From the edge of the city the hill held its magnificent burden of columns and towers and temples (one thousand slaves waiting at one shrine), and a citadel so thoroughly impregnable that Gibraltar is a heap of sand compared with it. Amid all that strength and magnificence Corinth stood and defied the world.
Oh, it was not to rustics who had never seen any thing grand that Paul preached in Corinth. They had heard the best music that had come from the best instruments in all the world; they had heard songs floating from morning porticos and melting in evening groves; they had passed their whole lives among pictures and sculpture and architecture and Corinthian brass, which had been molded and shaped until there was no chariot wheel in which it had not sped, and no tower in which it had not glittered, and no gateway that it had not helped to adorn.
Ah, it was a bold act for Paul to stand there amid all that and say:
“All this is nothing. These sounds that come from the Temple of Neptune are not music, compared with the harmonies of which I speak. These waters rushing in the basin of Pyrene are not pure. These statues of Bacchus and Mercury are not exquisite. Your citadel of Acro-Corinthus is not strong, compared with that which I offer to the poorest slave who puts down his burden at that brazen gate. You Corinthians think this is a splendid city; you think you have heard all sweet sounds and seen all beautiful sights. But, I tell you, eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.” Following up Paul’s line of thought, we may say the Bible, now, is the scaffolding to the rising Temple, but when the building is done there will be no further use for the scaffolding.
PHARAOH.
One of the most intensely interesting things I saw in Egypt was Pharaoh of olden times—the very Pharaoh who oppressed the Israelites. The inscription on his sarcophagus and the writing on his mummy bandages prove beyond controversy that he was the Pharaoh of Bible times. All the Egyptologists and the explorations agree that it is the old scoundrel himself.
Visible are the very teeth with which he gnashed against the Israelitish brick makers. There are the sockets of the merciless eyes with which he looked upon the over-burdened people of God. There is the hair that floated in the breeze off the Red Sea. There are the very lips with which he commanded the children of Israel to make bricks without straw.
Thousands of years afterward, when the wrappings of the mummy were unrolled, old Pharaoh lifted up his arm as if in imploration; but his skinny bones can not again clutch his shattered scepter. He is a dead lion.