Fort Worth gazette. [volume] (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1891-1898, 1891-11-26

CElcS Oul, VI OuC DlOOU LIZ
tions." Oh, Paul! you forget you are
speaking to the proudest and most exclu
sive audience in the world. Do not say sol
one blood" You cannot mean that. Had
Socrates and Plato and Demonsthenes and
Scion and Lycurgus and Draco and Sopho-
cles and Euripedes and Eschylus and Peri
Giles and Phidias and Miltiades blood just
like the Persians, like the Turks, like the
Egyptians, like the common herd OF human
itya "Yes," says Paul, ''of one blood, all
nations.''
Surely that must be the closing para
graph of the sermon. His auditors must be
let up from the nervous strain. Paul has
smashed the Acropolis and smashed the
national pride of the Greeks, and what
more can he says Those Grecian orators,
standing on that place, always closed their
climacteric. peroration, and Paul is going
to give them a peroration which will eclipse
in power and majesty all that he has yet
said. Heretofore he has
HURLED ONE THUNDERBoLT
at time; now, he will close by hurting two
at once. The little, old man, under the
power of his speech, has Strengthened him
self up and the stoop has gone out of his
shoulders, and he looks about three feet
taller than when he began, and his eyes,
which were quiet, became two flames OF
fire. and his face, which was calm in the
Introduction, now depicts whirlwind OF
emotion as he ties the two thunderbolts to-
gether with a cord of inconsumable cour-
age and hurls them at the crowd now stand
ing or sitting aghast-the two thunder
bolts of Resurrection and Last Judgment.
His closing words were: Because He
hath appointed day in which he will
Judge the world in righteousness by that
man whom he hath ordained; whereof he
hath given assurance unto all men in that
he hath raised him from the dead" Re
member those thoughts were to them novel
and provocative that Christ, the despised
Nazarene, would come to be their judge.
and they should have to get up out of their
cemeteries to stand before him and take
their eternal doom. Mightiest burst of
Evolutionary power ever heard.
The ancestors of some OF those Greeks
had heard Demosthenes in his Grafton on
the crown, had heard Hschines in his
speeches against Timarchus and Ctesiphon,
had heard Plato in his great argument for
immortality of the soul, had heard
Socrates on his death-bed, suicidal cup of
hemlock in his hand, leave his hearers in
emotion too great to bear, had in the thea
ter of Dionysius at the foot of the Acropolis
(the ruins of its piled-up ampitheater and
the marble floor of its orchestra still there)
seen enacted the tragedies of 4Eschylus
and Sophocles, but neither had the ances-
Oh UuGSc OU MATS I'LL, OF
themselves, ever heard or witnessed such
tornadoes of moral power as that with
which Paul now whelmed his hearers.
At those two thoughts of resurrection
and judgment, the audience sprang to their
feet. Some moved they adjourn to some
other day to hear more on the same
theme, but others would have torn the
sacred orator to pieces. The record says:
Some mocked." l suppose it means that
bay ielyaS tho calamity of biS roica
that they took off his impassioned gesticu-
lation, and they cried out: "Jew! jew!
Where did you study rhetOrica You ought
to hear our orators speak! You had better
go back to your business of tent-making.
Our Lycurgus knew more in a minute than
you will know in a month. Say, where did
YOU get that crooked back and those weak
eyes from9 Ha! Hal You try to teach US
Grecians! What nonsense you talk about
when you speak of resurrection and judg-
ment Now, little old man, climb down the
side of Mars Hill and get out of sight as
soon as possible" Some mocked'' But
that scene adjourned to the day of which
the sacred orator had spoken-the day of
resurrection and Judgment.
AS in Athens, that evening in 1889, we
climbed down the pile of slippery rocks
Nhere all this had occurred, on our way
back to our hotel, stood half way between
the Acropolis and Mars Hill in the gather
ing shadows of eventide, l seemed to hear
those two hills in sublime and awful con-
verse. 81 am chiefly of the past" said the
Acropolis. II am chiefly of the future"
replied Mars Hill The Acropolis said:
My orators are dead. My law-givers are
dead. My poets are dead. Ny architects
are dead. My sculptors are dead. l am a
monument of the dead past. l shall never
again hear a song sung. l will never again
see column lifted. l will never again be-
hold goddess crowned" Mars Hill re-
sponded: Il, too, have had a history. l
had on my heights warriors who will never
again unsheath
THE SWORD, AND JUDGES
who will never again utter doom, and ora
tors who will never again make plea. But
my influence is to be more in the future
than it ever was in the past. The words
that Missionary Paul uttered that exciting
day in the hearing of the wisest men and
the populace upon my rocky shoulders,
have only begun their majestic roll; the
brotherhood of man. and the Christ of
God, and the peroration of resurrection and
the last Judgment with which the Tarsian
orator closed his sermon that day amid the
hooking crowd, shall yet revolutionize the
planet. Oh, Acropolis! l have stood here
long enough to witness that your gods are
no gods at all. Your Boreas could not con-
troll the winds. Your Neptunes could net
manage the sea. Your Apollo never evoked
musical note. Your god Ceres never
grew harvest Your goddess of wisdom,
Minerva, never knew the Greek alphabet.
Your Jupiter could not handle the light
nings. But the God whom proclaimed on
the day when Paul preached before the
astounded assemblage on my rough heights
is the God of music, the God of wisdom
the God of power, the God of mercy, the
God of love. the God of storms, the God of
sunshine, the God of the land, and the God
of the sea. the God over all, blessed for
ever" Then the Acropolis spake and said
as though in self-defense: My Plato
argued for the immortality of the soul, and
my Socrates praised virtue, and my Milti-
AIDES at Marathon drove back the Persian
oppressors.' "Yes,'' said Mars Hill
'.your Plato laboriously guessed at the i'm
mortality of the soul, but my Paul. divinely
God. Your Socrates praised virtue, but
expired as suicide. Your NIiltiades was
brave against earthly foes, yet died from
wound ANONYMOUSLY gotten in after defeat
But my Paul challenged all earth and all
he'll with his battle-shout, we wrestle not
against flesh and blood, but against princi-
palities, against powers, against the rulers
of the darkness of this world, against spir-
itual wickedness in high places and then
on the 10Th of June, in the year &c, on the
road to Ostia, after the sword of the heads
man had given one keen stroke, took the
crown of martyrdom."
After moments silence by both hills,
the Acropolis moaned out in the darkness:
Alas! AlasI' and Mars Hill responded:
"Hosannah! Hosannahr' Then the voices
of both hills became indistinct, and as l
passed on and away in the twilight, l
seemed to only hear two Sounds-a frap-