Acts xvii. 26-31.
“And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent; because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.”
The picture of St. Paul at Athens, which is given us in the Acts of the Apostles, has been filled up with many lights and shades by the imagination of the reader. But these are the great outlines which cannot be effaced. He was grieved in spirit when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry; he disputed in the market-place with philosophers of different sects; the curiosity of the people to hear some new thing would not suffer him to abstain from a general statement of his object in coming to Greece, if he had desired to be silent; he did actually deliver the most elaborate of all his discourses on Mars’ Hill.
What that discourse would have been if he had adopted the notion respecting the right method of spreading Christianity, which is most prevalent and admired amongst us in this day, we can have no difficulty in conjecturing. He would have begun with offering proofs that all other nations had been left to follow their own courses, unguided and untended, while his had been the depositary of a divine communication. There was evidence,—he would say, not demonstrative, but sufficient to satisfy men who were alive to their own perils and their own ignorance, that the Ruler of the world had given intimations concerning His will to the children of Abraham. These intimations, so far as they concerned His nature and purposes, could not be called strictly true for men had no faculties wherewith to receive the knowledge of an infinite Being. But they were such approximations to truth as it was desirable for men to receive. Precepts founded upon them had proved very beneficial in the practice of life. Amongst these precepts was one against the worship of graven images. No reason, of course, was given for it. How can an infinite Being be expected to give reasons for His acts? How could they be made intelligible to men if they were given? But supposing the Lawgiver possessed infinite power to enforce His decrees, was it safe to set any of them aside?
Then proceeding from the people to the learned, he would show triumphantly how every speculation respecting the gods had proved abortive and ridiculous. He would show that by the very conditions of man’s being it must be so; that the dreams of men respecting a Nature so immeasurably transcending theirs, so altogether different from theirs, could have no counterpart in reality. Of course he would deal his blows with perfect impartiality. This would be aimed at the self-confidence of the Epicurean denier, that at the scepticism of the Academic, a third at the physico-theology and stern ethics of the Stoic. If there was any departure from this rule, it would be in the case of some particularly earnest inquirer. It must be a greater victory for the Gospel to expose his blunders and failures, than those of a mere sophist or professional disputer. Then, having cleared the ground of all other opinions and speculations, with what satisfaction would he commend his own religion to the acceptance of the multitude! He would represent it as milder, less national, less dogmatic, than the Jewish from which it had sprung. He would appeal to the common sense of the Athenians whether, in the utter ignorance of divine things in which they were and must be, the prudent course was not to accept a faith which promised inconceivable rewards to its champions, which denounced utter ruin against those who rejected it.
I can conceive only two reasons which can be assigned by those who approve this kind of teaching, why it should not have been St. Paul’s. One is, that he was not learned enough to know the opinions of sages, or not logical enough to produce the overwhelming argument against them. To such an objection I merely reply, that I presume St. Paul to have been sent forth with such weapons as were fitted for the work he had to do; if they think otherwise, they should say so boldly. The other is, that such language might have exposed the speaker to a storm of Greek indignation. But St. Paul, according to the opinion of him we have been wont to entertain, was a brave man, whose testimony would not have been more stern when he was in security than when he was in danger. Nor am I prepared to admit that the kind of discourse I have imagined, would have been more perilous to the Apostle, than those which had drawn down upon him the fanatical rage of Jews at Thessalonica and Berea. If his main object was to proselytize for a certain religion, I am not sure that it might not have induced more Athenians to join him than Dionysius and Damaris. For it would have appealed to passions which St. Paul in his actual speech did not invoke. Epicureans and Academics would have seen great plausibility in the denunciations of the popular worship. Each would have welcomed the sneers at the philosophical system of the other. St. Paul’s own countrymen—if any were present—would have recognized in him a champion, not an enemy, of their exclusiveness.
But let us consider now, not what St. Paul might have said, but what he did say, to the people of this idolatrous, philosophical, news-loving city.
I. “God hath made of one blood all nations of men, to dwell upon all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” This was the lesson which the Apostle had learnt by earnest meditation on the calling of his own nation, by his study of the Law and the prophets. God hath formed the nations of one blood, of one family. God hath watched over the bounds, the circumstances, the destiny, of each nation upon the face of the earth. The Jewish nation had existed to be a witness for this universal fellowship among the nations. It had existed as a witness against that which tended to divide them and set them at war. It had existed also as a witness for the special work of each one of those bodies which had its definite geographical limits, its sympathies of kindred and race. It existed to say, “The one living and true God has created you all to be one. The one living and true God has assigned you your tasks. He has never left you alone. No one fact of your history has lain beyond the circle of His providence. No one thought has been awakened in your minds without His teaching and guidance. I, the Jew, the child of Abraham, stand forth to make that claim on behalf of the God whom I worship. I stand forth solemnly to repudiate the doctrine that any nation whatever has a right to deny connection with any other. I, the Jew, the child of Abraham, stand forth to declare that you, the men of Athens, have had a divine vocation, that the God of all has appointed you to play a distinct and a very remarkable part in His great drama. I declare that you are utterly wrong when you affirm that the great deeds of your fathers are to be ascribed to them, not to Him; that your institutions, your freedom, your wisdom, are human, so as not to be also in the highest sense divine.” This is a wonderful message, very unlike that one which we heard just now. But I ask you to read St. Paul’s own words attentively, and see whether they express less than my paraphrase of them; whether they do not express far more.
