Chapter 17 of Paul the Dauntless. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by David Leeson. Paul the Dauntless. By Basil Joseph Matthews. Chapter 17. Finding a Son. Some days later, as Paul was talking to Barnabas, he said, Come Barnabas, let us go back and visit the brothers in every town where we have proclaimed the word. Let us see how they are doing. Barnabas said, Yes, I agree, who shall we take with us? I suggest my nephew, young John Mark. Paul frowned at this. I do not want, he said, to have as our helper the man who turned back and shirked the dangers of carrying the message when we were in Pamphylia. It would not be easy for Paul to avoid hurting Barnabas's feelings in telling him that his nephew, John Mark, had not the spirit of courage and the sturdiness needed in men who must be ready to risk their lives at any hour and take a stoning or a beating without flinching. Indeed it is likely that Paul's quick temper would lead him to say this abruptly. Barnabas maybe thought that John Mark ought to have a second chance, but Paul would not take the risk. We can see that he was right in thinking that they must not have a man with them who would fail at a pinch. In any case what Paul said made Barnabas so angry that he would have nothing more to do with his old friend. Barnabas took his kinsman, young John Mark, and went off on a missionary journey to his native place, Cyprus, leaving Paul in Antioch. It cut Paul to the quick to part from the great comrade of his first journey. He and Barnabas had faced stoning, fever, and robbers together, and had shared the perils of river and road and sea. But Paul knew that he was on a great enterprise where any man was unfit who, like John Mark, quailed before death or feared to take any adventure that might come to him. Paul never thought of himself as a hero. He only knew that he cared so much for the carrying out of God's great aim that he forgot his own safety. So Paul could claim rightly, I prove myself at all points a true servant to God by great endurance, by suffering, by troubles, by calamities, by lashes, by imprisonment, mobbed, toiling, sleepless, starving. So even for the love of Barnabas his comrade, he could not take with him a man like John Mark, whom he believed to be unready to face all these things. Barnabas therefore, all sore and angry in spirit, went down with John Mark to the port at Seleucia to set sail westward. We do not hear that Paul and Barnabas ever met again. Paul went to ask the friend with whom he had many talks on their way up from the Council at Jerusalem, Silas, whether he would go out on the long perilous journey over the mountains to the people of the Plateau. He, like Paul, though a Jew, was a Roman citizen. His full Roman name was Silvanus, but his friends called him Silas for short. Paul wanted Silas to go with him, across the Taurus mountains, to the Roman cities of Derby and Lystra, Iconium and Antioch. Silas would be a great help to Paul there, not only because he was a Roman Jew, but because he had been at the Jerusalem Council, where they had decided on the message to the nations. The strict Christian Jews in these Roman cities of the province of Galatia might say that Paul was a crank without any authority to tell the nations they might come into the fellowship without circumcision. But they would find it difficult to say such things to Silas, who came from the Church at Jerusalem itself carrying a letter signed by James. Paul and his new friend Silas started out northward. A little band of the Brethren came to give them a send-off. The flush of sunrise was reflected in the Orontes on their right as they crossed the bridge which carried them out to the northern plain. They had a long camping journey of many weeks ahead of them, in which they must be ready to wade across streams, skirt lakes, climb great mountain passes, and trudge over wide plains. They would probably take asses with them, who would carry in saddle bags slung across their backs water bottles, their oil and cheese and olives for the midday meal, an iron crock for cooking their dish of corn and meat at night, their hooded cloaks for shelter from the rain or mountain snow, and for sleeping in at night. As they joined a company of traders who traveled along the road together for defense against the robbers, they would take special care to do this when they began to climb from the great plain, round the curving roads among the brown hills, and up into the brigand infested ravines of the mountains that divided Syria, the province in which Damascus and Antioch lay, from Cilicia, the province of Paul's own boyhood where Tarsus stood. Paul and Silas talked as they rode along or walked by the side of the asses. Paul was very proud of his native city, toward which they were traveling. He would be sure to tell Silas stories of his life when he was a boy in Tarsus there. He could, as they came to rest in the evening at one of the caravan centers, point to black low tents stretched around them on the camping ground, made of the famous Tarsian goat's hair cloth. The cloth was known all over the Roman Empire as Cilisium, because it came from this Cilisian plain on which Paul was born. Silas knew that Paul had been trained as a tent-maker. Paul could tell him, I intend to earn my living at my trade whenever I stay in a city to preach. In that way I shall stop men from saying that I follow Christ just to get a livelihood. We can be certain that Silas and he would discuss the quarrel with Barnabas, and they would wish that there were some younger man like John Mark only braver with them as a helper. There is a young fellow in Lystra over the mountains, Paul might say, named Timothy, i.e. Fear God. He became a disciple of Jesus Christ when I was there.  I believe he would make a fine helper in place of John Mark. Talking in this way they came down among the towns in the Cilisian plain where Paul preached and taught in these quiet years before Barnabas came to fetch him to Antioch. As Paul came through the streets of these towns in Cilisia, the faces of the Christian people, cobbling and baking in their little shops, lighted up with gladness when they saw their old friend come back. They would run and bring together the other brethren who lived in the town, and they would listen eagerly to Paul who had, years before, by his teaching brought them into the new and splendid fellowship. We are not told what he said to them, but without doubt he would say simple, straight words like these which he wrote to his friends. My brothers, whom I love and have longed to see, stand fast. I wish greatly that your love may grow more and more in knowledge and in all judgment, so that you may be keen on the things that are really good. Then those two splendid sentences that might be the command of a commander to his armies, stand fast together in one spirit, with one mind, working hard together for the faith of the good news. Do not be at all terrified by your enemies. You are to have the gift of going through hard times on behalf of Christ, fighting battles like those through which I have gone. Do all your work, he went on, without muttering and disputing with one another, so that you may not be open to blame and may do harm to no one. Live like sons of God among a crooked, minded and contrary nation, shining in the midst of them like lights in the world, holding out as a torch the word of life. In many of these places the same hard question came up, the Jews declaring that everybody must come under the law and the others saying no. It was a great help to them when Silas brought out his parchment and read aloud the letter that said they were not to have this burden laid upon them. At last they came out on the bank of the river Sidnes and reached the great city of Tarsus. Paul's father and mother must have been very old by this time if indeed they had not died. Some of his old schoolmates would not speak to him. They had grown to be strict Pharisees who would have nothing to do with Paul since he had become a Christian. But others, who had been led by him into the blithe joy of being worshipers of God through Christ, would have plucked their very eyes out to give to him if he had needed them. But he and Silas could not rest long even here. In front of them rose the high ridge of the Taurus, and on the other side of the snows of the mountains was the great plateau of the Roman cities. The asses were brought out and a supply of food placed in the saddlebags, for they must prepare for days of trudging up lonely defiles where no villages stood, nor any place of rest saved the solitary roadside in by the rushing stream, with its dark, low, stable, and rough bare room. They rode out of the city by the northern gate. The hoofs of the asses clattered on the paved Roman road that ran straight ahead of them. They could see its distant lengths shining in the sunlight up past the hill of the seven sleepers. They went through the suburb among the hills, where Paul and his father and mother and sister used to come in the summer months when all the plain lay baked under the fierce, sultry heat of the sun. At length the last house of the distant Tarsus suburb lay behind Paul and Silas. Before them the road curved like a serpent among the hills by the side of the stream. It was still the great paved Roman road, for this was the way along which the legions marched and the imperial post galloped. Among the hills by the roadside the spring anemones bloomed, but as they climbed higher along the side of the rushing torrent of icy snow-water no flowers bloomed. Further on they stopped to take their olives and cheese and bread, where the gray old sycamores clung with their gnarled roots to the rocks that were grayer and older than the trees, while up above on the steep craggy peaks the dark green pine trees moaned in the wind. The sound of the tinkle and boom of bells came on them. On the curve of the rocky road a camel came. On his neck were little copper bells that gave a tinkling sound, and from his side hung larger ones that sounded deeper tones as the camel strode silently down the pass. Behind him another camel came, and another, and another, eight all linked together by light chains and the first and the last war bells, so that the camel-man who rode in front on a little donkey knew, if the bells in the distance ceased to sound, that the chain had broken and some of his camels were left behind. The sun went behind the rocks. As the late afternoon wore on Paul and Silas came to a square low building, just four windowless stone walls without, and within a quadrangle in which they could stable the asses and find a corner by the wood fire where they could wrap themselves in their cloaks and sleep. Inside the inn they saw the camels in groups, all in circles with tails outward and heads down in the center, eating the corn that their driver had thrown down. A new string of camels came in, and slowly squatting down grunted discontentedly while their driver unlashed the burdens from their backs. As night fell Paul and Silas, having gathered together twigs and pieces of wood, lighted a fire under their crock and boiled a dish of wheat and oil and spices. Other fires crackled all round the encampment. The flames threw wild leaping shadows of the sleeping camels against the wall of the inn. Then a camel driver started to sing a long ballad story in many short verses. Many of the verses were so foul and unclean that Paul and Silas were glad to wrap their cloaks around their ears and lie down to sleep. Before the morning sun had