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quent debasement of minds was frightful. In such a process, divers races lead downward to a common estate of moral putrefaction. Hardly do we find a parallel corruption in the basest of those Levantine marts, which we see given over to ideas the most base and selfish, and tied hand and foot by the intrigues of tyranny. It was an incredible jumble of buffoons and quacks, drolls and tricksters, wonder-workers, sorcerers, and juggling priests, a bazaar of races and ballet-dances, pomps and processions, Saturnalian feasts and Bacchanalian orgies, of luxury and lust unbridled, of fanatical outrages and superstitions the most pestilent, - in a word, of all the follies of the Oriental world. Obsequious to servility and then again basely ungrateful, at times cowards and then impudently rebellious, the population was thoroughly a specimen of hordes enslaved to Cæsarism, with no name to preserve or lose, without family character, without nationality, without country. Its grand Corso was a circus, through which flowed all day long the foul tides of a brute populace, light, volatile, always ready for an outbreak, sometimes clever enough, however, to be absorbed by diversions of music, by harlequins and their farces, by ambiguities, jokes, and impertinences of every sort. Cicero affects to credit them with a literary spirit, but it was a mere literature of spurious rhetoricians. The public shows were curious. The entire spectacle was made palatable to such a crowd by exhibitions of nudity; naked girls sharing in all the performances, with a mere fillet on their shameless foreheads. St. Chrysostom has denounced their favorite Maï

ouma, where troops of prostitutes showed themselves swimming in nakedness, with wanton display, in vast reservoirs filled with crystal waters. It was an inebriation of debauch, a revery of Sardanapalus, where all manner of indecencies, the worse for a certain simulation of refinement, were tumbled together pell-mell, in voluptuous contempt of ordinary pretences to propriety. Such was the Antioch which Juvenal, perhaps justly, accuses as the source of Roman degeneracy,- of those abominations which he deplores; which St. Paul, on widely different grounds, bewails, and to which, with inimitable condensation, he administers his scathing rebuke. Yes, indeed, says the satirist,1

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"The Syrian Orontes, at last, makes the Tiber the mouth of its vomit ;

Here comes, with its flutes and its strings, a jargon of tongues with all evils."

"The valley of the Orontes," says Renan," opening to the west, gives the neighbouring lake an outlet to the sea; or, to be more exact, enables the city to communicate with the vast world beyond, where the Mediterranean lies embedded, and where, through all the ages, it has afforded to the surrounding nations a neutral highway, and a bond of federal unity as well."

6. THE JEWISH ELEMENT.

To approach my subject, and to illustrate the decisive fact which fitted Antioch to become, through the Mediterranean, the starting-point for Christian

1 See Note P.

missions, I must strictly translate from Renan, and borrow his condensed and most suggestive paragraph about the Jews.

"They were among the most numerous of those colonies which the liberal policy of the Seleucids attracted to their metropolis. Their immigration started with Seleucus Nicator's grant of equal privileges with the Greeks. They had an ethnarch of their own, but not less were their relations very intimate with their Gentile co-citizens. Here, as at Alexandria, it is true, these relations were occasionally interrupted by strifes and mutual aggressions; but, on the other hand, they afforded a base for proselyting, which the Jews knew how to make very lively. More and more was polytheism proving itself unsatisfactory to all reflecting minds, and Greek philosophy in common with Judaism was attractive to those incapable of resting in the empty pomps of an effete mythology. The number of Jewish proselytes was considerable. Nicolas, a proselyte of Antioch, was enrolled among the seven deacons. Here were the germs of a harvest, which waited only for the day-beams of grace to blossom and bring forth fruits more beautiful than mankind had ever seen before." 1

One recognizes here the hand of God in the mission and work of Alexander: Antioch, with its Jewish colony and its traffic with the West through Asia Minor and Greece, as well as Alexandria with its library and its schools, had been fashioned beforehand for the Evangelists and Apostles.

7. THE CHURCH IN ANTIOCH.

In the spring of A. D. 43, just ten years after the Light of the World had been despised and rejected 1 See Note Q.

of men, all things were ready for a fresh outpouring of the Spirit. Barnabas found Saul at Tarsus, and brought him from his native shores to this Antioch, where the little church was sheltered, in its obscurity and feebleness, in a poor quarter under the hill Stavrin, and near a gate which sustains the Christian tradition by its time-honoured name of St. Paul's gate. It was " in Singon Street hard by the Pantheon." Among the believers here, fulfilling their local mission against such frightful odds of evil in the very citadel of Satan, imagine the effect of the appearance of these twins, Barnabas and Saul: the one with those massive and majestic traits which led the heathen to suppose him Zeus; the other with that light and active motion and electrifying voice which the same rustic idolaters could only identify with Hermes. They came to make the lily of gospel purity spring forth and shed its fragrance over the world out of a dunghill of pollution.

8. THE EXCEPTIONAL APOSTOLATE.

The exceptional addition to the choir of original Apostles of these twain, born out of due time, deserves a passing note of explanation. St. Paul was created an Apostle by Christ himself in person; Barnabas, by Christ, through his Vicar, the Holy Ghost. To confer their "Mission" and attest their apostleship to the churches was yet a logical necessity; but had even this been done by other apostles, they might seem to have been commissioned, if not "by men," yet at least "through men";

they would have been, not founders of the Apostolic Succession, but only its earliest recipients. Certain inspired prophets were therefore, by an oracle of the Holy Ghost, directed to do for Barnabas and Saul what the fiery tongues of Pentecost had done for Matthias. By an exceptional laying on of hands they conferred, not the "order" of apostles, but the "mission" to which their apostolic work was designated. The ordinals of Apostolic Churches have preserved this distinction: first orders and then jurisdiction are conferred in the rites of ordination. Barnabas seems to have been made St. Paul's coadjutor; but the pupil of Gamaliel was sent out with the world for his field. This mission of the Spirit was afterwards accepted by James, Peter, and John, when they "gave to Paul and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship,"1 and recognized the several jurisdictions proper to St. Peter and to St. Paul: the former restricted in mission to the Circumcision, while to the latter was assigned an unbounded mission to the Gentiles. And it is most instructive to observe how strictly St. Paul adhered to this " canon,' "2 as he calls it, in all his ministrations.

9. APOSTOLIC INSTITUTIONS.

To the inspired narrative of events at Antioch I must refer you for further subjects of great interest touching the early institutions and constitutions of Christianity. But it remains to note them as reflected in this school after the Apostles had 2 2 Cor. x. 13-16.

1 Gal. ii. 9.

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