II. But why has God chosen out the particular nations? Why has He ordered the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation? Here is St. Paul’s answer: “That they may seek the Lord, if haply they may feel after Him, and find Him.” According to this explanation of an inspired Apostle, it was God himself who stirred up the thoughts and inquiries of men about His Being and Nature. Nay, every circumstance of their outward position was devised and ordained expressly for the purpose of giving this impulse, this direction, to their thoughts. Certainly, if we believed that, many puzzles in history oppressive puzzles to those who read it as the history of their fellow-beings—would be solved. One sees how the soil and climate, the temperament of peculiar races, their apprehensions concerning law and government, their internal struggles, their relations with neighbours, have modified all their thoughts and feelings; but especially their apprehensions of the invisible world and of divine powers. If one might assure oneself that a soil fertile or rugged, a climate genial or cruel, the need of rule, the need of freedom, the activity which led to wars, the deeper craving for peace, all had been instruments of giving them some glimpse of a Guide and Ruler,—had led them to grasp at something which is really in Him, some side of His character, some purpose of His will,—the past would become an illuminated, not an utterly dark scroll. How one apprehension should become feeble, distorted, how others should be rejected for its sake,—how when others asserted their right and necessity, all polytheistic confusions and contradictions should arise, how they might become fixed in the mind by selfish fears,—how they would be perpetuated by dishonest priests seeking to keep up an impression of their own power, confounding that with the unseen power, this we can understand without much difficulty from later experience. The hard question is, What was the starting-point of those thoughts? and that other, How were they kept alive in men’s minds, when so much in nature and themselves was confuting them? To these questions St. Paul gives his decided reply. This feeling after God,—which has been discovered, under some condition or other, in all tribes of the earth, which has had the most marked tokens of being a human necessity, and yet which a thousand tendencies in man have threatened with death as well as with derangement,—this the Creator Himself has called forth and sustained; without His first word it could not have been,—without His continual presence and inspiration it must have ceased altogether.
III. Bold as this statement is,—strange as it must sound to those who have persuaded themselves that the method of defending the principles of the Old Testament is to treat all heathen apprehensions of God as merely traditive or merely imaginary,—it is less startling than the words which follow them. We are so familiar with them,—they have so leavened the dialect of Christendom,—that we do not consider how awful they are in themselves, how much more remarkable they are for the place in which they were uttered, how they contradict some of our most approved religious and philosophical maxims. “Though He is not far from every one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being.” Oh, how often has the wish presented itself to many of us that we had never heard these words in our childhood!—we think they would burst upon us with such overpowering strength if we were listening to them for the first time. It is an ungrateful and a foolish wish. We have been influenced by them all our lives through, in ways we cannot conceive, and shall not know till the day that discovers all things. We might not have been more thrilled by them than any of the crowd were who stood about St. Paul in the Areopagus; they may break now through all the frost of custom; they may come on us like guilty things surprised by a presence that we have forgotten. But is there not something in them which we shrink from because we think it may mislead us into a dangerous Pantheism? Do we not say to ourselves, “That is an especial peril of this time. The passage is no doubt true, as it occurs in the Bible. But since it is liable to be perverted, we had better dwell upon some different announcement, however suitable that may have been for other ages, which were prone to another kind of error.” Now consider. If there was a city in all the world which was exposed to the assaults of Pantheism, not in some other age, but in the very age when the Apostle visited it,—that city was assuredly Athens. Each form of idolatry, each form of speculation, was bearing towards this gulf; each, as it became weak, was sure to be absorbed in it. If St. Paul had no divine intimation of the fact, his discourses with the philosophers in the market-place must have made him aware of it. He must have seen it in the very inscription which was the text of his discourse. The dedication to the Unknown God,—whether it only indicated a desire in a time of pestilence to invoke all imaginable or possible assistance,—whether it expressed a sense of some Being who could not be represented as demons or demigods were represented, equally declared that the mind of the nation was aiming at an all-inclusive worship, and that as one definite object after another lost its hold upon them, more and more would be drawn into a lazy acknowledgment of the vague and indefinite. With this conviction full on his mind, St. Paul uses the words, “He is not far from every one of us; for in Him we live and move and are.”
