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your conduct towards the outside world, making your market to the full from the opportunity of this life. Let your con- versation be always gracious, seasoned with the salt and the refinement of delicacy, so as to know the suitable reply to make to every individual." As Curtius says, with his own grace and delicacy of perception, the Attic salt is here introduced into the sphere of Christian ethics. Polished courtesy of address to all, was valued by Paul as a distinct and important element in the religious life ; and he advised his pupils to learn from the surrounding world everything that was worthy in it, "making your market fully from the occasion" (a thought very inadequately expressed in the English Version, " redeeming the time," Col. IV 6). But it is in Phil. IV 8 that his spirit is expressed in the fullest and most graceful and exquisite form, " whatsoever is true, whatsoever is holy, whatsoever is just, whatsoever is pure, whatsoever is courteous, whatso- ever is of fine expression, all excellence, all merit, take account of these," wherever you find these qualities, notice them, consider them, imitate them.
It is not the Jew who speaks in these and many other sentences ; it is the educated citizen of the Roman world attuned to the most gracious and polished tone of educated society. We can faintly imagine to ourselves the electrical effect produced by teaching like this on the population of the Galatian cities, on a people who were just beginning to rise from the torpor of oriental peasant life and to appreciate the beauty of Greek thought and the splendour of Roman power. They found in Paul no narrow and hard bigot to dash from their lips the cup of education ; they found one who guided into the right channel all their aspirations after culture and progress, who raised them into a finer sphere of
1 50 St. Paul in Galatia. Chap. VI.
thought and action, who showed them what wealth of meaning lay in their simple speculations on the nature of God, who brought within their grasp all that they were groping after. We can imagine how sordid and beggarly were the elements that Jewish ritual had to offer them in comparison ; and we can appreciate the tone of Paul's letter to them, where his argument is to recall to their minds the teaching which he had given them on his former visit, to contrast with this freedom and gracious- ness and progress which he offered them the hard cut and dry life of Jewish formalism, and to ask who had bewitched them into preferring the latter before the former.1
It is remarkable that, alike at Lystra and Athens, there is nothing in the reported words of Paul that is overtly Christian, and nothing (with the possible exception of " the man whom he hath ordained ") that several Greek philosophers might not have said. That is certainly not accidental ; the author of Acts must have been conscious of it ; and it is a strong proof of their genuineness : no one would invent a speech for Paul, which was not markedly Christian. That remarkable omission is ex- plained by some commentators in the speech at Athens (<?.£-., Meyer- Wendt) as due to the fact that the speech was not completed ; and yet they acknowledge that the speech is a rounded whole, and that all the specially Pauline ideas are touched in it. To look for an addition naming the Saviour is to ignore the whole character of the speech and the scene where it was delivered.
The same mark of genuineness occurs in the central episode of the romance of Thekla, when we disentangle
1 Curtius's beautiful essay on Paulus in Athen has been constantly in the writer's mind in this and some other places.
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