even caught the snow crest of the torus in its loop of flame, Paul and Silas were up and, having washed in the running water of the stream, were away on the road again. As they climbed higher up the profound gorge which was filled from depth to height with the sound of running waters and the tinkle of camel bells, the dizzy gray crags soared higher and higher on either side. Then they came to a place where it seemed as though they must turn back, for, right across the road, towering six hundred feet above them, lay the crowning ridge of the mountain range. They could neither climb nor go round, yet the road lay straight on, as though into the very heart of the torus rocks. Paul and Silas trudged on, and the narrowest pass in the world opened before them. There ran the road so straight that a laden camel brushed the gray rocks with his burden, and by the road the swift mountain torrent ran. From the road and the river the two precipices soared up and up, as though defying the very skies, hundreds upon hundreds of feet of gray, defiant, glorious rock echoing with the music of the stream. They went on into the shadow of this deep ravine, the Solisian gates. We do not know whether they remembered that Alexander the Great with all his armies had poured through that narrow defile. Certainly Paul would have laughed, if Silas had said to him, what was perfectly true, that in that ravine at that moment, in the cloak of a traveling Jew, with hands stained and rough with the toil of tent-making, with limbs toughened and with muscle taught with the travail of much journeying, stood a man greater than Alexander himself. For Paul was mightier in his real power, swifter and more daring in brain than even Alexander, as brave and reckless of danger in action, and destined to have an effect on the future history of the world far wider and deeper. For Paul took up the standard of an empire that was to cover more races than even Alexander ever saw, and he dared to fight his life's campaign not at the head of an army, but almost alone, in the power of an invisible and risen king. Yes, without cheer of mother or of daughter, yes, without stay of father or of son, lone on the land and homeless on the water, pass eye and patience till the work is done. Yet not in solitude, if Christ a near me, waken him workers for the great employ. Nay, not in solitude if those that hear me catch from my joyance the surprise of joy. So Paul and Silas passed through the straight and narrow gate out into the sunshine of the high plateau. They rode among the hills in a broad valley with no ravine, and then dropped to the plain which ran for hundreds of miles at a level of some three or four thousand feet above the level of the sea. They were now in the kingdom of Antiochus, who held rule in allegiance to Rome. They did not stop at any cities in this kingdom, but pressed on with all speed to the frontier city of the Lycaonian part of the province of Galatia, Derby. Paul came into Derby, as you will see from the map, at the east gate in place of the west which he had entered coming from Lystra on his earlier journey with Barnabas. To the Christians there he and Silas read and explained the letter from Jerusalem and spoke to the people encouraging them. From Derby they hastened on westward along the Roman road. It may well be that Paul would tell Silas how he had come from Lystra along that road, all bruised with the cruel stones of the mob who had been egged on by the angry Jews. At length they came in sight of Lystra with the sun setting behind the great temple of Jupiter, whose priests, we remember, had started to sacrifice to Paul and Barnabas as Mercury and Jupiter. Here is Timothy, said Paul to Silas, as a young fellow hurried to greet them, his eyes all shining with joy at seeing his great hero Paul back again in Lystra. Silas would see from Timothy's hair and from the color of his eyes and his skin that he was not a pure-blooded Jew. When they went to Timothy's he found that Timothy's father was a Greek, and his mother, named Eunice, was a Jewess. In the house with them lived his grandmother named Lois. If Timothy was excited when he saw Paul come back into Lystra, he would hardly hold himself for joy and surprise when Paul put to him the question, will you come with me on my journey carrying the good news of the love of God as shown in Jesus Christ? We can imagine how Timothy would cry, oh yes, of all the things in the world that I most desire, when Paul would quietly interrupt him and tell him how John Mark had turned back in fear. This is no easy thing, he would tell Timothy, we must be ready to face weariness and pain, hunger and thirst and cold, storm and brigands, stoning and beatings, imprisonment and the fear of death. But as he looked into the face of Timothy and saw all his brave spirit looking at him with love and worship, eager to dare any danger if he might only be with his master Paul, he could not hesitate, but gave the word that Timothy was to travel with them on the new adventure into lands that none of them had ever seen. CHAPTER XVIII. As he saw Eunice putting the last stitches to her Timothy's cloak and filling his wallet with bread and dates, cheese and salted olives, Paul could not but remember how his own mother had years ago made ready for him to go down to Jerusalem to college. Only he would understand much better now than he did as a boy the wrench that it is for a mother to let her son leave home to go far away. The trembling hands of Grandmother Lois told their story too, as she filled Timothy's water bottle and slipped an extra cake quietly into his wallet, while Timothy strapped on his sandals and took up his iron shod staff. There were no luxuries, for they were on a campaign and must travel light. At last all the preparations were made. Then, with his own cloak and perhaps Paul's over his shoulder, and with his wallet and bottle at his girdle, Timothy said good-bye to his mother and grandmother, and stepped out into the great world. Going under the arch of the west gate of Lystra, the three travelers took a road which Timothy knew well, the road to the neighboring city, Iconium. Paul and his companions wonderfully represented the world of the northern and eastern lands of the Mediterranean. He and Silas were Jews, and yet were both Roman citizens. Timothy was the son of a Greek father, though his mother was a Jewish. Greek, Roman, and Jew, they were a band in which the three threads of the empire were woven together by great love for one another and in utter devotion to their one King. Climbing over the ridge across which we have already traveled twice with Paul, they walked on all day. Before sunset they were among the orchards of Iconium. In that city, again, as in Derby and Lystra, they brought out the letter from Jerusalem. The brethren there brought out parchment and a reed pen and carefully copied the letter, so that, if any strict Jews came and declared that Greek Christians must obey all the law of Moses, they could bring out the parchment to prove that it was not so. From Iconium the three comrades struck across the shoulder of the Twin Peaks to the Great Roman Road. They trudged along the paved way for, perhaps, two days, till they sighted the aqueduct coming over the valley from the hills to Antioch and Pisidia. Here again they cheered the Christian folk and left with them a copy of the letter that was their Charter of Freedom. Paul might now have turned as he had done with Barnabas to climb over the ridge of the mountains, drop down to Perga, and sail home to Antioch, but he had in his mind a daring scheme for a far wider campaign. There, ahead of them, lay the road, calling them west to the great Greek cities of the Roman Empire. On the road the camels trudged, bearing their burdens toward Ephesus and the sea, with the crack of a whip and the clatter of hoofs the imperial post rode to the west, taking the news of the empire back to Rome. These words that Paul had heard as he knelt in the temple at Jerusalem still rang in his ears. I have called you to carry the good news to the nations. To carry his good news to these great cities of the west, where men came and went from all parts of the empire, would he knew make it certain that the story would be carried all over the Mediterranean by those who went out, in ships or by road, or talked in the market and in the countryside village, in the city forum and cloisters of the gymnasium. So Paul led his companions out to the west along the high road of the nations that ran like a bridge from the east to the west. The morning sun threw three purple shadows ahead of the travelers on the grey pavement of the road, as they started out from Antioch and Posidia on this new venture. Timothy strode lightly along, glad to feel the open road under his feet, and Paul, the great companion, by his side. Paul was very silent as he walked, thinking over the future, hearing the voice, calling, calling him westward as surely as did the storks who were flying overhead. As they passed by towns on the road Silas might ask, shall we not stop to preach here? No, Paul said, the spirit tells me that we must go on and not stay to preach in all this province of Asia. Turning northward they walked for days, sometimes just by themselves, often in the company of a traveling band of traders. They were still on the high plateau, which in places became wild and rocky, and in others carried them for many hours over the flat plain. Day after day they pressed on, starting before the dawn. Toward midday they stopped to eat their food under the sheltering shadow of a rock near the stone mouth of a solitary well. They rested here while all the country shimmered in the blaze of noon. As the sun dropped lower in the sky they moved on again. At night they slept the sound sleep of tired men in the shelter of a rough roadside inn, undisturbed by the wild cry of jackals among the hills or the hungry howl of the wolves. They would have gone on still further north into the province of Bethenia, but guidance came again through the inner voice of the Holy Spirit, who gave strong, sure leading to Paul. So they turned westward again, leaving the inviting streams that ran down their glens toward the Uxen, and taking the roads through the Missia district of Asia. They crossed river after river flowing northward, but never allowed the streams to lead them from keeping their faces toward the setting sun. Over bridge and through city and town, unhasting but unresting, talking of the work in front and the friends behind them at home, the three great companions strode along the Roman way. Six hundred miles now separated Paul and Silas from the brethren in Antioch in Syria, and Timothy had trudged from two to three hundred miles. There was no spare flesh on these three companions, trained as they were to the last ounce on simple food, tramping the great road in sun and wind and rain. Timothy, with the Greek fondness for a body in perfect athletic trim, would feel the taut, wiry muscles working under his skin with ill-concealed pride. "'Bottily exercise has some value in it,' said Paul to Timothy, but the active life of the Spirit is good in every way.' They were now dropping down from the highlands of the plateau by a long broad valley. To their right the hills ran down to a lovely plain, but on their left the lovely mass of Mount Eda lifted above the valleys and looked out over the bluest sea in the world beyond the plains of Troy. Paul might remember the story that all true Greeks loved to hear in the immortal epic of Homer, and how