I conclude, then, that St. Paul regarded this statement as the one great protest against Pantheism, and all other evil tendencies to which the Athenian was liable; a protest against it, because it was the full and distinct assertion of the truth which was underlying Pantheism, and which Pantheism was perverting; a protest against it, because no proclamation was so certain, if it was received, to inspire men with awe of that Personal Being whom Pantheism was denying. The Apostle then is the standing witness for the maxim which is applicable to all places and all times, that you can only combat any prevalent error by seeking for the divine principle of which it is the counterfeit. Till you do that, your cleverest scoffs and reasonings will all serve to strengthen, not to abate its virulence.
IV. At last the Apostle approaches one of the teachers whom we may suppose he wishes to confute. He speaks, indeed, not of a philosopher, but of a poet; but then poets in the latter days were fond of enunciating philosophical sentiments, as in the earlier days they had done so much to build up the popular mythology. And here is a sentiment of Aratus which may be turned to either account. It may justify the old Homeric notion of men having a divine parentage; it may assert the proud notion of sages, that men by wisdom can make themselves gods; “For we also are His offspring.”
Surely, it might be said, the sentiment is all the more alarming because the singular number is used instead of the plural. To speak of a son of the Gods—of Apollo or Venus, was merely to use a phrase which most in that time would have felt to be a fable, or would have explained as a metaphor. To speak of His offspring was to mount into a higher region, and to assert for the poor frivolous people who cared only to tell or hear some new thing, that their origin was divine. Could you believe it?—St. Paul adopts the phrase in this aggravated sense; he indorses the words of the poet; he applies them not to his own countrymen, or some portion of his own countrymen, but to his heathen audience. He does not speak of some excepted persons among them; some who had arrived by any process at higher intuitions. He resorts to none of the qualifications which the writer of the words would probably himself have adopted. He looks out upon the jeering, laughing mass about him, and says, “We—you and I—also are His offspring; the offspring of that Unknown God, that God who made the heavens and the earth, and all things therein, whom I have been declaring to you.”
V. He does not stop here. He builds an argument upon this mighty assumption. It is the argument against that idolatry which had pressed so heavily upon his spirit. Upon it he rests the soundness and reasonableness of the Second Commandment. “Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.” Do not say that this was an additional motive which he urges for their abandoning the tradition of their fathers, the habit of their city. It is the only motive. He cannot urge them to make that change which involves such a convulsion in the whole moral being, which cuts asunder so many links of old affection, if the doctrine of their poet is not true, if they have not a right to claim God as related to them, —God as, in the strictest, fullest sense, their Father. I say again, in the strictest, fullest sense; not in some vague sense, which is indeed Pantheistical, a sense which represents Him as the Father of all cattle and trees and flowers, and therefore their Father. The argument would be utterly worthless and contemptible if that were his meaning. They might make the Godhead in the likeness of any object in nature,—they might mould Him according to their conceptions of any of those objects,—if that were all. It was because He was the Father of them, the Father of their spirits,—because they were spiritual beings created in His spiritual likeness, created to feel after Him and find Him,—it was therefore that the conceiving Him under any of these notions of theirs, the casting Him in any material shape, was so degrading and abominable. The whole burning indignation of the Jew against the gods of the hills and the groves comes forth in this assertion, which is nevertheless so full of tenderness for every heathen, and which could only have been uttered by one who believed that God had loved the whole world, and had sent His Son to take upon Him the nature of the dweller in Athens as much as of the dweller in Jerusalem.
VI. The tenderness to heathens,—the justification of God’s ways to men in all ages,—the assertion of the ground upon which he had affirmed all to be of one flesh and blood,—comes out fully in the next passage of the discourse. “And the times of this ignorance God winked at, but now He commandeth all men everywhere to repent.” I will not debate about the force of the word which we translate winked at, or inquire whether any better expression might have been found. No doubt it might have been an advantage to preserve the sentence in St. Paul’s own form, by using a participle in the first clause. But at least we may be sure that this sentence does not contradict the Apostle’s previous assertion, that God had not overlooked the different nations of the earth, so as not to order the bounds of their habitations, and to direct the search after Him; on the other hand, that it is incompatible with the headlong and ungodly conclusion which divines have often sanctioned respecting the condition of the heathen world, and the amount of guilt which was involved in its idolatry. St. Paul assuredly does not tell the Athenians what Tertullian’s higher inspiration and later revelation enabled him to proclaim with absolute certainty, that their fathers were doomed to hopeless perdition. That opinion which (it is said) urged the honest barbarian monarch to refuse baptism, was not thrust before the Greek; an entirely different one was suggested to him. But the message to the men of that generation was not less strong and decisive, because it involved no judgment upon previous generations. “God commandeth you to repent.” “Since by me He tells you that the words of your poet are fulfilled,—that He has sent His Son to claim you as His offspring, by me He commands you to cast aside the gods of gold and silver, made by art and man’s device; by me He bids you to turn round to Him and own Him as your Father. But not only by me. The message is to your consciences. The message comes straight from Him to them. He commands repentance. He gives repentance to all that will have it. If you are conscious of separation from Him who is so near to you, He destroys the separation. If you have felt after Him, and not been able to find Him, He will reveal Himself to you. The message is to all men everywhere. The separate gods, the material gods, shall not for ever tear the nations asunder. All in all nations are invited to become brothers with each other, by taking up their position as offspring of the same Father.”
