The quenchless light

by Agnes C. Laut

FOREWORD TO APPENDIX

As a child and later a student, I recall intensely disliking Paul. I wasn’t quite sure he was a “crazy fanatic and self-hypnotized epileptic and self-deceived, unconscious fakir,” which I have heard teachers of youth in our colleges call him; terrible views for a child to hold about a saintly character—I only set them down to show how wrong teaching can color our version of the Bible—but I regarded him as fanatical, narrow, crabbed, sour, domineering, eager to dragoon men into believing as he did, whether by fear of Hell-fire, which seemed to me a cowardly fire-insurance policy against retribution or by sheer force of will, I had not decided. I distinctly disliked saints, whose milk of human kindness had turned sour. Later, years later, when I came back to read his life in the sacred records, as I would read with unprejudiced eyes in the search for facts which we carry to the reading of an ordinary life, I was amazed and staggered to find he was a small man, frail of body, short-sighted, suffering some physical ailment from the persecutions to which he had been subjected, fearless as a lion where the faith was concerned, humble and simple as a child in other matters, generous in money matters—see the loan to Philemon—so independent that while he collected funds for famine in Jerusalem, he would never touch those funds himself, but supported himself by the making of tents, for which there was great demand owing to caravan travel being universal, and so great of heart that his tenderness extended to a little slave boy, who came to him in Rome and who ultimately became the youngest bishop in the Christian Church in the third largest city of the Roman Empire.

About this time I began reading the Bible as I would any other book, or a newspaper editorial, critically but shorn of early beliefs and prejudices. I read ignoring chapter divisions and verse divisions, which too often have provided controversialists with bullets for sharp-shooting in ambush by wresting sentences from context and meaning, and using them as “the Devil quotes Scripture” for his own purposes; and I can conceive of nothing that will restore belief quicker than to read the Bible as a historical record of the birth and growth of a great redemptive force for humanity—using redemption as a force in present-day life, not in a far-away, vague shadowy Kingdom of the Hereafter.

About this time, too, I realized what one of the greatest American theologians has frankly admitted—that the worst foes of Christianity are not its enemies but “the friends in its own house,” and those foes are sometimes medieval inheritances of superstitious interpretations, of which we are unconscious; scraps of misapplied, ignorant Sunday-School teaching. In fact, I have often wondered, if secular teaching were given with as colossal ignorance of historic data as sacred teaching is given, how many pupils could pass even a primary examination? How much would be known of applied science, or even our own secular historic development? For instance, how many Bible teachers know that Christ and John and Paul all quote from the Book of Enoch, which is variously dated as from 200 to 120 B.C.? How many know that “the camel and the eye of a needle” was an Arab expression used to this day? How many know that many of the expressions precious to the whole world were quoted by the writers from ancient masters sacred and secular—such as the reference to “principalities and powers” separating us from the love of God? How many realize that “oil out of the flinty rock” was not a metaphor, but a fact—such a fact, that modern drillers for petroleum have found oil in that very spot? How many know that the fiery furnace recorded in the book of Daniel to destroy the three young Hebrews is corroborated by references in the Maccabees and other ancient books to naphtha waters which burned with a flame to consume all towards whom the wind blew, but which had a funneling air center inside, which left the furnace harmless in the middle? How many know that tiles and statuary dug out of the ruins of Babylon show a man lying unharmed under a lion in the lion’s den of the king’s royal gardens? We ridicule the story of Jonah and the whale; yet from the belly of a stuffed sacred alligator in Egypt amid scraps of waste paper were taken precious lost records of the sayings of Christ.

The Bible is not much longer than seven short novels. The most of people read seven novels in a year. The ordinary modern magazine has the same number of words as a short novel. A great many people read a magazine from cover to cover once a week. If the Bible were read in the same free spirit, unclouded by inherited prejudice or taint of “creeds,” the return to belief among youth would be a thing to astound the world.

Why isn’t it so read?