the great armies of the Greeks and the Trojans on that very plain had been locked in frightful battle led by the heroes, and how siege was laid for year after year around the towers of Ilium for the sake of Helen. Paul would be just as likely to know also that on that plain young Alexander of Macedon, who later earned his title the Great, had landed with his mighty armies and had there put on the armor of Achilles, as though to clothe himself with the spirit of the ancient warrior hero. Yet on the day when Paul walked down onto those plains, Troy saw a greater leader than Achilles, one who never sulked in his tent, and as we have already seen, a nobler leader than Alexander. Timothy was filled with wonder as he looked down on the plain, for he had never seen such a city as this great Roman seaport of Troy. Sturdy walls crowned with many towers ran for three miles round the city. The marble stadium glittered in the light. A lovely open-air theater stood there under the blue sky, facing westward so that the eyes of the audience would hardly know whether to look down on the play, or out over the harbor to the gleaming blue of the sea beyond, where the islands lay basking in the sun. An aqueduct ran over the plain carrying water with healing powers down from the hot springs on the slopes of Maldita. In Troy there was a physician who, it seems, had come from a great city called Philippi on the hills two days distant across the sea from the northwest. His name was Luke. One day we do not know how, he and the three travelers met with one another. We cannot even tell whether he worshipped in the name of Christ or in the name of Escalapius, the Greek god of healing, when he met Paul first. In any case, Luke, the physician, quickly became a follower of Jesus Christ, the great physician. Among all the friends of Paul, whose names we know, and there are scores of them, we owe more to Luke than to all the others combined, for he it was who wrote that book, one of the greatest books in the world, in which we read the Acts of Paul and the other apostles. Luke was very proud of Philippi and told his new friends how the city, which was named after the great Philip of Macedonia, stood on one of the greatest roads in the Roman Empire, the Via Egnatia. This way ran westward across the province of Macedonia for hundreds of miles straight to Durrachium on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, whence men sailed over to Brundizium and rode up the Via Appia to Rome. That night, as Paul slept, a vision came to him. He saw, surely it must have been a vision of Luke, a man from Macedonia, holding out his hands and pleading with Paul, saying, come over into Macedonia and help us. In the morning Paul told his companions about the dream he had had. They all agreed that God had called them to go and preach the message of the kingdom to the people in Philippi and the other cities of Macedonia. Going down into the harbor at Troy they took passage in a coasting sailing ship. She hove anchor, and after rowing out between the ends of the granite piers of Troy Harbor, they spread sail, and the ship went dipping and bobbing out into the open a G and C. Keeping the island of Embros on the port bow and passing the narrow channel of the helispont on their starboard beam, they set the ship's course straight for Samothrace Island. They sailed on, and when the sun was setting, they saw the tumbling waters as it were a glassy sea mingled with fire. They then dropped anchor in the shelter of the island, for on their coasting journeys the smaller boats always anchored by night and sailed only by day. The sun barely tinged the distant east with pink before the anchor was hauled aboard and the sail bellied and strained to the morning breeze. The ship sailed on northward, and after running for hours before a favoring wind, the sharpest eye of the sailors could see on the high ground that rose behind a city and its port the columns of a temple which caught the rays of the sun. They ran into a spacious bay and the boat was made fast at one of the wharves of Neapolis, the port of Philippi. They had crossed the narrow water that for us divides Asia from Europe, but when Paul sailed there all the world of the A G and C was won, and at Troy as well as at Philippi, at Ephesus in Asia as well as at Athens in Achaea, it was above everything else Greek. Out of Neapolis Paul and his companions climbed by a glen upward to the crest of the hill where they could take breath and look back over the sea to the great plains and hills that they had left. Then they marched on again till after three or four hours of hard travel they clattered in through the gate of Philippi. They rested through the remaining days of the week. On the Sabbath they walked down from the city out through the gate and down to the river bank. The stream ran through a wide glen to the sea. There were not many Jews in Philippi so they it seems had no synagogue but met in the open by the riverside at a place of prayer. Paul and Silas, Luke and Timothy went down there together. They found a number of women met and talked to them. Among them was a woman named Lydia who came from Thyatira across the sea in Asia, three or four days journey beyond Troas. She sold lovely robes from Thyatira, a city which was almost as famous as Tyre for its wonderful purple dye. Great sums of money were paid for a cloak or a toga, all woven in one piece without seam, and dyed in the purple vats at Thyatira. Lydia sat by the river listening very closely to all that Paul told them about Jesus Christ having come to show the love of God and to lead the Greeks and Jews and all people to reverence God and each other. In her native place of Thyatira she had seen her people worshipping idols and she had been sure that God was greater than the idols. She had seen there also a curious worship which was partly the Jewish worship of Jehovah but was mixed with uncleanness, and this too she felt quite sure was not really worship of the true God. The Jewish worship in Philippi, where she now lived, seemed true, yet God was still distant, though great and pure. As Lydia listened it came over her that what Paul said was the very truth, not only because he said it, but because at the same time she felt in her own inner self as though Jesus Christ had really come to her, bringing God very close to her, and was making her feel just that love which Paul said he would bring. So Lydia and her children and servants became Christian. She pressed Paul and the others to stay in her house while they were at Philippi. She begged them saying, If you are sure that I am a believer in the Lord come and stay at my house. She compelled us to come, writes Luke. One day as they went down to the riverside they met a slave girl dressed in a flowing-colored tunic, with one end of the cloth that made the tunic thrown over her dark hair. She looked at them with a curious, wistful, intent gaze. Although she was a slave girl, many people in Philippi, both Greeks and Romans, knew her, for they came to her to have their fortunes told. When she told fortunes the people paid her owners for it, which brought them a great deal of money. The sensitive girl whose daily work was to look at people and try to see at a glance what they were like, so that she might tell fortunes, felt at once that Paul's was the face of a man of great power and goodness. She stopped and lifting up her hands. She cried out so that all the people passing by could hear, These men are slaves of the most high God. They tell you the way to salvation. People stopped to stare, first at the girl, then at Paul and his companions. Paul and Silas and the others walked on. But she cried out the same words again, following them all down the road, declaring that they were, not like herself a slave telling fortunes for a master, but bond slaves of God telling the way of salvation. What did she mean? What did the startled people walking along the road understand when she called out, pointing to Paul and Silas, They tell you the way of salvation. The word that she used and that we translate salvation was Soteria, and even where she stood shrieking at the side of the road there may well have been stones like that of which a drawing stands on the previous page. A boy who knows Greek can read that one word on that stone is Soteria in Greek capital letters. These stones were set up by men in the cities and villages of the world of the great sea and along the roadside in Paul's day. Each stone was a prayer to the gods for that strange something which they called salvation. So when the slave girl stood there crying out about Paul and Silas, They tell you the way of salvation. She used a word that all the people as they went by would understand. More than that, the fact that men everywhere set up these stones asking for Soteria showed that it stood for something that they greatly desired. The slave girl could not leave them, would not leave them. She followed Paul and his friends down to the river bank and back again. She walked behind them through the streets till they went into Lydia's house, and all the next day she vexed them again calling out in the street, These men tell you the way of salvation. What did the word mean to the young sandaled Greek student in his white tunic with his waxed tablet slung on a tape over his arm and his writing stylus in his hand going down to his class and coming home from the gymnasium all glowing with exercise. To him, Soteria, salvation, meant that he should be lifted up with the fullness of the stature of an all-round man. If he cared simply for wrestling and throwing the javelin, then salvation meant being freed from every disease of body, every weakness of muscle and nerve, and being made a perfect athlete and warrior. This young student coming up the high street of Philippi knew, however, he would have learned from his tutor how the great Greek teachers like Socrates said that he was not only made up of body and of mind, but that his inmost being was spirit. There in Philippi, as in all the Greek cities of Paul's day, men were initiated into the mysteries of worship of gods. As a man was led into the innermost mystery by strange ceremonial, the very life of the god they believed came into him, so that the man became immortal as the god was immortal. This deliverance from the fear of evil and from the power of death through union with the god of mystery religion was, to the Greek man of Paul's day, and to many of the people of Asia, salvation.  