(18) Certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks.--The two schools were at this time the great representatives of Greek thought. The former took its name from its founder, Epicurus, who lived a long and tranquil life at Athens, from B.C. 342 to 270. As holding their meetings in a garden, which he had left by his will in trust as a place of study for his disciples, they were sometimes known as the School of the Garden, and as such were distinguished from those of the Porch (Diog. Laert. Epic. c. 10). His speculations embraced at once a physical and an ethical solution of the problems of the universe. Rejecting, as all thinking men did, the popular Polytheism, which yet they did not dare openly to renounce, he taught that the gods, in their eternal tranquillity, were too far off from man to trouble themselves about his sorrows or his sins. They needed no sacrifices and answered no prayers. The superstition which enslaved the minds of most men was the great evil of the world, the source of its crimes and miseries. The last enemy to be destroyed was with him, as in our own time with Strauss, the belief in an immortality of retribution. A man's first step towards happiness and wisdom was to emancipate himself from its thraldom; the next was to recognise that happiness consisted in the greatest aggregate of pleasurable emotions. Experience taught that what are called pleasures are often more than counterbalanced by the pains that follow, and sensual excesses were therefore to be avoided. Epicurus's own life seems to have been distinguished by generosity, self-control, and general kindliness, and even by piety and patriotism (Diog. Laert. Epic. c. 5). But as no law was recognised as written in the heart, and human laws were looked on as mere conventional arrangements, each man was left to form his own estimate of what would give him most pleasure, and most men decided for a life of ease and self-indulgence; sometimes balanced by prudential calculations, sometimes sinking into mere voluptuousness. The poetry of Horace presents, perhaps, the most attractive phase of popular Epicureanism; the sense which has come to be attached to the modern word "Epicure," as applied to one whose life is devoted to the indulgence of the sense of taste, shows to what a depth of degradation it might sink.

In the world of physics, Epicurus has been claimed as anticipating some of the results of modern science. The ideas of creation and control were alike excluded. Matter had existed from eternity, and the infinite atoms of which it was composed had, under the action of attractive and Tepelling forces as yet unknown, entered into manifold combinations, out of which had issued, as the last stage of the evolution, the world of nature as it now lies before us. The poem of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, may be regarded as the grandest utterance of this negative and practically atheistic system, but its real nobleness lies chiefly in its indignant protest against the superstition which had cast its veil of thick darkness over all the nations.

It may be well to give one or two characteristic examples of each of these phases. On the one side we have the ever-recurring advice of the popular poet of society to remember that life is short, and to make the most of it:--

"Quid sit futurum cras, fuge quaerere: et,

Quern Fors dierum cunque dabit, lucro

Appone."

["Strive not the morrow's chance to know,

But count whate'er the Fates bestow

As given thee for thy gain."]--Hor. Od. i. 9.

"Sapias, vina liques, et spatio brevi

Spem longam reseces. Dum loquimur, fugerit invida

'tas. Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero."

["Be wise, and let your wines flow clear,

And as you greet each short-lived year,

Curb hope's delusive play:

E'en as we speak, our life glides by;

Enjoy the moments as they fly,

Nor trust the far-off day."]--Od. i. 11.

The student of Scripture will recognise an Epicurean element of this kind in one of the two voices that alternate in the Book of Ecclesiastes, "It is good and comely for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour that he taketh under the sun all the days of his life" (Ecclesiastes 5:18. Comp. also Ecclesiastes 3:19; Ecclesiastes 8:15; Ecclesiastes 9:7). It appears as the avowed principle of the evil-doers in the Apocryphal Book of Wisdom which, as probably the work of a contemporary writer, represents the impression made by the dominant Horatian phase of Epicureanism on a devout and thoughtful Jew:--

"Our time is a very shadow that passeth away . . . Come on, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that are present . . . Let us crown ourselves with rose-buds before they are withered . . . Let none of us go without his part of our voluptuousness."--Wisdom Of Solomon 2:5-9.