To quote the theologian—because “the literalists” insist that in the reading, youth shall read into the context what they dictate rather than what youth finds of everyday usable livable truths; and to-day, youth will not be dragooned. He is going to follow the light of truth as he finds the light of truth and proves the truth. He isn’t going to accept one set of opinions on Sunday, which he finds won’t work out in everyday life on Monday. Christianity has to be a workable scheme for every day in the week, or youth is going to leave the church pews empty and crowd to “the movies,” to the theater, to the anarchist lectures, to the wild abandon of joy in the rhythmic emotional dance; and—youth is right. With unfettered feet and wings of dawn to its soul, it faces always the new day. It never looks backwards. It rejoices in Life; and Christianity must be put in terms of youth, or preach to emptier and emptier pews. Paul never ceased reiterating “Rejoice—rejoice and again I say—rejoice.” Too often we have clothed a glad and glorious message in habiliments of age and woe, which are really the consciousness of past sins and failures. The Communion is not a Doleful Supper commemorating a death. It is a Loving Cup commemorating a wonderful and glad new birth. The Kingdom of Heaven is not to-morrow. It is now; or else it is never. And yet, let us not blame the Middle Age interpretations shadowy with crime and sorrow. In a carnival of lust and crime and rapine and sword, the Middle Age Church preserved and conserved for humanity, like an oasis of the spirit in a desert of materialism, all that has helped humanity most, and this in spite of the fact it foolishly punished astronomers, who proved the earth round and burned men who differed by a hair’s breadth from its “credo.” While it was guilty of these tragical mistakes of obeying the letter rather than the spirit—as the Pharisees who crucified Christ, had done before it—the Middle Age Church kept the faith for us, inspired and conserved art, science, letters, in a wilderness of barbarism. Who encouraged almost sublime architecture? Who produced paintings that have never been equaled to this day? Where did Roger Bacon work out his great, though concealed, truths of science? In the safety, though it was the imprisonment, of a friar’s cell. Roger Bacon (1214-1294), the friar at Oxford, wrote these words. Were they clairvoyant foresight, or the superior knowledge of a scientist from facts? “Ships will go without rowers and with only a single man to guide them. Carriages without horses will travel with incredible speed. Machines for flying can be made in which a man sits. Machines will raise infinitely great weights. Bridges will span rivers without supports.” His superior knowledge was ascribed by his superiors to Black Magic; but Pope Clement IV supported him and ordered his knowledge set forth in books, of which he wrote three in eighteen months without secretary; but his own immediate superiors ascribed his marvelous knowledge to communications from the Devil, and had him imprisoned for fourteen years. After seven hundred years, the light of that cell comes out to the world: yet, the men who suppressed him thought they were protecting God’s word from assault. It can only be added that the history of ignorance repeats itself with surprising persistence. The good men of his day were simply trying to tie truth down to the dead line of their own ignorance. With a charity and a clarity infinite as the love of God, let us be careful we do not do the same thing.

Rather than condemn the mistakes of the Middle Age Church from whose darkened and superstitious interpretations we yet suffer, let us beware we do not repeat their mistakes by shutting out the new light of history and archæology and science, where we should welcome it.

Christianity does not need to apologize for itself, or beg the question. When it does that, he who excuses accuses. When it does that, it is off the carpet in the modern world. It can stand on the solid foundation of its own truth. If that foundation cracks, it will fall as the Holy City fell before a New Order. Rather than repel attack, we should welcome it. Attack is the storm wind that strengthens the hold of the roots on the eternal rocks. It is the wind that causes the corn stalk to put out guy ropes above its roots to hold fast to sure foundation. I love to read attacks on Christian truth if they are sincere and not cheap, cynical, ignorant sneers, which never get anywhere. They force examination of the certainty of the facts beneath our faith.

To take but one example of what muddy thinking has done to stir up shallow waters to make them look deep—consider the furious and foolish controversy in the modern church over “miracles.” “We believe in miracles,” shouts one section of the Church, “and if you don’t, we’ll see that you are put out of the church and prove that you are damned.” “We don’t believe in miracles and we defy you to put us out of the church; or we’ll pull down the pillars of youth like Samson as we go out,” shouts back the other section; and neither stops to ask in simple clarity:

What is a miracle?