It was of such salvation as this that Paul wrote when he said, in the most wonderful sentences in the greatest letter that he or any man ever wrote, I kneel before the father, from whom every family in heaven and earth gets its name and nature, pleading with him out of the wealth of his glory to give you a mighty increase of strength by his spirit and the inmost man. May Christ live in your heart as you have faith. May you be so fixed, so firmly founded in love that you are able to grasp with all the saints what is the meaning of the breadth, the length, the depth, the height by knowing the love of Christ which goes beyond all knowledge. May you be filled with the entire fullness of God. A Jewish boy stopped on his way from the synagogue school by the sound of this piercing voice of the slave girl, crying, These men are slaves of the most high God. They tell you the way of salvation. Would think first of the promised coming of the prince who should lead all the chosen people, the Jews, and establish their kingdom. To a Jewish boy in Philippi, the word salvation meant that he would have a place in the new age which the Messiah was to bring, the kingdom of God. The slave girl was, both to the Greek and the Jewish way of thinking about salvation, far truer than she ever dreamed when she shouted after Paul that he told men the way of salvation, for he showed how Jesus Christ brought men the mighty increase of strength and the healing and cleansing from the disease of foul living that the Greek needed, to the Jew the coming of the new kingdom, and to all the immortal life that they desired. At last Paul's patience was gone. He turned to the girl as she was crying out to the gaping crowd of people. He called out sternly to the spirit in her that prompted her, in the name of Jesus Christ, I order you out of her. Startled, the girl lost all belief in her powers. Something had gone from her. People came to her as they had been used to doing, saying, I have lost a bracelet. Tell me where to find it, or I want to go on a journey. Will the ship be wrecked or shall I travel safely if I go now? But she could not answer their questions. Her old confidence had altogether gone. So the people went away without paying the slave girl's masters. In a few days people stopped going to her. So the money that used to flow into the purses of her owners from people who listened to her fortune-telling ceased to come. The masters were naturally furious. They went out telling people what had happened and, searching through the streets, they found Paul and Silas. Rushing up to them, they seized them by the arms and robes and dragged them along the streets. To the pre-tors was the cry. The pre-tors were the Roman officials in Philippi. Very officious, very anxious to get promotion by showing how they upheld the power of Rome. The masters of the slave girl came into the forum where the pre-tors sat, dragging Paul and Silas along, and at their heels came a shouting mob. The pre-tors sat in their marble chairs on a raised dais. On either side stood the Roman lictor, each carrying the axe and the bundle of rods that were the mark of the authority of Rome. See these fellows? The men cried out, Jews as they are. They are upsetting everything in the city. They tell people to take up customs that are against the law for us as Romans to accept. Yes, yes! cried the crowd. Flog them, flog them! The pre-tors, without asking Paul or Silas a single question as to whether this was true or allowing them to make any defense, were fussily eager to show their Roman patriotism. Standing up they gave their orders. Strip them, flog them! This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Recording by David Leeson. Paul the Dauntless by Basil Joseph Matthews. Chapter 20. Earthquake. Quickly the lictors set about their horrible work. Slaves seized Paul and Silas and, roughly stripping off their robes, bared their backs. They were tied by their hands to the whipping-post. The crowd, all eager to see these wandering Jews thrashed, gathered round. The bundles of rods were unstrapped. Throwing back the sleeve of his right arm for freer movement, each of the two lictors brought down his rod with cruel strokes on Paul and Silas. Every blow cut through the skin or left a livid wheel across the back. The sight of the blood flowing down caused no voice to be raised to question the judgment or to plead for pity. Racked with the terrible pain, Paul and Silas felt their robes being thrown over their tortured backs. They were led out of the blazing sunlight of the Philippi Forum toward the abysmal darkness of the prison. A square building of thick windowless walls faced them. A rough, strong wooden door was opened. They were thrust into the dark entrance. We can't imagine the Roman soldiers laughing as they left the prison, repeating to the jailer in their jeering way the words the slave girl had shouted through the city. Here are the men who show you the way of salvation. Keep them safe. The jailer took them and, because he was specially charged to keep them safe, led them into a further dungeon, pitch dark, where the jingle of chains on the ankles and wrists of groaning prisoners told the story of the misery of the place. Paul and Silas felt the clasp of the shackles snapped on to their arms. Their feet were clapped into stocks. Each shackle was attached to a chain of which the other end was fastened to a staple in the wall. The stench of the place, the groaning and oaths of the other prisoners, the dull ache of their wounded bodies, made sleep impossible to Paul and Silas. Then there came back into their minds the songs of their own people. And they remembered that though their prison was dark as the pit, it was still a place where they could talk to their God. So, as the slow hours crept on, they prayed and sang joyful songs that Paul had learned on the rooftop at Tarsus when he was a boy. The other prisoners stopped their cursing to listen to such songs as this. You that seek after God let your heart live, for the Lord heareth the needy and does not despise his prisoners. And again, God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will we not fear, though the earth do change and though the mountains be moved in the heart of the seas, though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Then the stillness of the night was broken by a rumbling, the singing ceased, the ground rocked beneath them, the walls shook, the staples being loosened from beneath the stones, the chains fell with a clang, the stocks were wrenched open with the force of the earthquake, the pillars of the gateway shook and the hinged supports of the doors came loose, the bar across the two doors loosened from its sockets fell to the ground, the heavy doors swung open with a crash. The jailer by this time was wide awake, leaping out he saw the stars and the moon shining into the entrance of the prison. The prisoners have escaped, was his first thought. It spelt ruin for him, a Roman jailer. Death in an awful form would be meted out to him for having let his prisoners go while he slept. He snatched his short sword from its sheath and turned its point on himself, another moment and he would have thrown himself upon his sword and killed himself, but a voice came upon his ear. Paul, sitting in the black darkness of the inner prison, could see the figure of the jailer standing in the open gateway and his eyes caught the glint of the moonlight on his sword, so Paul shouted out, Do not harm yourself, we are all here. The jailer turned to the dungeon from which the voice came, but he could see nothing. Torches, torches, he cried. As the assistance came with the lights he rushed in and saw before him Paul and Silas. He set his men to work fastening the other prisoners. In front of him were the men after whom he had heard the girl shouting, These men show you the way of salvation. The belief that the Greeks and Jews held that an earthquake was the act of God was strong on him. The fear of the unseen gripped him. He remembered the cry of the slave girl. Sirs, he said, falling in terror before these prisoners of his, what must I do to be saved? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, said Paul and Silas, and then you will be saved, you and your household as well. The jailer brought his wife and children to Paul who spoke to them about Jesus. Then the jailer told his wife to get some water and oil. She hurried to do this, and he led Paul and Silas up into his house. The robes were very gently taken from their backs, and the jailer took the basin his wife handed to him, bathed the wounds and poured healing and soothing oil on them. The whole family was then at once baptized, and they all felt overjoyed because they believed in God. A meal was quickly laid, and Paul and Silas sat down to restore their strength. As the dawn came up, the Lictors marched down from the Pretors with an order. Relaced these men, they said. The jailer delighted that his new friends were not to be imprisoned any more, went to them and said, The Pretors have sent to release you, come out then and go in peace. He was indeed startled when he heard Paul say, No indeed. They flogged us in public in the forum and without a trial, flogged Roman citizens. They throw us into prison, and now they are going to get rid of us secretly. Let the Pretors come here themselves and take us out. It was the strangest message these Lictors had ever been told to carry or the Pretors had ever received. But Paul had taken measure of the position. He knew that if it was reported to Rome that the Pretors had flogged Roman citizens, the officials would not only be recalled and degraded from their positions, they would be ruined. The Pretors, who had been so fussily anxious only the day before to uphold the dignity of Rome by flogging Paul and Silas, were now panic stricken at the peril they were in of losing their own positions. They climbed down from their rostrum and went down personally to the prison to plead with Paul and Silas to leave the prison. The judges were now at the bar, the prisoner had them at his mercy. Publicly they took Paul and Silas by the hand and led them out and said, We ask you to go away from the city as we are afraid of a further riot. Paul and Silas then went to the house where they had been staying, the home of Lydia. There they cheered the other Christians, with Luke and Timothy, telling them to keep the work of spreading the message in Philippi going strongly and to be cheerfully prepared for trouble. Lydia, their hostess, would spare no trouble to get healing oils for the wounded backs of Paul and Silas. Preparations were made for them to leave, not to turn back and cross the sea again to Troas, but to go on still further westward. The city of Philippi, as we know, was at the eastward end of the great Ignatian Way, that military way of ours, as Cicero proudly said, which connects us with the helispont. So Paul and Silas, who had come into the city probably in October of the year A.D. 50, left on a morning in the early winter of the same year, riding westward along the Marble Road. It is likely that Paul had in his tunic a letter from one of the Jews in Philippi to a friend named Jason in the city to which they were traveling. End of Chapter 20. Chapter 21 of Paul the Dauntless. