 
 els. Executioners had marveled to see 
 them give rest to the tortured and cour- 
 age to cowards. Slaves had seen them 
 transform ferocious masters into sympa- 
 thetic friends, and masters had seen them 
 change truculent slaves into obedient ser- 
 vants. Pagan philosophers had vainly 
 endeavored to explain how a superstition 
 which seemed to them absurd could plant 
 and foster honesty in thieves, kindness 
 in professional assassins, generosity in 
 misers, and valor in poltroons. But 
 the facts were obvious and indubitable. 
 Trajan, who had striven more zealously 
 than any other Caesar for the strict en- 
 forcement of established law, had recog- 
 nized them and wrenched the law till it 
 cracked to conform to them. He had 
 ordered Pliny to shut his eyes when 
 
TYANA 227 
 
 Christians refused to pour libations, and 
 to disregard accusations unconfirmed by 
 their own confessions. 
 
 Thus the words of Christ penetrated 
 all atmospheres. Domna had heard, but 
 thought little of them in the days of her 
 pride when her heart was whole. But 
 when her heart was broken they came 
 to her with power, though she knew 
 not whence they came. Many of them 
 were credited to Apollonius. His was 
 a household name among the rich and 
 the mighty, as was the name of Christ 
 among the poor and the needy. Some 
 of Christ's teachings Apollonius had re- 
 peated, others he was believed to have 
 originated. To Domna Christ was at 
 best an obscure foreigner who had lived 
 in the slums and been ignominiously gib- 
 beted. Apollonius was a distinct and dei- 
 fied personality, admired by philosophers 
 and worshiped by aristocrats. Hungry 
 for help, she commissioned Philostratos 
 
228 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 to collect all that could be learned of 
 him. Thus the famous book came to 
 be written, and a poor parody of our 
 Saviour's life became the gospel of the 
 Roman court. But the diluted gospel and 
 the tinseled Christ were insufficient. For 
 a time they did some service. It was 
 doubtless Domna's influence that sent 
 her dastard son to Tyana and constrained 
 him to build a temple and consecrate the 
 city to the sham saviour, for in spite of 
 his atrocity Caracalla appears to have 
 given his mother all the affection it was 
 in the power of his fiendish nature to 
 bestow. But the sham saviour could not 
 give the despairing woman the blessed- 
 ness of them that mourn, for she died a 
 suicide. Yet she lived until, through her 
 influence, the worship of Apollonius had 
 received a strong impulse and been put 
 upon the way toward becoming the im- 
 perial religion. That road was closed to 
 it and opened to Christianity by the in- 
 
TYANA 229 
 
 fluence of another and a very different 
 woman, whose story runs parallel to 
 hers. 
 
 Domna's sister Maesa had two daugh- 
 ters, cousins therefore of Caracalla and 
 Geta. Their names were Soemis and Ma- 
 maea. Each of them bore a son and each 
 of the sons became an emperor. The son 
 of Soemis was surpassingly beautiful. 
 While still a boy he was made a priest 
 of the Sun. His splendid appearance 
 fascinated the soldiers, and by the machi- 
 nations of his mother he was placed upon 
 the throne of the Caesars. There he dis- 
 graced humanity by an ostentatious de- 
 pravity which exceeded the obscenities of 
 Nero, and had no trace of those artistic 
 qualities which make it possible to be- 
 lieve that even Nero was once a man. 
 In less than four years this son, the Em- 
 peror Heliogabalus, with his mother, 
 perished at the hands of an exasperated 
 soldiery and an outraged people, who 
 
230 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 murdered them and threw their bodies 
 into the Tiber. 
 
 The son of Mamaea met a different 
 fate. His mother had in some way been 
 drawn to Christianity. Perhaps it was 
 only that she clung to the best there 
 was in the religion fostered by her aunt 
 Domna, and was by that led toward 
 the light. However that may be, she 
 adopted the principles of Christ and 
 trained her son to obey them. 
 
 Now there was at Alexandria one of 
 the wisest, devoutest, and most per- 
 suasive Christians who have ever lived. 
 In knowledge of the Scriptures no one 
 equaled him, in classical learning no one 
 excelled him, in powers of persuasion 
 no one approached him. His name was 
 Origen. Before her son's character was 
 fully formed, and probably to confirm 
 convictions which had already nearly, 
 if not wholly, mastered her, she sent for 
 this man. He spent a considerable time 
 
^ 
 
 TYANA 231 
 
 with her. It cannot be doubted that all 
 his matchless abilities were strained to 
 lead her into a deeper devotion to Christ. 
 Her conduct shows that he succeeded. 
 Her conceptions of life and its duties 
 were antipodal to those of her mother 
 and her sister. In place of the diabolical 
 ambition which ruined the other mem- 
 bers of her family, there appeared in her 
 a genuine patriotism. Before her son 
 was fifteen the army forced Elagabalus, 
 who had just failed in an attempt to 
 murder him, to appoint him successor 
 to the throne. Mamaea guarded her boy 
 with wise and tender care. She sur- 
 rounded him with the best and ablest 
 men in Rome. Without taking him 
 out of the world, her resolute will and 
 motherly tact kept him from the evil 
 and prepared him for the high place 
 to which Providence had called him. 
 
