The Great Awakening



of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; this her citizens alone could
rob themselves of; and this they were doing by wor-
shipping false gods, by following the precepts of an Epi-
curean philosophy, and by vain, wordy babbling. They
still thought Athens the abode of wisdom, and like chil-
dren of the great, still thought themselves the world's
great thinkers and philosophers because their fathers
had been; when as Paul puts it, 'They spent their time
in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new
thing;' piling words on words, metaphysical and un-
fathomable; and knowing nothing of the beginning of
wisdom, which is to fear the Lord and depart from evil.
   "Paul's biographer tells us that, 'His spirit was
stirred when he saw the city full of idols ;' gods of gold
and silver and stone, with even a shrine to THE UN-
KNOWN GOD.
   "Though such sights would have stimulated our curi-
osity, Paul had seen enough. There was work to do; he
could not remain silent; and spoke first in the synagogues
and the Agora, the market place. Then he was taken to
the Areopagus. North of the market place was the Are-
opagus or Mars Hill, a spur of the Acropolis which
towered three hundred feet higher and on which stood
the citadel, the Parthenon and the Temple of Winged
Victory. Whether Paul spoke from the top of Mars Hill
or the Athenian Council, which having in earlier days
met on the Areopagus and for that reason was so called,
is immaterial. We know he spoke to an Athenian audi-
ence, who were curious to hear from a Jewish Socrates,
a new man on a new subject, THE UNKNOWN GOD.
   "From the summary of his discourse we know it was
framed upon that pedagogical dictum that one should
proceed from the known to the unknown. That he talked
first of their gods, of their poets, of their belief that there



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