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by David Leeson. Paul the Dauntless by Basil Joseph Matthews. Chapter 21 The Goat of God. All day they rode, passing along a valley among the Heather Hills, and at last came to where the waters of the Striman broadened into a lake that reflected the clouds and the autumn skies. Near the lake among the hills they came on a great city. The city of the Nine Ways, the proud citizens used to call it, because of the roads that radiated from it, though its real name was Amphipolis. If they had been looking over Luke's shoulder when he wrote the account of Paul's journeys, the Amphipolitan people would have told him to scratch out what he had written when he said that his own Philippi was the first city of the district, for Amphipolis was older and larger than Philippi. Rising in the morning Paul and Silas set out again for a second day's long travel. This stage of their journey lay across the broad neck of a peninsula of many mountains. But, although the mountains were high and wild and the country rough, the great road pointed straight onward, and Paul and Silas urged on their beasts till the gates of another city faced them, as the sun set behind the towers and roofs of Apollonia. A third day's travel of over thirty miles followed, and they came to the place where they were meant to stay for some time. It was called Thessalonica, by Alexander the Great, for that was his sister's name. As they went under the east gate they would see the afternoon sun shining through a noble triumphal arch along the great marble way that ran straight as an arrow across the city. The arch was there to recall the great triumph when the battle of Philippi was won by Octavia, and of Mark Antony, who, you remember, had been in Tarsus half a century before Paul was born. Up the steep streets of Thessalonica they climbed till they came to the house of Jason, who welcomed these two traveling fellow Jews, little knowing the nest of hornets his kindness was to bring about his ears. Down in the harbor many ships swung at anchor, while the sailors got their vessels ready to sail down the gulf into the Aegean Sea. The porters ran across the planks between the ships and the dock, carrying jars of corn and bales of cloth. In this busy harbor city Paul found purchasers for his handiwork. He settled down to work. You remember our hard labor and toil, how we worked at our trade night and day, he reminded the people at Thessalonica afterward in a letter. He wished to preach without being kept by anybody, so that people should not be able to say that he was a traveling Jew talking new things simply to make a living for himself. He went down on the Sabbath to the synagogue, and there he spoke to the Jews and the Greeks who worshipped with them. As he stood up there near the dimly burning lamp, his eager face alive with desire that they should catch from him the light that he had, all could see that every word of Paul's burned with fiery conviction. But could it be true, they asked, that the Messiah had come? They had waited how long through the centuries they had listened and looked for the coming of the King. Now here was this astonishing traveler who had come post-hast across from their own native land to say that truly he, the one sent from God in the person of Jesus Christ, had come. But how? That was the disturbing, unbelievable part of the story. He had suffered, had been condemned to death, and executed by the Roman government. Was it likely that such a one was God's anointed Messiah? It was a stumbling block to them, yet Paul declared that he was the Christ, that he was proved to be so by the fact that God had raised him from death. Paul knew this, he said, for Christ had spoken to him on the road to Damascus. On a weekday Paul went on with his tent-making work, and spoke at the same time to those who would hear him. He talked in this way to all kinds of people. The dire, with his arms blue to the elbows bending over his vats, the potter shaping the clay on his whirling-wheel, the leather-worker making crimson shoes or a saddle for one of the merchants of the city, the shipwrights bending the tough wood to its place on the bow of a new boat, all would hear Paul. Many also of the wives and sisters of the counselors and wealthy merchants in Thessalonica, dressed in those exquisite silks that were brought into the harbor from far off Persia, also listened to him, and were convinced. So for Sabbath after Sabbath Paul spoke, and in the week the Greeks and Jews would come, while he was at work stitching his canvas, and would ask questions and argue with him. One by one, and in increasing numbers, they came to believe that what he said was true. In Thessalonica, however, just as in Antioch and Pisidia, Lystra, and Iconium, there were many Jews who thought that Paul's audacity in declaring first that a man who had hung on the cross as the Son of God, and then that he had come for the love of the other nations as well as the Jews, was a blend of blasphemy and treason against the race. They went round whispering to loungers at the street corners who were spoiling for a riot, and said, these fellows who have come into the city are trying to break down the Roman rule, and to put up a new king in the place of the emperor. Soon they had gathered a mob of nerduels. To the house of Jason was to cry, for they knew that Paul and Silas lived there. Jason heard the noise of a rabble coming down the street in which he lived. Looking out he could see them filling the road and shouting, waving their hands in the air.  They were coming and battering at his door. We want Paul and Silas, they shouted, and attacked Jason's house to get out them, but neither of the two was in the house. In disappointed rage they seized hold of Jason and some of the other Christians and dragged them along to the rulers of the city, called the Polotarks, or city chiefs, for Thessalonica was a free Roman city, and appointed its own rulers not receiving pre-tors from Rome. It was difficult in the confused howling of voices to hear what was really said, but the Polotarks made one man come up and give a statement. These fellows, who upset the whole world, have come here to Thessalonica. Jason here, and they pointed to him, has welcomed them. They all break the decrees of Caesar, for they say that someone else named Jesus is to be king. A yell of patriotic rage went up. The Polotarks were disturbed when they heard this. It was the most awful cry that could be raised in the empire, this charge of treachery and rebellion against Caesar, that Jews raised this charge against Jesus, and now against his pioneer missionary. But the rulers evidently felt that the matter would blow over most easily if they took easy measures. They therefore bound over Jason and the other brethren to keep the peace. Those who followed Christ, nevertheless, knew quite well that the Jews would start a more serious attack on Paul and Silas when they next appeared, and feared it might mean they're being executed. They therefore persuaded the two that it would be better to leave the city till the fury of the Jews cooled. The brothers, as the early Christians called one another, could hardly wrench themselves away from Paul, but it must be done for his sake and their own. The two comrades must leave that very night. Paul gave the brothers at Thessalonica parting advice as they gathered in the darkening twilight. We can't imagine with what tense faces they would lean forward to listen to Paul, as he told them in very straight, strong words how the Lord Jesus wanted them to live. We know some of the things that he said, for he recalled them to the people in a letter that he wrote later. You must keep clear from unclean living. You should never play a fraud on your brother. You will not need to be told to love one another. God himself tells you that. Stick to your own task. Work with your hands, and as he said it, Paul might almost unconsciously lift up his tough hands, blackened with the day and night work on the heavy tent canvas, so that the outside world respect your straightness, and so that you can support yourselves. We must be clad in a coat of mail made of faith and love, and on our heads the helmet of the hope of salvation. Keep a check on loafers. Never lose your temper with anyone. See that nobody pays back evil for evil, but always make a point of being kind to one another and to all the world. Rejoice all the time, and never give up prayer. Thank God for everything. Between the hour after sunset when darkness rushes swiftly over the land and the rising of the moon, Paul and Silas quietly escaped. They passed by the sentries at the west gate without challenge into the open road. The leagues of the Ignatian way stretched before them. The moon came up, and its cold light blanched the empty length of the road into ghostly whiteness. Silently they strode out along the road in the cool freshness of an early summer night. With the memory of the rods and the prison of Philippi in their hearts, and the shouting of the frenzied mob of Thessalonica still in their ears, they went out despised and rejected, each like his master, not having where to lay his head. They went, however, not through the east gate homeward to seek some quiet and refuge, but under the west gate, out into the road of empire, to take what new adventure should befall them. CHAPTER XXI Paul and Silas walked westward along the pavement of the Ignatian way for some miles. It was probably May, now, in the year AD 51. They had been in Thessalonica some six months. By this time it may well be, Timothy was with them, having come along from Philippi. He joined them either at Thessalonica or at the city to which they were now traveling. When he came he was able to tell Paul how Luke was giving new life to the people in Philippi by his teaching, preaching and healing. By the time the dawn had come up they came to a fork in the road, the paved Roman road going on like an arrow to the right. They took a rougher road to the left, running southwestward. This road led them along through woods, where they would be glad of the shade from the now scorching sunshine, and over rolling hills till, at last, they saw ahead of them the compact, secure little city of Berea, which lies at the foot of Mount Bernius. A Roman-like Cicero, because Berea was off the great road from Rome, called it an out-of-the-way place. When Paul stood up to speak to the people there he found more friendly faces than he had met anywhere in his travel. They did not simply take everything that he said as true on first hearing, but, as he argued that all the story of the life of the Israelites and their law and prophets proved that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, they took out their well-fingered rolls of parchment, and turned them to see whether the parts Paul quoted agreed with what he said. So convinced were they that many of the Jews believed, and with them were large numbers of the best known Greek men and women in Berea. Travelling Jews going up on business from Berea into Thessalonica, which Paul had left, would naturally talk to their brother Jews about how Paul and Silas and Timothy were persuading the people to worship in the name of Christ. Some of the Jews were furiously angry with the incorrigible apostles and came hotfoot from Thessalonica along the road to Berea. They began to work up the mob into a frenzy against Paul, whom they singled out as the ringleader. The brothers came together to discuss what ought to be done. They decided that the best thing was that Paul should go down to the harbor and sail away, while Silas and Timothy stayed in Berea to keep the work quietly going on. It was a great wrench to Paul, not only because he was leaving Berea itself, but because it cut him off more completely from the people whom he gloried in above all his friends in all the cities, the brothers in Thessalonica and in Philippi. None of them knew where it was best for Paul to go. They only knew that he must go, that the life of their great leader, whose speech had changed the whole world for them, was of unspeakable importance, and that, therefore, some of them must go with him and bring back news of the place in which Paul settled. So, without knowing where he would sail to next, Paul left Berea along with his friends from that city, like the Greek Christian Sopater, son of Pyrrhus. They went down the valleys, riding toward the coast hour after hour through the mid-summer heat. Paul had been driven on by an invisible goat that would not let him rest, driven from the prison of Philippi along the Ignatian Way, hounded out of Thessalonica, his life threatened at Berea. It must have seemed to him as though he would never have where to lay his head. He seemed like a tent-maker of the lives of men who had no sooner begun to weave a piece of canvas