Is it God breaking, or intervening to prevent, the effect of His own laws?

We have no such phenomena in natural life, and shy back from answering that question in as bold terms as it is asked.

Or is it the working of a higher law overruling and annulling a lower law? There are cases of that in nature, as when the effect of a warm and constant ocean current is annulled by a cold wind from the north; but in this case, neither law is abrogated. We are getting the effects of each; but the effect of one is stronger than the other. That might be the meaning of “a miracle”; but the explanation is so obscure and the workings so complex and in the unknown, that if that be the conception of “miracle” we had better not split the church over it. We are dealing with too many unknown quantities to postulate with mathematical certainty what we do know and what we don’t of fact, or to exclude from fellowship on the grounds of what is unknown.

Or is a miracle a superior knowledge of all laws and the use of that knowledge to get certain effects, such as the knowledge of Roger Bacon, who was seven hundred years in advance of his time? If that be “miracle,” the controversy vanishes in thin air.

A century ago, if any man had told us we could see through a man’s flesh and count his ribs and the joints in his backbone, we would have called him an unconscious fakir, or a conscious liar. Yet X-rays have worked that “miracle.”

Fifty years ago, if any one had told us we could go round the world under the sea like Jonah in the whale’s belly, we would have answered him in the language of Missouri, “Show me.” Yet the submarine has worked that “miracle.”

Twenty-five years ago, if any one had predicted we would course the skies in winged chariots of which you can read a description in the First Chapter of Ezekiel, we would have told him a comic legend about Darius Green and his flying machine. Yet the aeroplane has worked that “miracle.”

Ten years ago, if some one had told us soberly and expecting belief that he could talk without wire or letter from New York with a friend in Honolulu, we would have had him examined for his sanity. Yet wireless has worked that “miracle.”

The impossibility of yesterday is the wonder of to-day and the commonplace of to-morrow. The laws of the X-ray, of under-sea navigation in submarine, of air travel in aeroplane, of wireless communication, existed just as much and the same in the days of Christ as they exist to-day; but men did not know those laws and did not know how to use them. “Greater works than these shall ye do,” said the Master. We didn’t believe Him, though we thought we did; and we witness the fulfillment of the prophecy. We are heirs to the fulfillment of the prophecy by the greatest Master in foresight the world has ever known, by One who did more to set the human soul free of the shackles of ignorance and prejudice than any other leader of all humanity.

He, who postulates to-day on what is, or is not, miraculous, simply writes himself down an ignorant muddy-brained thinker, stirring up shallow waters to make them look deep. The “literalist” in this case simply tries to bind youth down to “old wives’ fables” and to nursery beliefs. He tries to level Christian truth down to the dead line of the most ignorant.

And so of nearly all the disputes in the Christian Church—“the resurrection,” “the descent into Hell,” “the Immaculate Conception,” “the letter inerrancy of the Scriptures.” Ask definitely what the controversialist means by his own terms, and whether agnostic or fundamentalist, instead of answering you, he backs against the wall of his “rightness” and hurls thunder bolts of damnation and excommunication from fellowship at you; and Youth still goes on its way in laughter and gladness; and I thank God that it does. It would be terrible if Christianity ever became as static and dead as the faith of the Pharisee, who crucified Christ because He would not conform to the letter of the law instead of the spirit.

We should remember the simple words, “He will not wrangle.” All Christianity asks is—“prove all things.” If they don’t prove up, don’t take them.

