All Things to All Men
All things to all Men. modern times. In itself, and in its adaptation to circumstances, it exhibits great literary power and consummate skill It is a fine example of the preacher’s own rule — that is, of becoming all things to all men that he might gain some. He grasps firmly at the same moment both his own aim as a missionary of Christ, and the peculiar character of his audience. His speech is a noble effort to win for the gospel the most cultivated and refined people of that age. It is a grand crisis; and this Jew is equal to it. The apostle of Jesus Christ is at length face to face with human civilisation in its highest form, and his aim is to overturn it — to place it on a new foundation and animate it with a new spirit. He stands up, waves his hand, and begins: u Athenians, everything I behold gives evidence that you are very devotional.” The words of the English version — “too superstitious” — are not happily chosen. It is quite true that in Paul’s view their worship was superstition, and in his mind the word he employed attributed to them a reverence for demons. But the word was ambiguous, and to his audience it might convey the idea of religiosity without suggesting anything offensive. They will discover as he proceeds what he thinks of their religious rites; but, in the first instance, he conveys to their minds only the idea that he considered them very religious. He speaks the truth according to his own judgment; but he carefully avoids such harshness at the outset as might have bereft him of his coveted opportunity. He will not offend the audience in the first sentence.
This missionary is a philosopher as well as a Christian. He will preach Christianity, not philosophy; but he will employ philosophy as an instrument in his work. According to the symbolic phraseology of the Apocalypse, the earth will help the woman. In the intense devotion of the Athenians, Paul recognised a power which might yet be turned to good account. This appetite for the spiritual proclaims man to be the child of God, although in a state of disease it seeks impure food. This appetite may yet be fed with the bread of life. He knew that the “demondread” with which his audience were affected was a dark superstition; but he did not openly or offensively, in the first instance, say so. He will lead them by a gentler and, as he hopes, a surer method to the truth. He conciliates their favour by acknowledging their religiousness; and then endeavours to turn the wandering stream of their piety into the right channel.
Paul paced the streets of Athens like other strangers. He looked eagerly on every object of interest. He observed men as well as things; actions as well as scenes. He took mental note of all that he saw, and classified the facts in his memory for subsequent use. This is a most precious faculty. Any person can see the objects; not every person can arrange his observations in order, and lay them where they will be available in time of need.
Of the various objects which had attracted his attention on the streets, one now started to his memory, and leaped to his lips. “As I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, To the unknown God.” Some pilgrims were bringing a votive offering and laying it on an altar as the apostle passed. He will turn aside and study them. He sees the inscription — “To the unknown God.” The sad words are written not with a pencil in a note-book, but with a pen of iron on his memory. He weeps in secret over the blindness of the heathen. He possesses a light which will chase away that darkness. He longs to make God known in the Mediator.
These idolaters seem to have advanced one step beyond their own idolatry. They felt, and sadly owned, that with
All things to all Men. their thirty thousand deities, and their city full of temples, they had not yet discovered the truth. There remained something which they could not reach, and without which they could not be happy. After this unknown One they grope blindfold. They stretch out their arms into night, and on closing them embrace only the damp air.
The astronomers LeVerrier and Adams, in separate countries at the same time, observing certain motions among the spheres which could not be accounted for by any known cause, concluded that there must be a body not yet discovered, somewhere in the regions of space in which the disturbances were observed. Seeking in the direction thus indicated, they found the far distant and hitherto unknown world. So Greek philosophy was able, from the appetites and vacancies of the human mind, which all the idols could not satisfy, to determine that there must be some God hitherto from them concealed, to whom these appetites pointed, and without whom they could not be satisfied. Their skill could discover in a general way their need, but they could not by their searching find the missing Portion for a human soul. This messenger who now speaks to them can supply the lack. Through Christ he can make known to them the Father. “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.” Paul was willing to take their confessed sense of want as inquiry after the living God, and offered to lead them by the gospel into his presence.
Incidentally, while preaching to the philosophers, the apostle declares the unity of the human race. Of one blood are all nations. The blood is the life. He conceives of it as a river flowing from one fountain, and branching out into many channels. The stream has, in point of fact, been continuous, like waters that fail not. The blood that flows in the veins of this generation has descended in an uninterrupted stream from the primeval man. This stream is one; it had not several distinct fountains.
The Greeks were a fine race of men; and they knew it. In regard to physical symmetry, they thought of themselves as the Pharisees thought of their spiritual attainments. They trusted in themselves that they were intellectually and physically beautiful, and despised others. Mankind were divided in their conception into two great sections — Greeks and Barbarians. They would not admit a community of race with other peoples; but alas! in order to isolate and so distinguish themselves, the highest fiction they could invent was that they had sprung from the soil of Greece!
This old heathen fable is curiously cognate with the latest speculations which a sect of secular philosophers are at this day zealously propagating. The old fiction assumed a poetical form — the living men, full-bodied and perfect, sprang from the mother earth; the modern myth, as becomes its date, is dressed up in a complete suit of scientific garments. But it is the same in its substance; for it represents that men, body and soul as you now behold them, came, through an infinite succession of steps indeed, but still came, without an intelligent cause, from dead matter — that is, that they sprang from the ground. Thus human reason, when left to itself in matters that relate to God and the soul, spins round in a giddy circle, and thinks it is making progress.
After glancing at God’s providential reign over the world, the preacher comes more closely home to his heathen audience, and out of their own lips convicts them of not acting up to the light they possessed. By the mouth of their own poets they professed themselves to be the offspring of God, and yet they worshipped wood and stone — the work of their own hands. It is worthy of remark here that Aratus, the poet whom Paul quotes, was a native of Tarsus.
Some fell on the wayside. 3 79
Paul must have been acquainted with his writings in the schools of his native place. An almost identical phrase occurs also in the hymn to Jupiter by Cleanthes, a distinguished disciple of Zeno, the founder of the Stoic sect. Perhaps the preacher glanced toward the colossal statue of Minerva, the patron saint of the city, fixed on the top of the temple that crowned the Acropolis, the pride of Athens and the work of her greatest artist, while he uttered the withering words, “Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.”
The times of this ignorance God looked over — that is, he waited for his own set time, and then sent the Word forth from Jerusalem to the nations. In that Word he commands all men everywhere to repent. God in the gospel not only permits and invites, he commands men to repent and believe and live. This is his commandment — to Greeks and to Britons — in the first century and the nineteenth — his commandment is, “That we should believe on the name of his Son J esus Christ, whom he hath sent.”