and had got the pattern of warp and wolf prepared than he was driven away to start again and to be interrupted once more. How futile it seemed! But what really happened was that instead of Paul completing his tent at one place, he left at one center after another, men and women who had caught his pattern and his plan, and would work it out after he had left them. He was the scout riding on perilous work ahead of the main army, the heroic pioneer missionary. I can, in Christ Jesus, be proud of my work for God, he said, from Jerusalem right round, across Asia Minor and the Aegean, to Illyricum, behind Berea, I have been able to complete the forth-telling of the good news of Christ, my ambition always being to preach only in places where Christ's name has never been heard before, so that they should see which had never learned about him, and they who had never heard of him should understand. The shimmer of blue and gold caught his eye as Paul came out at last in sight of the Sea of Islands, the Aegean. They hastened down to the harbor called Diom. There may have been boats just ready to sail to Neapolis, the port of Philippi, or to the harbor at Thessalonica, but Paul would have to pass them by. Then he saw a coasting vessel preparing to put to sea, with Greek letters on the prow, above the eyes that were painted there so that the boat could see its way. Inquiring of the master mariner, they found that she was sailing for Athens, taking passage, Paul and his friends went aboard, and at dawn felt the swing of the sea under the vessel as she ran out, hugging the mountain coast of Thessaly on her starboard. Young sopater, sitting under the shade of the tall sail, watching the coast go sliding past and all the mountains and the sea glowing in the July sun, could tell Paul how each mountain and headland had stories of the battles of the Greeks that his father, Pyrrhus, had told to him. There was Olympus, which his fathers had always believed was the council seat of the gods. Now the boughs of the boat swung westward into a lovely narrow channel between Artemisium, situated on an island headland and the mainland. The pillars of a noble temple to Artemis, Diana, stood there looking over the ocean, as they passed into the channel sopater, who would be likely to have read the history of his people by Herodotus, could tell Paul how, from the day when a storm out on this coast beat upon the Persian fleet, the Greeks had called Neptune, the sea god, the savior. But Paul would feel a shudder at the thought of this idle, half-fish, half-man receiving the name of savior that truly belonged alone to Jesus. Right in front of them, as those stopping their journey was ashore backed by hills, among those hills sopater could tell Paul as they stood at the boughs looking up the blue waters. At the gates of the boiling springs, Thermopylae, three hundred Greeks defied the armies of Persia in the most famous battle of the world. The man at the rudder paddle turned the ship southeast again, and the vessel scutted along, helped maybe by the strong north winds that sweep down through the mountains. At length they came out from this long channel into the open sea once more. On another headland, a shining temple of Athena, built of marble from the quarries of Pentelicus which they passed further on, showed that they were now nearing the wonderful city of this victory goddess. At last in smooth water they beat up the gulf till the boat slid into the crowded harbor of Perias. The companions from Berea now got ready to sail back to tell their friends at home that they had safely piloted Paul far beyond the reach of his venomous enemies from Thessalonica. Tell Silas and my son Timothy to sail to me with all speed! said Paul as the men went aboard the little sailing ship that was to carry them back to Berea. As he stood on the harbour side, resting one sandled foot on a stone mooring pillar, and watching the ship gather way under the steady beat of the oars, he was all alone. He was alone for the first time since he had walked across the bridge into Antioch in Syria with Barnabas eight and a half years ago. He was lonely indeed without his close friends Silas and Timothy. Paul now grasped his staff and, turning his back on the busy harbor, strode up the broad portway that linked the harbor of Perias with Athens. He walked between the tremendous but already partly ruined walls that ran from the port straight up to the city of Athena. A head he saw lifted up on a mighty rock, the crown and glory of Greece, the deathless beauty of the Parthenon. Before that majestic temple stood the exquisite and noble statue of Athena, which seemed as though it were a flame, the bronze figure and its gleaming golden crown were caught in the glory of an August sunset. Paul was in Athens. End of Chapter 22 Chapter 23 of Paul the Dauntless This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by David Leeson. Paul the Dauntless by Basil Joseph Matthews Chapter 23 The Scorn of Athens Paul was in Athens, the sleepy Roman sentinel as he glanced under his proud heavy eyelids at the travel-stained Paul in his cloak and sandals, could never guess that the greatest man in the world of that day had at that moment entered the most learned and brilliant city in the Roman Empire. Still more wildly absurd would it have seemed to the sentry if a passing prophet had told him that when all the worship of the gods of Athens had vanished like morning mist and when the last sentry of the Roman Empire had fallen behind her broken walls, the worship which Paul that day brought into the city would endure and spread to the ends of the earth. Though the long street from the perious gate to the heart of the city was crowded, Paul was very lonely. Up the street went merchants riding on asses with slaves running alongside coming up from the port. Greek mothers led their children along the shaded sidewalk with its marble pillars past the little wooden shops where you might buy figs and dates, olives and oil, and goat's milk cheese. Here a mother stopped to bargain with the crafty merchant for a length of buff-colored linen for a tunic for her boy who had grown out of his old one. There a man stopped at the armorers to test the blade of a demasking sword. Lusty Romans, keen-witted Greeks, olive-skinned Syrians, swore the Egyptians, rubbed shoulders with Paul as he walked up the street, but they only made him feel more utterly alone, for he longed greatly for his old friend Silas and his son, Timothy, the companions with whom he had tramped the open road and sailed and shared meals and prison for so many days. He hoped that they would hurry to him when they heard his message. Paul's feet carried him on the next Sabbath to the door of the Jews' meeting-house, where he spoke to them after the word had been read. The Jews and the Greeks who had come to believe in Jehovah listened eagerly to the new truths that Paul poured forth. On other days he walked about the streets and markets of Athens through the hot August days. The sun was climbing over the Aegean Sea when Paul would issue forth in the cool of the morning. He always loved cities and all the shifting many-colored scenes of the streets. He preferred them to the country, so we can best imagine that he would not walk out to listen to the bees droning in the sunshine over the purple heather of Himetus, gathering the very honey of the gods, nor would he stroll by the illicit stream that ran by the hill of Himetus and watered the grove of the Lyceum, under whose shade Aristotle in the old days had taught his disciples. Paul would, we can believe, be drawn to the great marble stadium between Himetus and the city, where he could see the crowds of Athenians with a sparkling of country people and sailors watching the sports about which he wrote again and again in his letters. The wrestlers, the brawny boxers, and the lithe-running men in their short white tunics, trained there for the great pan-Athenaic games which drew people from all the countryside to Athens. The shouts surged to the sky as the teams of straining horses, white with sweat, thundered round the course, with the drivers in their reeling chariots cracking their long whips above the maddened horses' heads. Walking from the stadium toward the city, Paul would see the giant temple of Jupiter Olympus rearing its gleaming marble columns, and beyond, in the distance, he could see the still lovelier Parthenon, set like a priceless jewel on the Acropolis. Coming along the street around the foot of the Acropolis, he would see the black Nubian slaves, and maybe British ones also, waiting outside the theater of Dionysius, which was cut in the living rock on the south side of the hill and facing the distant sea. The chattering Athenian audience came pouring from the theater discussing the actors and the play. The slaves ran with their draped and gilded litters for the ladies. The long-robed priests, for whom the seventy marble seats in the front row were reserved, might be arguing with some Epicurean philosophers as to whether drama ought to reveal truth or should simply give pleasure. Doubtless they would come to the conclusion that, in this great play of escalus which they had watched, the author had given them both truth and pleasure. As Paul passed along, he saw many altars on which men left their offerings, this man in order that the god Mercury should protect him while traveling, or this mother that escalepius should make her sick boy well again, and that youth that Venus should give him success in love, or Diana bring skill in hunting, or Minerva grant courage in war, and Paul saw one strange altar on which was carved to an unknown god. When Paul climbed the steep way up the one approach to the Acropolis, and passed through gate after gate on to the shining summit, he was face to face with the loveliest building in the world, the Parthenon. It stood there looking out over Athens to the sea, perfect in its exquisite proportions, with its lovely pillars and shaded portico, and the marvelous sculptures of dancing youths and maidens, priests, warriors and horses, oxen and garlands, and within the Parthenon was the gigantic statue of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, whose special care was thought to be over this city named after her. Paul felt a stirring within him as he looked on the altars of Athens and thought of the countless gods whom the people worshipped, for he knew that in truth all the power that the people believed to dwell in Athena and Escalapius and the other gods really belonged only to the one god whose image could not be carved with hands, who is wisdom and health and love and justice. This was the most learned city in all the world, yet Paul knew with a clear flaming certainty that he had a truth which contained and surpassed all the truth its scholars knew. He could see that what these Athenian worshippers of three thousand idols desired to know was life, yes to know the real truth and the way to live, and Paul was quite sure that Jesus Christ was the way and the truth and the life. Paul went down from the Acropolis and past the sacred rock cleft in which the Furies dwelt, went by the holy place under which Agamemnon's bones lay buried, beyond the hill where the High Council of the Areopagus sat in judgment, and walked under a beautifully carved marble archway into the Agara, the marketplace. The hum of busy voices fell on Paul's ears, men chaffering over the price of their wares, selling and buying fish from the Aegean Sea, woolen stuff from the Greek hill villages, purple