Not long ago, a friend had an experience that illustrates this. For twenty years, she had practically never read the Bible. She had been taught the Bible wrong and when the Bob Ingersoll era came on, ridiculing these vulnerable teachings, she had quit reading the Bible. As a professor, who teaches teachers in the largest teachers’ institution in America, once said to me: “Really I envy you your naïve beliefs! I envy any one who can believe that old stuff”; she had discarded the Bible as a book of myths and fairy tales. She said once “I can’t read it. I simply can’t read it. I read into it the old impossible prejudices and creeds I was taught when I was a girl; and now I know they are not true.” To overcome that mental habit of reading into the Bible what isn’t in it, I suggested Weymouth’s translation in modern phraseology with strictest adherence to linguistic scholarship. We miss some of the old and beautiful phrases in this translation, but we get a translation free of the old controversial doubtful implied interpretations. She began re-reading the Bible as she would any other authentic historic record. In her enthusiasm, she carried her new treasure to a devout elderly saintly friend of the old school. The friend sat up in horror. How dare any one suggest there could be any improvement in the translation of the Bible. The good friend was evidently in devout and blissful self-righteous ignorance of the sources of the Bible. She evidently did not know that the Tindale Bible of 1555 was improved in the King James Version of 1611, and the King James Version was improved in the 1888 version; and there are still phrases and words which linguistic research is improving. And recall that, in old texts from which the Bible is taken, some of the old manuscripts did not use the vowel but left the vowel to be guessed. The good friend—and she was sincere—mistook the pebbles and the small rocks of the trail up the slopes of light for the main foundation and the light ahead; and promptly began hurling those rocks and pebbles at a true seeker after light.

It was a case of a saint’s shadow darkening a seeker’s trail.

APPENDIX A
CONCERNING PAUL’S MISSIONARY TOURS
AND DISPUTED POINTS

“The Christian religion takes its stand upon the ground of history,” says Malden in his Problems of the New Testament; “but there is now a feeling abroad that the authority of the New Testament has been severely shaken by recent studies, if it is not in danger of being destroyed outright.”

Fifteen years ago, such a statement would have been acknowledged as voicing general sentiment, not to be denied; and the liberal wing of scholars would have regarded the statement as grounds for relegating the New Testament in history to the junk heap of picturesque myths, in which there was, of course, some dim reflex of events that had happened, but so embroidered by superstition as to be utterly untrustworthy as a basis for belief founded on facts; while the literalists would have regarded the same general sentiment as grounds for blind belief, for dogmas to embody their blind belief, to which all Christians must subscribe, or be cast out. Indeed, the most excited and least informed of the literalists would have gone even farther as late as 1922—they would have passed laws prohibiting free speech, free thought, the teaching of any brand of belief but their own. The panic reiteration of dogma was a sad evidence of lack of faith in the truth beneath their own beliefs.

Truth needs no bludgeon of civil law or religious threat of exclusion. All it needs is to be put forth with its proofs. He who seeks to establish his own beliefs by disproving some one else’s—is wasting precious time. Truth needs only that its torch be held high aloft lighting the way, and humanity will follow; and the dark illusion called error will vanish as darkness always disperses before light.

But with the War has come a subtle change. The change of front is something deeper than a complete collapse of the scheme on which our civilization seemed founded. It is a something deeper than the fear of death that took such awful toll in the War. It is deeper than a panic stampede from the impasse of our own former conclusions.

It is a determination to get at basic truths and with them rebuild a better civilization. Even if we have to proceed slowly step by step as up a steep trail of rolling stones to higher outlook, we are determined to eliminate error and get at truth, on which we’ll found our faith for the morrow.

The War only hastened a tendency that had been ripening for half a century. It opened doors long closed in the East to linguistic scholars, to archæologist’s spade, to such purely secular scientific expeditions as the American expedition to the deserts of Tartary and Mongolia to find if the original home of mankind and prehistoric life were really in Asia.

Men and women back from the horrors of War somehow vaguely realized that dogmatic religion had not prevented a hideous throwback of civilization to the practices of barbarism. They discovered with horror civilization was only skin deep; and while some came back with hopeless fears that science, in submarine and aeroplane and poisonous gases and armaments of long-range devilish powers undreamed as possible, seemed to have created a monster that would devour civilization, like the destruction of the fabled Atlantis, others came back with a deeper insight. While science had created the monsters of destruction, it had also discovered the angels of mercy in surgery, in aeroplane, in wireless, that seemed almost to rend the veil into the unseen.

So humanity came back from the War seeking foundations for belief in truth facts—sifting error from truth, proving all things, and holding fast only to what it could prove and use; and neither science nor religion asks any other criterion—“Try it; if it works, take it: if it doesn’t, don’t”; and the latest scholarship declares bluntly Christianity takes its stand on the ground of history.