 When he became emperor under the 
 name of Alexander Severus, the court 
 
232 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 was immediately reformed. A change 
 more instantaneous than that which, 
 when William took the helm that James 
 had fled from, swept Jeffreys from the 
 chancellorship and drove Claverhouse 
 into exile, renovated Rome. The great 
 jurists whom Elagabalus had dismissed 
 that he might fill their places with men 
 selected from the gutters, the race-course, 
 and the arena, for no other reason than 
 their bull necks and brawny breasts and 
 bestial proclivities, were recalled to of- 
 fice. Papinian, the greatest jurist Rome 
 ever produced, had been murdered by 
 Caracalla because when commanded to 
 palliate before the Senate Geta's assas- 
 sination he replied that it was easier to 
 commit fratricide than to justify it ; but 
 Ulpian and Paulus still lived and gave 
 lustre to the new administration. 
 
 Severus sought counsel from the best 
 men in the empire, and was swayed by 
 their advice, but to the close of his life 
 
TYANA ^233 
 
 his mother was his chief and most trusted 
 guide. Abuses were corrected, morals 
 were purified. Nine years of peaceful 
 prosperity followed his accession, during 
 all of which the example of a family 
 Christian in all but name was given to 
 the Roman world by the relations be- 
 tween the emperor and his mother ; and 
 though the last five of the fourteen years 
 of his beneficent reign were agitated by 
 wars which the wickedness of former 
 rulers had made inevitable, they were 
 wars which proved that the influence 
 which made him just and gentle in peace 
 had also made him brave and generous 
 in war. 
 
 This upright man, devoted son, and 
 beneficent sovereign placed in his pri- 
 vate oratory four statues. They repre- 
 sented Orpheus, Abraham, Apollonius, 
 and Jesus of Nazareth. To our minds 
 this may seem an inexplicable combina- 
 tion. What relation has Orpheus to 
 
234 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 Abraham or Apollonius to Christ ? we 
 naturally ask. But had we lived in Rome 
 at the court of Alexander, the group- 
 ing would have seemed to us appropri- 
 ate, and would have told us a plain and 
 most impressive fact. 
 
 Orpheus had long been accepted by 
 Pythagoreans as the one whose resur- 
 rection proved immortality ; whose lyre 
 showed that persuasion is more powerful 
 than force ; whose rescue of Eurydice 
 proclaimed the victory of self-sacrificing 
 love over all things, even over death. 
 The members of the Orphic societies, 
 though few in number, were the salt of 
 the heathen world. Their white gar- 
 ments were a protest against the scarlet 
 splendors of pagan debauchery. Their 
 ascetic rules, which forbade the use of 
 animal food, and cultivated plain living 
 and high thinking, were a perpetual re- 
 buke to the purple and fine linen of 
 those who fared sumptuously every day 
 
TYANA 235 
 
 and did nothing else. They had done 
 much to prepare the way before Apol- 
 lonius, who had himself been a Pytha- 
 gorean or was believed to have been one. 
 As Christ was the ultimate fruit of all 
 the good which had grown for centuries 
 in Judaea, ApoUonius was the consum- 
 mation of the best that Greece and Rome 
 had been able to produce. As Orpheus 
 passed for the spiritual ancestor of Apol- 
 lonius, Abraham bore a similar relation 
 to Christ. Such was the reasoning. The 
 idea of the unity of God had not yet 
 mastered the Gentile mind. That there 
 should be two divinities with equal claims 
 to worship would not seem strange to 
 Romans. 
 
 The strongest trait in Alexander's char- 
 acter was family affection. It had kept 
 him loyal to Elagabalus in spite of that 
 monster's unspeakable infamy, in spite 
 of the monster's attempt to murder him. 
 At a time when no one could oppose the 
 
236 CITIES OF PAUL 
 
 will of the army without risking his life, 
 it had kept him from yielding a hair*s 
 breadth to the clamors of an infuriated 
 soldiery bent on forcing him to usurp his 
 cousin's throne. For many years the 
 strong will of his great-aunt Domna had 
 been the controlling influence in his fam- 
 ily. What then could be more natural 
 than that reverence for her should lead 
 him to place the statue of the god she 
 had taught him to revere beside the im- 
 age of the God his mother had taught 
 him to worship ? 
 
 However this may be, in his oratory 
 Christianity was for the first time raised 
 before the whole Roman Empire to an 
 equality with the loftiest cult of pagan- 
 ism. It might still be hated, it might still 
 be fought, — and so it was at intervals 
 for a hundred years, — but it could never 
 again be, as it had been, despised. In a 
 century almost to the year from the day 
 on which Alexander put the statue of 
 
TYANA 237 
 
 Jesus beside that of Apollonius, Con- 
 stantine placed the Cross above the 
 eagles and made Christianity legally the 
 religion of the empire. 
 
 Gradually the gospel according to 
 Philostratos, the splendid rhetorician, 
 faded from human memory, and the 
 gospels according to the despised publi- 
 can, the obscure disciple, the faithful 
 physician, and the humble fisherman 
 whom Jesus loved became the Bible of 
 our race. For this we are indebted to the 
 afflictions of Domna and the influence 
 of Mamaea more than to the battle of the 
 Milvian; to the unrecorded words of 
 Origen whispered in the closet more 
 than to the obtrusive sword of Constan- 
 tine, and the in hoc signo trumpeted at 
 the street corners of the world. 
 
EUctrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton &* Co. 
 Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A. 
 
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