There is a nobler ring, it must be owned, in the bold language in which Lucretius sings the praises of Epicurus:--

"When this our life lay crushed before men's eyes

Beneath the yoke of Faith, who from on high

With horrid aspect frightened mortal hearts,

It was a Greek, himself a mortal too,

Who first had courage to lift up his eyes

And to her face withstand her. Tales of gods,

And thunderbolts from Heaven, with all their threats,

Were impotent to stay him. . . .

. . . . So at last

Faith in its turn lies trampled under foot,

And we through him have triumphed over Heaven."

De Rer. Nat. i. 67-80.

We can understand how St. Paul would assert, as against this school of thought, the personality of the living God, as Creator, Ruler, Father; the binding force of the law written in the heart; intuitive morality as against mere utilitarianism; the nobleness of a hero-soul raised above pleasure, and living, not for itself, but for others and for God. And in so teaching them he, in this respect differing from the mere professor of a higher philosophy, would point to the Resurrection and the Judgment as that which should confound the pleasure-seeker by giving him tribulation and anguish, and should assign glory and immortality to the patient worker of righteousness. (Comp. Romans 2:7-9.)

The Stoics--who took their name, not from their founder (Zeno, of Citium in Cyprus), but from the Stoa paekile, the painted porch, at Athens, adorned with frescoes of the battle of Marathon, where Zeno used to teach--presented a higher phase of thought. Josephus (Vit. c. 2) compares them with the Pharisees, and their relation to the moral life of heathenism at this time presented many features analogous to those which we find in the influence of that sect in Palestine. They taught that true wisdom consisted in being the master, and not the slave, of circumstances. The things which are not in our power are not things to seek after, nor shrink from, but to be accepted with a calm equanimity. The seeker after wisdom learnt, therefore, to be indifferent alike to pleasure or pain, and aimed at an absolute apathy. The theology of the Stoics was also of a nobler kind than that of Epicurus. They spoke of a divine Mind pervading the universe, and ordering all things by its Providence. They recognised its government in the lives of nations and individual men, and probably reconciled, as the Pharisees did, their acceptance of its decrees with a practical belief in the freedom of the individual will. In the Manual of Ethics, by Epictetus, under Nero, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, we see how the slave and the emperor stood on common ground. In Seneca, we see now often the Stoics spoke in the accents of Christian ethics. Many of the Stoics were sought after as tutors for the sons of noble families, and occupied a position of influence not unlike that of Jesuit confessors and directors in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The main drawbacks were (1) that in aiming at apathy for themselves they shut out sympathy with others as disturbing their tranquillity; (2) that in striving after an ethical perfection in the strength of their own will they anticipated the position of the Pelagians in the history of the Christian Church; and (3) that, as with the Pharisees, the high ideal was often but a mask for selfish and corrupt lives. They, also, were too often "hypocrites," acting a part before the world to which their true character did not correspond. In the language of the satirist--

"Qui Curios simulant et Bacchanalia vivunt."

["They pose as heroes, and as drunkards live."]

--Juvenal, Sat. ii. 3.

It is evident that there would be many points of sympathy between the better representatives of this school and St. Paul, but for them also the message that spoke of Jesus and the Resurrection--of God sending His Son into the world to be first crucified and then raised from the dead--would seem an idle dream, and they would shrink from the thought that they needed pardon and redemption, and could do nothing true and good in their own strength without the grace of God.

What will this babbler say?--Better, What might this babbler mean? The Greek noun, literally seed-picker, was primarily applied to a small bird of the finch tribe. The idle gossips of the agora picking up news, and, eager to retail it, the chattering parasites of feasts, were likened by the quick wit of Athenian humourists to such a bird as it hopped and chirped. So Zeno himself called one of his disciples, who had more words than wisdom, by the same contemptuous name (Diog. Laert. Zeno, c. 19). The philosophers, in their scorn of the stranger who was so ready to discuss great questions with any whom he met, applied the derisive epithet to him.