VII. But is not that call to repentance fortified by a threat of punishment? If it were, I should produce it, and dwell upon it; for I do not think we can warn people too much of the heavy punishment which they bring upon themselves, by continuing servants of material, sensual, unreal things, and by not taking up their rights as children of a gracious and righteous Father. But though I might like the word if it was in St. Paul’s discourse, I cannot introduce it when it is not there. St. Paul speaks of judgment, not of punishment. He speaks of “a day in which God will judge the world by that Man whom He hath ordained, whereof He hath given assurance in that He hath raised Him from the dead.” I am bound to say that the two modes of speaking are wide as the poles asunder, however in our carelessness we may confound them. To proclaim a judgment, is to proclaim an accurate discrimination of acts and characters. To proclaim a judgment of God, is to proclaim that He will discriminate who knows characters and acts perfectly. To proclaim a judgment of God by that Man whom He has ordained, is to declare that He will apply to men that kind of measure which the Son of Man applied when He was upon earth. Now He said, “It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for Chorazin and Bethsaida.” He preached a gospel to publicans and harlots. He said, “Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees.” He said to His disciples, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” In the face of such language, how could St. Paul dare to stand up among the Athenians, and tell them that either they or their fathers would be cast off by God, who had not cast them off yet? How could he help telling them that there would assuredly be a judging and sifting of all nations and all men, inasmuch as the Son of Man, the risen Head of Nations and of Men, had come to bind them all to God,—to bind them all to each other? How could he help saying, “He whom you have been seeking for,—He who has been seeking for you,—will be revealed in the fulness of His glory. He will know what each nation has done in fulfilment of the purpose for which it was called out. He will know what each man has done to fulfil the purpose for which he was sent into the world. He will know who have followed the light which He gave them, and sought for Him; who have loved darkness rather than light, and have chosen death. I, Paul, can pass no judgment upon you or any one. I judge not my own self. But I know that that judgment will be according to the truth. For He who is truth,—He who, dying and rising again, has manifested the truth to men,—will be manifested in every man’s conscience. Every eye shall see Him.”
My brethren, I have endeavoured in this sermon to set before you two methods of presenting the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ to men. I have not concealed from you—indeed you are all aware of it—that the first has very powerful supporters, that it puts itself forth as the logical, the safe, the orthodox method. I have been able to say nothing on behalf of the other, except that it was the method of that Apostle, who, as we affirm, was God’s instrument for causing His light to shine throughout the world. By the one course we silence objectors, joining, according to all precedents, in the same auto da fé, the representatives of the most diverse sects and schools, the most devout and the most scornful, the most earnest and the most frivolous. By the other, we claim all the most diverse sects and schools, the most devout and the most scornful, the most earnest and the most frivolous, as witnesses for the God and Father who would lead them all to His Son. By the one, we magnify immensely the skill of the particular dialectician who argues the case; we depress to the lowest point our common humanity. In the other, the man who pleads is nothing, but the race is glorified by its union with a crucified and ascended Lord. To the one method we are indebted for an exhibition of a vast amount of ingenious advocacy, of fine metaphysical reasoning; to the other we are indebted for the existence of a Christendom.
Such is the testimony of the past. How the future will speak we wait to learn. Nothing less is involved in the question, than whether the hundred and sixty millions in India shall be taught that all their mythology and all their philosophy is folly—or that God has sent His Son to claim them for His offspring; whether the masses of our own population who have been alienated from our Churches, shall be told that infidelity is false and foolish, because it holds out a hope that man may know something of the Infinite—or that God seeks that all should know Him, from the least to the greatest; whether each one of us shall accept every dogma of the Church and Bible because that is quite as likely to be true as anything else,—or shall continue to pray to Him who cannot be mocked, that He will give us in this world knowledge of His truth, and in the world to come life everlasting.