The story of Onesimus will be found in outline in the letter to Philemon. Though Rome had neither Titus’ Triumphant Arch, nor Vespasian’s magnificent colosseum, when Paul was prisoner in the hut near the Three Taverns, one can reconstruct from Josephus and from the Roman historians of the period the character of the Rome in which the young Phrygian slave found himself enmeshed, and how Paul lived with the radiance of a quenchless diamond amid the cesspool slime of a great imperial city in the first stages of its moral decay. How great and hideous was that moral decay could not be told in a book going through the mails. Hints of it can be found in Philostratus’ Apollonius (Oxford, 1912). The references to Nero need no proof. They are well-known history; and if space permitted, the letters, true or false, of Paul and Seneca could be given. These letters can be found in the Apocryphal Books of the New Testament, on which Malden (Oxford), Turner (Oxford), Sir William Ramsay and Bishop Lightfoot have given the latest best views. At first, my impression was Onesimus might have been a colored slave like the Apostle later known as “Niger,” but on looking up the past history of the Phrygian mountain clans, it was easy to see how the constant raids of robber bands from upper Galilee to kidnap the mountain boys and girls and sell them as slaves in the cities of the Roman Road, might have produced a character like Onesimus, and that he was pure Greek. To this day, the Druse descendants of these mountain clans have resisted all enslavement. If captured and reduced to servitude, they become fanatic demons of crime. If left free, they preserve a peculiarly pure form of Christian belief, though primitive and superstitious. Felix’s part in clearing out the robber bands of Galilee is also history and can be found fully given in Josephus though too often when he rescued the kidnapped victims, it was to resell them to enrich himself. The jealousy between the sisters—Drusilla and Bernice—is also given in Josephus. The fact that Felix, who had once been slave himself, rose to marry the royal and proud line of the Herods attests a character of peculiar force. The scene in the Cæsarean Judgment Hall will be found given in the Acts, and still more fully in Josephus. Of later authorities on Paul, besides Malden and Lightfoot, are Robinson of Cambridge, Rendell Harris in his volumes of 1893 and 1911, Parry of Cambridge, 1920, Smith, 1919, and Kersopp Lake in 1916. Students wishing to trace back these modern authorities to the ancients and nearer contemporaries of Paul will find the references in these volumes leading them back to Clement and Ignatius and Iræneus and hosts of others. The name of Paul’s custodian on the ship wrecked en route to Rome is variously spelled, but I have followed the spelling of the Acts. The same name is again found in the fall of the Holy City.

Church historians have been very severe on Bernice, who became a character famous or infamous—as you will—in Titus’ day in Rome. Her angling to ensnare the Emperor, who was a young general at the time, became a joke in the Roman theaters, but would judgments be so severe, I wonder, if censors looked up the age at which this child was married to her first husband, and then to silence evil gossip about the affection between herself and her brother, was married to a second aged husband whom she at once left? She could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen, when married to the second husband. All the Herods notoriously married off their daughters and sisters to strengthen their own insecure thrones. Women were a pawn for empire; and I, for one, would hate to cast a stone at a girl of eighteen, who when she found herself a pawn between lust and power, if she had to pawn herself, aimed at the highest bidder. The name of Bernice’s second husband from whom she fled—Polemo or Polemon—should be noted carefully; for it comes again in the story of Thecla. The royal Roman lady, a relative of the Emperor, was either wife or daughter of this ancient satyr, and her sympathy for Thecla may have arisen from her own similar experiences. Apollonius’ Life gives the brand of the man’s vices. Young Agrippa, the last of the Herod line, while too weak to master circumstances and rule with the iron ruthless hand of Herod the Great, was undoubtedly the most decent of all the evil Herods, and his character as portrayed by Josephus, hardly bears out the evil insinuations of the Jews, who mobbed and would have murdered both him and his sister. Paul’s opinion of the young man, we get in the Acts, and Agrippa’s reaction to that appeal does not bear out proof of a degenerate youth. “Almost,” says the boyish prince, he could not have been much over twenty, “you would make me a Christian.” All that is merely hinted here of the Daphne Gardens is mild compared to the truth that can be found in any Roman record of the day. The lure of the Daphne Gardens drew many Romans to spend the winter at Antioch, with fatal results to the morale of officers and governors; and after the fall of Jerusalem compelled the change of the headquarters of the Christian church from Antioch to Ephesus. The best testimony to the influence of the new faith in counteracting the evil of those Gardens is found in the charges and countercharges when the temples were destroyed, that the Christians had burned them. It was not with earthly fires they had burned them but with the divine fires of the faith.

