[119] The Romans had a local police in Asia Minor, organised after the manner of our own local police. The chief of the police in each town was called the eirenarch, and was annually appointed by the proconsul. The Romans never made the mistake of placing the police in the hands of discontented subjects. See, on this curious topic, Le Bas and Waddington's _Voyage Archéologique_, t. iii., pp. 27 and 255.
Antioch was the centre whence Paul and Barnabas had issued forth to preach among the Gentiles, and to Antioch the apostles returned to cheer the Church with the narrative of their labours and successes, and to restore themselves and their exhausted powers with the sweetness of Christian fellowship, of brotherly love and kindness such as then flourished, as never before or since, amongst the children of men. Mission work such as St. Paul did on this great tour is very exhausting, and it can always be best performed from a great centre. Mission work, evangelistic work of any kind, if it is to be successful, makes terrible demands on man's whole nature, physical, mental, spiritual, and bodily. The best restorative for that nature when so exhausted is conversation and intercourse with men of like minds, such as St. Paul found when, returning to Antioch, he cheered the hearts and encouraged the hopes of the Church by narrating the wonders he had seen done and the triumphs he had seen won through the power of the Holy Ghost.[120]
[120] It has often been argued that the gift of tongues conferred by the Holy Ghost at Pentecost was not necessary, as Greek was universally spoken in Asia Minor. The use of the Lycaonian tongue at Lystra, even though a Roman colony, is an important fact on the other side. Mr. Ramsay, in his _Hist. Geog. of Asia Minor_, says; "Greek was not the popular language of the plateau, even in the third century after Christ; the mass of the people spoke Lycaonian and Galatian and Phrygian, though those who wrote books wrote Greek and those who governed spoke Latin." Cf. pp. 98, 99 of Mr. Ramsay's work, and p. 103 of the previous volume of this commentary. This subject of the original languages of Asia Minor and their survival to Christian times is an interesting and novel subject of study, for which materials are gradually accumulating. Thus the ancient Cappadocian language is discussed and a lexicon of it compiled in a monograph which appeared in the _Museum_ of the Evangelical school at Smyrna (1880-84), pp. 47-265. A large number of inscriptions in the Phrygian language have also been recovered. St. Paul, addressing the natives of the central plateau of Asia Minor in Greek, would have been like an Englishman preaching to the inhabitants of Wales or of Connemara in English. I never heard of any powerful results thus following, save in the case of Giraldus Cambrensis who tells us in his _Itinerary in Wales_ of the melting character of his own Latin sermons upon the Welsh people, though they did not understand a word of them. But then Giraldus was, to say the least, an imaginative historian.