Discourse on the Areopagus Expanded: With Its Fourfold Theme

“He had not intended to speak immediately: but nevertheless presently, without waiting for his companions, stimulated by a remarkable and extraordinary zeal, this Soldier of Christ commences the action at once.” — Bengel.

“Those sufferings which would have broken the back of an ordinary patience, did but make him rise up with the greater eagerness and resolution for the doing of his duty. St. Hierom cries him up as a great master of composition: that as oft as he heard him, he seemed to hear, not words but thunder.” — Caw’s Lives of the Apostles, A.D. 1676.

Let us now proceed, not to any additional theological exposition or analytic exegesis beyond what we have ventured to give in the last chapter; — but rather to extract the spirit of the memorable Discourse delivered from the “stone pulpit” of the Areopagus.

The Address — in itself a compendium of religious truth — seems appropriately to resolve itself into four parts, or themes.

The God of Nature.
The God of Phovidence,
The God of Grace.
The God of Judgment.

Though the connection be an arbitrary and fanciful one, this fourfold division, as we have ventured to note at the close of each section, — seems singularly to harmonise with some successive strains in the greatest of the Great Hymns of Christendom.