cloths from tire, earthen jars and pitchers and dishes, lovely glass vessels from Sidon. There were cheese and olives, bread and wine for the housewives, for the students of the university, parchment and vellum and wax tablets. On a raised platform, slaves lounged in the sun, while the auctioneer knocked them down to the highest bidder. On one side of the marketplace Paul saw a group of men in long white robes fringed with purple and blue and yellow, talking in a secluded shaded place where there were no booths. Some of the elder men rested on a marble seat, younger men stood listening. The younger men were students at this University of Athens. They had come from all over the empire to get wisdom, men from Rome and Corinth, Ephesus and Tarsus, Antioch and Damascus. One or another of them would occasionally, after a ripple of laughter had gone round the group, make a note of a smart saying with his pointed ivory stylus on his wax tablet. Paul went near to the group and listened. They were arguing, using long difficult words about very high thoughts. Some of them said that God was simply all the life that there is in trees and animals and men, all the force that drives the winds and the seas. The world that we see is the garment of that serene, unfeeling power which is God. Man should aim, these stoics said, at reaching a like serene freedom from feelings of mere pain or pleasure. Paul knew their arguments very well. Indeed, he probably knew all about them when he was quite young in his native place, Tarsus. For in Tarsus' University itself, this way of looking at things, called the stoic philosophy, had been taught for many years. Our teacher, Epicurus, teaches us, one of the speakers on the other side might say, that we must first believe that God is a being blessed and immortal according to the notion of a God commonly held amongst man, and so believing you will not say anything about him that is contrary to everlasting life and to happiness. Men should aim not to be above feeling, as you stoics say, but to take pleasure, not in wild excesses, but in quietly seizing each moment and pressing out all the happiness that it can give. Then the Epicurian ceased, and a stoic asked him clever questions that would lead him into contradicting himself if he was not very careful. This way of arguing by asking questions they called the Socratic Method, because a very great thinker, Socrates, had used it in Athens centuries before Paul was there.  He had not listened long before he dropped a question that made the Greek debaters turn to see whose was this new voice. His eyes flashed keenly as he met and answered the questions that came back swiftly to him. We do not know exactly what he said to them, but he certainly spoke about Jesus and his resurrection, and argued that Jesus alone really told men the nature of God for which they were groping. They saw from his face and his clothes that he was not a university man. Some thought he must be just a half-educated crank from the provinces. What would this smatterer say? sneered one. He seems to be talking about some foreign gods, said another. They felt superior to this outsider, but their curiosity got the better of them, for the Athenians loved nothing better than to hear the latest craze from the east. So the leaders decided to take him from the clamor of the marketplace to a quieter spot, where Paul could explain the whole of his new teaching without distraction. Calm, they said, as they took hold of his arm and led him away. Let us know what is this new teaching that you are talking about, for you have brought some strange things to our ears. We wish to know, therefore, just what these things mean. They led him toward a long-sloping rocky hill called the Areopagus, a few hundred yards away to the south of the marketplace. In the side of the hill and facing the marketplace, a little plateau had been cut in the living rock. It was in the shadow comparatively early in the day and was quiet. Here the men paused, Athenian and foreign, grouped round, stylus in hand to listen, and behind them the crowd of inquisitive loiterers waited, listening. Among them was a woman from a foreign land whose name was Demaris. Paul had had little time to prepare what he would say to this learned and critical audience, but his brain went swift and short to the very thing that would grip their attention and make them feel that he understood their minds. Men of Athens, he began, I see at every turn that you are unusually given to the worship of deities. As I walked along and scanned the objects of your worship, I actually came upon an altar bearing this inscription, to an unknown god. What you worship in ignorance I proclaim to you, God, he continued, appealing to the belief of the Stoics and Epicureans, the God who made the world and all things in it, he, as Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in shrines made with human hands, Paul would point to the lovely temple of Theseus that's shown in the sunlight on a hill beyond the marketplace. He is not served by human hands, continued Paul, as if he needed anything, for it is he who gives life and breath and all things to all men. He has made of one nature all nations of men to live over the earth, fixing their allotted periods and the boundaries of their abodes, meaning them to seek for God on the chance of finding him in their groping for him. But indeed, this God is close to each one of us, for it is in him that we live and move and exist, as some of your own poets have said, for his very offspring we are. The wise Athenians must have raised their eyes in surprise to hear this Jew quoting their own poets. Paul may well have learned at Tarsus this maxim of the poem from which he quoted. For Cleontes, who was a Stoic philosopher, had more than three hundred years earlier written a poem which was known wherever the Greek language was spoken. It ran, God most glorious, called by many a name, Nature's great king, through endless years the same, Omnipotent, who by thy just decree controlst all, hail Zeus, for unto thee Behoves it mortals in all lands to call, we are thine offspring. After all, we can imagine some of them saying, this Jew has more in him than we had expected. He knows something of our philosophy and our poets. Paul went on with the men sitting chin in hand listening. Well, as the race of God, we ought not to imagine that the divine nature resembles gold or silver or stone, the graven product of human art and invention. The ages of such ignorance got overlooked, but he now charges men that they all everywhere do repent in as much as he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world justly by a man whom he has destined for this, and he has given proof of this to all by raising him from the dead. Bleh! absurd! cried some of his hearers, stung into interruption by the mad notion, as it seemed to them, of anyone who had once been dead ever being raised to life again, and some of them laughed at him. One man, however, a member of the court called after the Areopagus, sat quiet, meditating. His name was Dionysius. He saw at a glance how true Paul's speech had been, up till those strange last words. Might not that tale, too, of Paul's about the resurrection be true? After all, if God made men, surely he could bring one again from the dead. The meeting broke up, and the men strolled back to the agorah with some joking word about wasting time on the mad ideas of a Jew whose speech they would forget in a week. But that speech is now the most famous in all history, while the very names of those men are forgotten, except the one who was now waiting to speak with Paul. I would like to hear more of this teaching, said Dionysius the Areopagite. In the background, the woman Demaris, also lingered, wishing to know more from Paul's lips. These two, with some others, sat with Paul while he, with all his soul in his words, poured out the story of how God had shown his love to the whole world by giving his son Jesus to live and love and die for men, and had shown that Jesus was indeed his son and the true Savior of men by raising him from the grave. At last Paul's time was up. He had come in August and it was still early autumn. His stay had measured only weeks, nor had he been persecuted, but the voice called him onward from the icy flippancy of Athens, telling him he could do better work in another place. He girt his tunic about his loins and grasping his stick once more made his way down the long street and out through the perious gate, until the waters of the harbor were at his feet. He boarded one of the many boats going westward up the gulf to Synchria, the eastern landing-place of Corinth. And men today do not judge Paul with the sneering judgment that the wise men of Athens passed upon him. They rather judge the Athenians of that day by their failure to know the supreme greatness of the hero and saint who now left their gates forever. Of all the men who ever spoke in Athens the greatest were Socrates and Paul. Athens slew Socrates by poison. It froze Paul out with a laugh. Gulf past Salamis Island toward Synchria. As she ran westward and the day wore on, the purple mountains drew closer to the gulf, till the waters lapped the feet of the hills. Paul, as he stood at the bow, gazing toward the now setting sun, could see the stone piers of Synchria harbor, backed by the busy port town, and, as they drew still nearer, he could catch, beyond the town itself, the gleam of marble temples through the trees. The boat threaded its way through the shipping of the port, where Paul could hear the songs and the shouting of the sailors, black sailors from the Nile, and swore the men out of Spain, with Phoenicians, Syrians from Antioch and men of Tarsus and Rhodes and Ephesus. The whole port was alive with movement and sound, the thud of sacks thrown down on the wharves from the ship's holds, the endless processions of men with jars of oil on their shoulders, passing over the gangways, the grunting camels and the donkeys being loaded with corn and wine and cheese and silks. Synchria was one of the busiest harbors in the world, for it was the gateway from the east to Corinth and along the gulf of Corinth to Italy and all the west. But every large ship that came must unload at Synchria, so that the camels and asses and the bullock wagons might carry the goods across the nine miles of Isthmus that lay between the two gulfs. Smaller boats were often not unloaded, but were dragged over rollers across the land all day by slaves, and then slipped into the gulf on the other side. Paul landed at the harbor, and next morning took the crowded road for Corinth, across the Isthmus over which the caravans were bearing the loads from port to port. On this Isthmus, at the place where it is little more than four miles wide, the great Isthmian games were held, which drew over thirty thousand Greeks from all the country round, from the towns along the two gulfs and from the mountain lands of Greece, from Parnassus and Helicon and Delphi. The finest athletes from the different cities came together there every two years for these great Isthmian games. They wrestled and boxed with iron-studded leather straps over their knuckles. They fought lions from Africa and tigers from the east simply armed with shield and sword. They flung spears and threw quartz and ran foot races. Amid the frenzied cheers of the Greeks, the charioteers drove their quivering, galloping horses round the stadium. The prize to each winner was simply a wreath cut by a priest with a golden knife from trees