The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1891-12-04

pether with cord of incon-
sumable courage and hurts them
at the crowd now standing or sitting
aghast-the two thunderbolts of resur-
rection and last judgment His closing
words were: because He hath ap-
pointed a day in which He will judge
the world in righteousness bv that man
whom He hath ordained; whereof He
hath given assurance unto all men in
that He hath raised Him from the
dead" Remember, those thoughts
were to them novel and provocative,
that Christ, the despised Nazarene,
would come to be their judge and that
they would have to get up out of their
cemeteries to stand before Him and
take their eternal doom.
Mightiest burst of elocutionary power
ever heard The ancestors of some of
those Greeks had heard Demosthenes
in his Grafton on the crown, had heard
Eschines in his speeches against Ii
marchus and Ctesiphon, had heard Plato
in his great argument for Immortality
of the soul, had heard Socrates on his
deathbed, suicidal cup of hemlock in
hand leave his hearers in emotion too
great to bear, had in the theater of
Dionysius at the foot of the Acropolis
(the ruins of its piled-up amphitheater
and the marble floor of its orchestra
still there) seen enacted the tragedies
of Eschylus and Sophocles, but neither
had the ancestors of the Grecians on
Mars hill, or themselves, ever heard or
witnessed such tornadoes of moral
power as that with which Paul now
whelmed his hearers
| At those two thoughts Uf 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 sup
pose it means that they mimicked the
solemnity of his voice, that they took
off his impassioned gestulations and
they cried out: 'Jew! Jewl Where
did you study rhetoric? You ought to
hear our orators speak.
As in Athens that evening in 1889 we
climbed down the pile of slippery rocks,
where all this had occurred, on our
way back to our hotel, stood half
way between the Acropolis and Mars
hill in the gathering shadows of even
tide, seemed to hear those two hills
in sublime and awful converse: 81 am
chiefly of the past" said the Acropolis
81 am chiefly of the future" replied
Mars hill. The Acropolis said: my
poets are dead. / am a monument of
the dead past l shall never again
hear a song sung. / will never again
see column filled will never again
behold goddess crowned. Mars hill re-
sponded: 81, too, have had history. l
had on my heights warriors who will
| never again unsheath the sword and
| judges who will never again utter
doom, and orators who will never again
make a plea But my influence is to
be more in the future than it ever was
| in the past The words that Mission
ary Paul uttered that exciting day in
the hearing of the wisest men and the
populace on my rocky shoulders have
only begun their majestic roll The
brotherhood of man, and the Christ of
God, and the peroration of resurrection
and last judgment with which the
Tarsian orator closed his sermon that
day amid the mocking crowd shall yet
revolutionise the planet. Oh, Acropo-
lis! l have stood here long enough
to witness that your gods are no
gods at all Your Boreas could not
control the winds Your Neptune
could not manage the sea. Your
Apollo never evoked a musical note.
har
vest Your goddess of wisdom, Mi
nerva, never knew the Greek alphabet.
Your Jupiter could not handle the
| lightnings But the God whom pro-
claimed on the day when Paul preached
| before the astounded assem- blage 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 forever"
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 Miltiades at Marathon drove back
the Persian oppressors.
"Yes," said Mars hill, your Plato
laboriously guessed at the Immortality
of the soul, but my Paul, divinely in
spired, declared it as a fact straight
from God. Your Socrates praised vir-
tue but expired as a suicide. Your
| Miltiades was brave against earthly
foes, yet died from wound ignomin-
| ously gotten in after-defeat But my
L.
with this battle shout: I'VE wrestle
not against flesh and blood, but
against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of
this world, against spiritual wickedness
in high places, and on June 90. in the
year &C, on the road to Ostia, after the
sword of the headsman had given one
| keen stroke, took the crown of martyr
DOM"
AS that night in Athens / put my
tired head on my pillow, and the excit-
ing scenes of the day passed through my
mind. / thought on the same subject on
which as a boy l made my commence
ment speech in Niblo's theater on
graduation day from the New York
university, viz: "The Moral Effects Of
! Sculpture and Architecture" but fur
ther than l could have thought in boy
hood, thought in Athens that night
| the moral effects in architecture and
sculpture depend on what you do in
great buildings after they are put up
and upon the character of the men
whose forms you cut in marble,
veal 1 thought that night what
struggles the martyrs went through in
order that in our time the gospel might
have full swing; and 1 thought that
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