In one secular account of the return of the Roman troops after the sack of Jerusalem will be found mention of a shipwreck almost similar to that which overtook Paul on his journey to Rome; and in early Grecian statuary and pottery will be found ships “trussed” or “frapped” by ropes to keep the timbers from going to pieces just as recorded in the Acts. Lucian’s history describes the corn ships of the period; and Josephus’ account of a wreck is an exact parallel of Paul’s experiences, except that Josephus’ ship carried six hundred passengers. “Corn,” it need hardly be told here, was not our modern corn but such grains as wheat and barley. Palestine is now known to have been the original area of the first wheat cultivated in the world.

One very pointed question occurs here. Where Josephus refers to Christ, his words are: “Now there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it is lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works . . . he was the Christ . . . and when Pilate . . . had condemned him to the cross . . . he appeared alive again the third day. . . .”[^[3]]

[3]	By some scholars, this paragraph is regarded as a forgery.

And he hints that the destruction of Jerusalem was divine chastisement for the murder of James, the disciple. His words are: “The brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James . . . he (Herod) delivered to be stoned.” Luke’s account of this in the Acts is: “Herod the king stretched forth his hand to vex certain of the church; and killed James, the brother of John, with the sword.” The two accounts do not seem to agree, but recall all men wore swords in these days, even the disciples—see the cutting of Malchus’ servant’s ear—and in a rabble stoning a man to death both accounts may be true. That being Josephus’ belief, why did he not refer more frankly to Christ as the Messiah of Jewish expectation? That has been a puzzling question that has cast discredit on Josephus as historian of the Roman era. Yet it would not cast discredit on him if one paused to examine the circumstances under which his history was written. He had been a Pharisee of the Pharisees, in the best sense, and a Zealot of the Zealots for the defence of Hebrew rights; but when he saw that Judea had not a chance on earth against Roman power—that Rome could give order and law where the Hebrews, themselves, could not, like Isaiah before him, he counseled coöperation with the strong power rather than the opposition that would inevitably end in national extinction. In the siege of Jerusalem, like Agrippa, he went over to the Roman side against the lawless robber bands, who held and plundered the Holy City. He did everything in his power to save the city from total destruction by imploring its surrender till he was stoned away by the fighters on the walls. When the Holy City was conquered and totally destroyed but for the Herod Towers on the west, he was taken to Rome and given quarters in the royal palace, and wrote his record of the Roman era in Palestine for Titus and Vespasian, as their guest and pensioner. As historian in an era when emperor worship was being set up by Rome throughout the Empire, he could hardly issue an official history under Roman approval that acknowledged Pilate, the Roman governor, had crucified, at the behest of the Jews, the unacknowledged Messiah. We wish for his own sake he had frankly given record of the Christ, whose career he must have known in detail in a land not much larger than Vermont, or say, about a hundred and seventy-five miles long by sixty broad, which was the area of the Jewish Palestine in his day. He gives full record of all the High Priests and the Sanhedrim to the cutting of their throats in the Aqueduct twenty-five years after Christ’s death. He was in and about Jerusalem during the most of Christ’s life. Familiar with every foot of Palestine, that life he must have known; but he is silent because he was the pensioner of the government that had consented to Christ’s death.

