The managers of the vessel, pretending they want to look over the side of the ship and undergird it, get into the small boat, expecting in it to escape; but Paul sees through the sham, and he tells them that if they go off in the boat it will be the death of them.
The vessel strikes! The planks spring! The timbers crack! The vessel parts in the thundering surge! Oh, what struggling for life! Here they leap from plank to plank. There they go under as if they would never rise, but, catching hold of a timber, they come floating and panting on it to the beach.
Here strong swimmers spread their arms through the waves until their chins plow the sand, and they rise up, and ring out their wet locks on the beach. When the roll of the ship is called, two hundred and seventy-six people answer to their names.
Paul was the most illustrious merely human being the world has ever known. He walked the streets of Athens and preached from yonder pile of rocks, Mars Hill.
Though more classic associations are connected with Athens than with any other city under the sun—because here Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Pericles, Herodotus, Pythagoras, Xenophon and Praxiteles wrote, chiseled, taught, thundered or sung—yet, in my mind, all those men and their teachings were eclipsed by Paul and the Gospel he preached there and in the near-by city of Corinth. Standing yesterday on the old fortress at Corinth, the Acro-Corinthus, out from the ruin at its base arose in my imagination the old city—just as Paul saw it.
I have been told that, for splendor, the world beholds no such wonder today as that ancient Corinth, standing on an isthmus washed by two seas—the one sea bringing the commerce of Europe, the other sea bringing the commerce of Asia.
From her wharves, in the construction of which entire kingdoms had been absorbed, war galleys with three banks of oars pushed out and confounded the navy yards of all the world.
Huge handed machinery, such as modern invention can not equal, lifted ships from the sea on one side and transported them on trucks across the isthmus and sat them down in the sea on the other side.
The revenue officers of the city went down through the olive groves that lined the beach to collect a tariff from all nations. The youth of all peoples sported in her isthmian games and the beauty of all lands sat in her theaters, walked her porticos and threw itself upon the altar of her stupendous dissipations. Column, statue and temple bewildered the beholder. There were white marble fountains into which, from apertures at the side, there gushed waters everywhere known for health-giving qualities. Around these basins, twisted into wreaths of stone, there were all the beauties of sculpture and architecture; while standing, as if to guard the costly display, was a statue of Hercules of burnished Corinthian brass. Vases of terra cotta adorned the cemeteries of the dead—vases so costly that Julius Cæsar was not satisfied till he had captured them for Rome. Armed officials paced up and down to see that no statue was defaced, pedestal overthrown or bas-relief touched.