in the sacred grove near the sea where the Temple of Neptune stood. When the proud winner went back to his little city among the hills, with his withering wreath in his hand, the council and the people would gather to cheer and wave ribbons in the air, and a sculptor would make a statue of the winner in marble and set it up in the city square, and on the head of the statue a wreath was carved. Paul, passing on, went through the Sincrea Gate of the city of Corinth and straight along the street till he came out into the open market where men sold goods from all over the world of that day. The market and the streets were not old, for the old city had been wiped out by a conqueror centuries earlier. But Julius Caesar, a short time before he started the conquest of Britain, and some fifty years before Paul was born, had rebuilt Corinth. The city was now immensely rich, for the merchants of Rome and Poteoli, Brundisium and Spain, brought their wares to Corinth in exchange with the merchants of Philippi and Thessalonica, Ephesus, Smyrna and Rhodes, and on all the goods that changed hands, Corinth itself levied toll. The sound of the click and hiss and clump of a hand loom caught Paul's ear. He looked into a little open shop and saw a man of his own handicraft making tent cloth. In the tent maker's booth lay ropes and lengths of cloth, poles and pegs. Paul saw at once that the tent maker was a Jew. He stopped and spoke to him, saying that he himself was a tent maker. My name is Aquila, the Jew told him as he paused in his work. I have come with my wife Priscilla from Rome. We have been driven from Rome with many, many more by the emperor, for Claudius has passed an edict exiling all Jews from Rome on pain of death. My old home was far away in Pontus. Then Paul would tell Aquila that his home was away in Cilicia. Pontus lay far north of Cilicia on the shores of the Black Sea. Aquila invited Paul into his house. Paul went into the shadow of the dark workshop and into the living room behind where Priscilla was at her housework. The three soon became fast friends and it was settled that Paul should live with them while he was at Corinth. Paul set to work with needle and thread upon the heavy hair cloth, making tents so that he should be earning his own living. At night when work was done Aquila would tell Paul about Corinth, and sometimes Paul would go out in the day to see the city. Close behind Corinth he saw, overshadowing the city, the great cone of the acrochorinth, a hill that leapt sheer out of the plain, a thousand feet in height. Up the one steep path along the western face of the hill, men climbed to the wall-surrounded citadel at the top. Like a crown on the height itself stood a beautiful temple of Venus, attended by a thousand priestesses, dressed in white robes, yet living unclean lives that spread evil through all the city beneath. If Paul climbed the steep path to that hill-top, he would see looking east the roofs of Sancria and the blue gulf running down to Athens, while to the west the lovely gulf of Corinth ran out to the Adriatic Sea and toward Italy itself, and to the north rose the beautiful mountains on the blue haze across the gulf. On the Sabbath Paul and his friends went down the busy streets, for Corinth had no rest day, and into the meeting-house, passing under the lintel on which synagogue of the Hebrews was carved in Greek. Paul would be received with great respect by the elders and people, for he was a rabbi who had graduated at Jerusalem at the feet of the great Gamalio. There was a stirrer, however, in the synagogue when this newcomer, with his swift speech and passionate words, told these people who waited for the Messiah that already the Christ had been born and had died the death of a felon on a Roman cross and had been raised again. We are not told what he said to them, only that he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath. One thing we know that he had made up his mind that the method he used at Athens was not the one for him to use here, for as he wrote to them, I did not come to you with clever speech or with wisdom. I made up my mind not to know anything among you, except Jesus Christ and him crucified. The Jews in the synagogue muttered uneasily at this man who dared to say that a man who was nailed to a Roman gallows could ever be the Son of God. About that time two men, a young Greek who, however, had a Jewish tinge in his hair and face, and an older bearded man came walking into Corinth. Paul's eyes lighted with joy as he saw them. They were his comrades, Silas and Timothy, who had hurried down from Macedonia, Timothy from Thessalonica and Silas from Berea, to Athens, and had followed him on to Corinth. Paul simply overflowed with joy when he heard that persecution utterly failed to shake the courage of the Christians in Thessalonica, and he sat down at once and dictated a letter to them. Timothy would sit with a long scroll of papyrus unrolled, writing down in Greek letters. This is a part of what he wrote. When Timothy came just now from you to us, and brought us glad news of your faith and love, and that you have good remembrance of us all the time, wishing us greatly to see us as we desire to see you, then, brothers, we were made happy over you. For now we live if you stand fast in the Lord. How can we express our thanks to God again for you, for all the joy that makes us glad for your sakes before our God? Love one another. Study to be quiet.  Do not do evil for evil to any man. Paul now seemed a flame as never before with the good news that he had to tell to Corinth. Like a mountain torrent in full spate his words would not wait, nor could he brook delay. He stood before the synagogue and cried to them with arms out stretched. We come as ambassadors for Christ as though God sent us to win you to him. We come showing ourselves to be his ministers, patiently in suffering, in poverty, in distresses, beaten, imprisoned and mobbed, laboring, watching, going hungry, by pureness, by knowledge, by the Holy Spirit, by love without fraud, by the armor of justness on the right arm and on the left, men sorrowful yet always full of joy, poor and yet making many others rich, having nothing and yet possessing everything. He looked round on them. The chief man in the synagogue, Crispus, was looking at him with eyes glowing as though all the world had become new. But others stood up and with angry voices asked how long they must listen to this blasphemous fellow, who declared a mere peasant criminal was the Son of God. Paul's blood was up. He had given them their chance of knowing the truth. They refused. And in his mind there came the picture of the Corinth outside the synagogue, out there under the winter sky of Greece, the Corinth with its theaters and stadium, its temples and markets, its wild and wanton evil. Then with a rush the intolerable craving shivers throughout me like a trumpet call.  Paul rose and loosening his robe, he took its skirt in both hands and shook it at them as though he shook the dust of the place from him. And with passion in his voice he cried, Your blood, be upon your own heads, I am clean, from this hour onward, I go to the peoples. The contemptuous shaking out of his tunic infuriated the Jews, who ground their teeth on him as he went out of the synagogue, never to return. Close by the synagogue lived a man named Titius Justice, a Roman who had become a fellow worshiper with the Jews, but now shared Paul's faith. Justice and Paul, being both Roman citizens, would have a fellow feeling, so when Christmas the chief man of the synagogue came out with Paul, they went into Justice's house next door. Here Paul gathered those who wished to hear him, and many of the Corinthians who would never have appeared inside a synagogue, came to listen and believed on Jesus Christ. Yet Paul, as he thought of the anger his protest must have provoked, wondered if it would not be better to remain quiet for a little, for he now knew that the Jews would be sure to set up a ferment against him, as they had done in Lystra, Philippi, Thessalonica, and indeed all along his path. When Paul lay on his mat bed, wondering what would happen next to him, there came a vision in his sleep. These words came to him in a vision as from Jesus Christ to himself. Do not be afraid, speak on. Do not hold your peace, I am with you. No man shall hurt you, for I have many people in this city." So Paul boldly went on with his speaking. We know some of the words that he said, for he wrote afterward in one of his letters to the Christians at Corinth. If ye keep in memory what I preached to you, first and foremost that Christ died for our sins and was buried and rose again the third day and was seen of Peter and then of the twelve, and last of all he was seen by me also. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore my loved brothers, stand, stand fast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.  The spirit of God lives in you as in a temple.   Do you not know, he said to these men who had from the time they were boys been familiar with the Isthmian games, that they which run in a race all run, but one wins the prize. So run that you may be victors, and every man entering for an athletic contest goes into thorough training. Now they do this to win a wreath that will wither, but we for a wreath that cannot fade. I therefore run not as a man who does not know the goal. I box not like a man beating the air. No, I buffet my body to be master of it. The more vigorously Paul spoke to the people of Corinth and the greater the number of men and women who came to him, the more furious did the Jews become. But they seemed to be unable to do anything. They would, like the Jews in Philippi, have trumped up some evidence that Paul was teaching people to break the Roman law, but probably the governor of Corinth, which was capital of all Achaia, i.e. South Greece, was friendly to Paul and perhaps knew, it may be through justice, that Paul was a loyal freeborn Roman citizen. At last this governor was recalled to Rome and a new proconsul was appointed, Galio, the brother of that famous author Seneca, who became private tutor to young Nero. The Jews made up their mind to try now, once and for all, to get Paul stopped in his work. The proconsul sat at certain hours on his ivory sedile of office on the marbled deus of justice for any to bring their case before him. So the Jews seized Paul and drew him along to the tribunal. Galio looked up as the rabble of Jews came crowding in breathlessly. What is it? he asked. This fellow, said their leader, probably Sostanes, the new chief man of the Jewish synagogue, pointing to Paul, is persuading men to worship God contrary to the law. Swiftly Paul stepped forward ready to speak when Galio with lifted hand called for silence and said, You Jews, there would be some sense in my entertaining your charge if it were a matter of breaking the Roman law. But if this is a mere question of debate and words between you and only concerns your Jewish law, look to it yourselves. I will be no judge of things that do not concern me. Go away. Galio signaled to his lictors to drive the crowd of Jews back and they began to hustle them away. The circle of Greeks who had been watching on the fringe of the crowd and who had no love to spare for the Jews, no sooner saw the turn events had taken than they set on the Jews and gripping hold of Sostanes their leader, they thwacked him with staves right in front of Galio. But Galio passed to the next case and did not lift a finger to protect Sostanes.