He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods.--This was, it will be remembered, the precise charge on which Socrates had been condemned (Xenoph. Memor. i. 1, ? 1). In his case it rested on his constant reference to the daemon, the divine monitor who checked and guided him, in whose voice he heard something like the voice of God; but the secret of his condemnation by his countrymen was to be found less in what he actually taught than in the questions with which he vexed their inmost soul, and made them conscious of ignorance or baseness. The questions of St. Paul, as he reasoned "of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come," were equally disturbing.

Because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.--The verb implies continuous action. This was the ever-recurring theme of his discourses. It is possible that with the strong tendency of the Greek mind to personify all attributes and abstract thoughts, St. Paul's hearers saw in the word Anastasis (= Resurrection) the name of a new goddess, representing the idea of immortality, to be worshipped in conjunction with Jesus, and therefore they used the plural and spoke of his bringing in "strange gods." So temples and altars had been dedicated to Concord, and the history of Athens told how Epimenides had bidden them erect two altars to Insolence and Outrage (Cicero, De Leg. ii. 11), as the two demons by whom their city was being brought to ruin. What startled them in the Apostle was that he taught not only the immortality of the soul--that had entered into the popular mythical belief, and had been enforced with philosophical arguments by Socrates and Plato--but the resurrection of the body. In 1Corinthians 15:35 we see the character of the objections raised to this doctrine, and the manner in which St. Paul answered them.

Verse 18. - And certain also of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers for then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, A.V.; would for will, A.V.; preached for preached unto them, A.V. and T.R. The Epicureans (so called from Epicurus, their founder) and the Stoics (so called from the στοά, the colonnade or piazza where Zeno their founder taught) were the most numerous sects at Athens at this time; and their respective tenets were the most opposite to the doctrines of the gospel. Encountered him; σύνεβαλλον. In Acts 4:15 it is followed by πρός, and is properly rendered "conferred;" here it is followed by the dative, and may be understood to mean "disputed" (συμβάλλειν λόγους). It may, however, not less properly be taken in the sense of a hostile encounter of words, as Luke 14:31, and frequently in classical Greek. This babbler (σπερμολόγος); literally, a picker-up of seeds, applied to a crow (Aristoph., 'Ayes,' 232, 579). Plutarch too ('Demet.,' 28) has σπερμολόγοι ὅρνιθες, birds picking up seeds. Hence it is used of idle hangers-on in the markets, who get a livelihood by what they can pick up, and so generally of empty, worthless fellows. Hence it is further applied to those who pick up scraps of knowledge from one or another and "babble them indifferently in all companies" (Johnson's 'Dictionary,' under "Babble"). A setter forth of strange gods. There does not seem to be the least ground for Chrysostom's suggestion that they took Anastasis (the Resurrection) for the name of a goddess. But the preaching of Jesus the Son of God, himself risen from the dead (ver. 31), and hereafter to be the Judge of quick and dead at the general resurrection, was naturally, to both Stoics and Epicureans, a setting forth of strange gods. Χένα δαιμόνια are "foreign deities," or "daemons," inferior gods. The word καταγγελεύς, a setter forth, does not occur elsewhere. But the nearly identical word κατάγγελος is used by Plutarch.