That Paul and Josephus and Apollos must have known one another is self-evident. Each was a great student of the law and of philosophy. Each was familiar with the studies of the great philosophies of Alexandria. Paul quotes from them continually. Paul and Josephus had both studied in Jerusalem. Paul and Apollos had both spent their boyhood in Tarsus. Apollos seems to have been the richest of the three, and a traveled gnostic. Josephus was soldier till he laid down arms in Jerusalem to become historian in Rome, and he was a liberal Pharisee. Paul was fanatical student of the Hebrew law till he became follower of Christ. That Paul was tentmaker did not place a social chasm between him and the other two; for every Hebrew boy had to learn a trade to forefend against want in perilous times.

Solely because it would require a library of books to give the corroborative data of Paul’s life in Rome and in Cæsarea, the data bearing on Onesimus’s story must here be condensed to notes for reference.

The Spring Festival in the Roman Empire occurred at almost the same period of the year as the Jewish Passover and the Christian crucifixion; so that the tortures inflicted on Christ and the later Christian martyrs at this period were really to glut the lust for blood that was part of the old pagan worship. Free gifts for charity to the mob had degenerated into a bribe to the populace in place of justice. Rome was no longer Roman. It was a composite of the known world. Though Rome gave her Empire good laws and stable government, as Apollonius, the sage, pointed out to the General, Vespasian, she could not ensure the execution of those laws for two reasons: if she appointed local governors or kings, like the Herods, to hold loyalty, she could not prevent them exacting extortionate taxes for their own wealth; if she appointed Roman governors like Pilate, they could not speak the languages of the far-flung provinces and had to depend on underlings of native birth, who perverted Roman justice. The Roman Empire was falling to pieces from over-extension. Democracy was degenerating to mobocracy and mobocracy to the tyranny of the Army.

Would the old Idumean guard have been executed for the loss of his prisoner in the shipwreck? He most certainly would; for Rome was as ruthless to her own, as to her provincials.

The object in kidnapping a beautiful slave can be found in the four lives that have been written of Apollonius. We sometimes despair of the world because religion seems to have done so little to change men. The despair is the voice of unbelief. Read the old records. The tortures of Thecla were mild compared to the martyrdom of many a Christian in the pleasure gardens of Nero, where the victims were dipped in oil and then tied to stakes, as torches, in ridicule of the claim that they were the torch bearers of light and glad news.

Rome standing for irresistible brute power, was ever jealous of the cultured Greeks; and the Greeks returned scorn for scorn—which would explain why Onesimus, a Greek runaway, was friendless in Rome.

By the time of Paul’s first imprisonment, 63-64 A.D., Nero’s madness was acknowledged in Rome. The great fire, of which Paul and Seneca corresponded, took place in 64 A.D., but Rome, rolling in wealth and luxury, did not want to upset prosperity by destroying good times; and only after Nero’s suicide and three years of turbulence, when the Army loomed as a terrible menace, was Vespasian, the strong general, called to become Emperor.

Regarding the Three Taverns, all through the Empire at this time, the keepers of the wine shops were women; and in the East, they were called Rahabs—a name with evil import to us to-day; but all the Rahabs were not harpies—as witness the Rahab of Jericho in Joshua’s day.

Fuller details of the equinoctial gales at Crete will be given on the chapter on Apollos and John.

In Malta, or Melita, is St. Paul’s Bay, to this day commemorating the site of his landing and shipwreck, just as Lud gave London its name, and the myth of Lud points back to a personality behind the myth.

The songs of the Arabs are the same to-day as in Paul’s time and can be found in Newman’s Babylon and Nineveh.

The whole story of the gladiatorial combat in Cæsarea, to which old Julius refers, will be found in Josephus. Both sides fought till the arena swam in blood to the ankles, and of one side not a man was left alive. Other victor slaves were given their freedom.

Felix, like Herod the Great, tried to clean out the robber bands from the caves of Galilee; but Felix was charged with selling the rescued victims as slaves to accumulate a fortune for himself, though he had, himself, been slave. This can all be found in Josephus with the full story of the Herod family and their perplexing intermarriages and repudiations of marriages. Bernice’s flight from her old husband was by pretense a religious vow, but openly in the theater of Rome, she was twitted with taking the vow to escape her spouse.