HIS OFFSPRING. (29) being then the offspring
OF GOD, WE OUGHT NOT TO THINK THAT THE DIVINE NATURE IS LIKE UNTO GOLD OR SILVER OR STONE, GRAVEN BY ART AND DEVICE OF MAN. (30) NOW THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE GOD OVERLOOKED, BUT AT PRESENT HE CHARGETH ALL MEN EVERY- WHERE TO REPENT, (31) INASMUCH AS HE HATH SET A DAY ON WHICH, IN the person of THE MAN WHOM HE HATH ORDAINED, HE WILL JUDGE THE WORLD IN RIGHTEOUSNESS ; AND HE HATH GIVEN ALL A GUAR- ANTEE BY RAISING HIM FROM THE DEATH." (32) AND WHEN THEY HEARD OF " RAISING FROM THE DEAD," SOME MOCKED, AND OTHERS SAID, " WE WILL HEAR THEE CONCERNING THIS YET AGAIN". (33) THUS PAUL WENT OUT FROM THE MIDST OF THEM. (34) BUT CERTAIN MEN CLAVE UNTO HIM AND BELIEVED ; AMONG WHOM ALSO WAS DIONYSIUS, A MEMBER OF THE COUNCIL, AND A WOMAN NAMED DAMARIS, AND OTHERS WITH THEM. (XVIII i) AND THEREAFTER HE LEFT ATHENS, AND WENT TO CORINTH.
The influence of Paul's Athenian surroundings may be traced in the " philosophy of history " which he sketches briefly in his address. In the Socratic position the virtue of " knowing " was too exclusively dwelt on, and in some of the earlier Platonic dialogues the view is maintained that virtue is knowledge and vice ignorance ; and Greek philosophy was never clear about the relation of will and permanent character to " knowing ". The Greek philo- sophers could hardly admit, and could never properly understand, that a man may know without carrying his knowledge into action, that he may refuse to know when
Sec 3. The Speech before the Council. 251
knowledge is within his grasp, and that the refusal exercises a permanent deteriorating influence on his character. Now Paul, in his estimate of the relation of the pre-Christian world to God, adopts a different position in the Athenian speech from that on which he afterwards took his stand in his letter to the Romans, I 19-32. In the latter place he recognises (to quote Lightfoot's brief analysis) that the pagan world " might have seen God through His works. They refused to see Him. They disputed, and they blinded their hearts. . . . There- fore they were delivered over to impurity. . . . They not only did those things ; but they took delight in those who did them." Here we have a full recognition of that fundamental fact in human nature and life, which iEschylus expressed in his greatest drama1 as a conception of his own differing from the common Greek view : " the impious act breeds more, like to its own kind : it is the nature of crime to beget new crime, and along with it the depraved audacious will that settles, like an irresistible spirit of ill, on the house ". But to the Athenians Paul says, " the times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked " ; and those times are alluded to as a period, when men were doing their best to find and to worship " God Unknown ". We must not, of course, demand that the entire theology of Paul should be compressed into this single address ; but yet there is a notable omission of an element that was unfamiliar and probably repugnant to his audience, and an
1 Agamemnon 730 f., a passage where the text is very uncertain and is terriDly maltreated by many editors : Paley turns it into an elaborate genealogical tree, while Wecklein conjectures away the depravation of the will, which is the key to the philosophic position of iEschylus.
252 Athens and Corinth. Chap. XI.
equally notable insistence on an element that was familiar to them. The Stoic ring in 23 f. is marked (pp. 147, 150).
One woman was converted at Athens ; and it is not said that she was of good birth, as was stated at Bercea and Thessalonica and Pisidian Antioch. The difference is true to life. It was impossible in Athenian society for a woman of respectable position and family to have any oppor- tunity of hearing Paul ; and the name Damaris (probably a vulgarism for damalis, heifer) suggests a foreign woman, perhaps one of the class of educated Hetairai, who might very well be in his audience.