17:16-21 Athens was then famed for polite learning, philosophy, and the fine arts; but none are more childish and superstitious, more impious, or more credulous, than some persons, deemed eminent for learning and ability. It was wholly given to idolatry. The zealous advocate for the cause of Christ will be ready to plead for it in all companies, as occasion offers. Most of these learned men took no notice of Paul; but some, whose principles were the most directly contrary to Christianity, made remarks upon him. The apostle ever dwelt upon two points, which are indeed the principal doctrines of Christianity, Christ and a future state; Christ our way, and heaven our end. They looked on this as very different from the knowledge for many ages taught and professed at Athens; they desire to know more of it, but only because it was new and strange. They led him to the place where judges sat who inquired into such matters. They asked about Paul's doctrine, not because it was good, but because it was new. Great talkers are always busy-bodies. They spend their time in nothing else, and a very uncomfortable account they have to give of their time who thus spend it. Time is precious, and we are concerned to employ it well, because eternity depends upon it, but much is wasted in unprofitable conversation.Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans,.... These were so called from Epicurus, the son of Neocles, who was born 342 years before Christ, and taught philosophy at Athens, in his garden; the principal tenets of which were, that the world was not made by any deity, or with any design, but came into its being and form, through a fortuitous concourse of atoms, of various sizes and magnitude, which met, and jumbled, and cemented together, and so formed the world; and that the world is not governed by the providence of God; for though he did not deny the being of God, yet he thought it below his notice, and beneath his majesty to concern himself with its affairs; and also, that the chief happiness of men lies in pleasure. His followers were called "Epicureans"; of which there have been two sorts; the one were called the strict or rigid "Epicureans", who placed all happiness in the pleasure of the mind, arising from the practice of moral virtue, and which is thought by some to be the true principle of "Epicureans"; the other were called the loose, or the remiss Epicureans, who understood their master in the gross sense, and placed all their happiness in the pleasure of the body, in brutal and sensual pleasure, in living a voluptuous life, in eating and drinking, &c. and this is the common notion imbibed of an Epicurean.

And of the Stoics: the author of this sect was Zeno, whose followers were so called from the Greek word "Stoa", which signifies a portico, or piazza, under which Zeno used to walk, and teach his philosophy, and where great numbers of disciples attended him, who from hence were called "Stoics": their chief tenets were, that there is but one God, and that the world was made by him, and is governed by fate; that happiness lies in virtue, and virtue has its own reward in itself; that all virtues are linked together, and all vices are equal; that a wise and good man is destitute of all passion, and uneasiness of mind, is always the same, and always joyful, and ever happy in the greatest torture, pain being no real evil; that the soul lives after the body, and that the world will be destroyed by fire. Now the philosophers of these two sects

encountered him; the Apostle Paul; they attacked him, and disputed with him upon some points, which were contrary to their philosophy:

and some said, what will this babbler say? this talking, prating fellow? though the word here used does not signify, as some have thought, a sower of words; as if they meant, that the apostle was a dealer is many words, a verbose man, and full of words, but not matter; but it properly signifies a gatherer of seeds; and the allusion is either to a set of idle people, that used to go to markets and fairs, and pick up seeds of corn, that were shook out of sacks, upon which they lived; and so the word came to be used for an idle good for nothing fellow, and for one that picked up tales and fables, and carried them about for a livelihood. So Demosthenes, in a way of reproach, called Aeschincs by this name; and such an one was the apostle reckoned: or the metaphor is taken from little birds, as the sparrow, &c. that pick up seeds, and live upon them, and are of no value and use. Harpocratian says (d), there is a certain little bird, of the jay or jackdaw kind, which is called "Spermologos" (the word here used), from its picking up of seeds, of which Aristophanes makes mention; and that from this a base and contemptible man, and one that lives by others, is called by this name: from whence we may learn in what a contemptuous manner the apostle was used in this polite city, by these men of learning.

Other some, he seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods; other than those worshipped in the city of Athens: this was the charge which Melitus brought against Socrates;

"Socrates (says he (e)) has acted an unrighteous part; the gods, whom the city reckons such, he does not, introducing other and new gods.''

Aelianus (f) represents him as censured by Aristophanes, as one that introduced , "strange gods", though he neither knew them, nor honoured them. The reason why they thought the apostle was for bringing in other gods, than which nothing was more foreign from him, was,

because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection: the Syriac version reads, "and his resurrection"; that is, the resurrection of Christ; the Arabic version renders it, "the resurrection from the dead"; the general resurrection; both doubtless were preached by him, see Acts 17:32 Jesus they took for one strange and new God, they had never heard of before, and "Anastasis", or "the resurrection", for another; which need not be wondered at, when they had altars erected for Mercy, Fame, Shame, and Desire; see Gill on Acts 17:16.

(d) Lexicon, p. 271, 272. (e) Laertius in Vita Socratis. (f) Var. Hist. l. 2. c. 13.