Voices; Birth-Marks; The Man and the Elephant

by Mathew Joseph Holt

Sunday, August 9, was known as John Calvin day; and John Calvin Campbell conducted the afternoon service. He was mentally and physically in his prime; a man of great spirituality, great mental force, great voice and untirable physically. To his preaching was attributed the beginning of The Great Awakening, now sweeping Kentucky and marvelous tales were told of him and his work. As the crowd was very great, arrangements were made for others to address overflow meetings, including Barton Stone and Robert Marshall, both of whom were very able preachers; but when it became evident that the crowd wished to hear Calvin Campbell and that the range of his voice was such that all might hear him if closely grouped, the other meetings were dismissed and all gathered to hear him. It was said that more than eight thousand persons listened in marked attention to his sermon.

The scripture lesson was taken from the seventeenth chapter of Acts. His text was “Paul in Athens” or “Worshipping Our Own Handiwork” and a portion of the sermon is preserved.

“Paul, driven from Thessalonica, departed for Corinth. On the way he stopped at Athens waiting for Timothy and Silas.

“Visit the grave of the great, the tomb of one of the Pharaohs, and though you know the body is long since dust, you feel the spirit of a reflective greatness. Thus Paul visiting Athens must have been impressed by the mother of art, eloquence and philosophy. Decadent Athens, her liberty gone, paying tribute to Caesar. Even a Caesar could not take away the heritage of the children [pg 301] of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; this her citizens alone could rob themselves of; and this they were doing by worshipping false gods, by following the precepts of an Epicurean philosophy, and by vain, wordy babbling. They still thought Athens the abode of wisdom, and like children of the great, still thought themselves the world’s great thinkers and philosophers because their fathers had been; when as Paul puts it, ‘They spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing;’ piling words on words, metaphysical and unfathomable; and knowing nothing of the beginning of wisdom, which is to fear the Lord and depart from evil.

“Paul’s biographer tells us that, ‘His spirit was stirred when he saw the city full of idols;’ gods of gold and silver and stone, with even a shrine to THE UNKNOWN GOD.

“Though such sights would have stimulated our curiosity, Paul had seen enough. There was work to do; he could not remain silent; and spoke first in the synagogues and the Agora, the market place. Then he was taken to the Areopagus. North of the market place was the Areopagus or Mars Hill, a spur of the Acropolis which towered three hundred feet higher and on which stood the citadel, the Parthenon and the Temple of Winged Victory. Whether Paul spoke from the top of Mars Hill or the Athenian Council, which having in earlier days met on the Areopagus and for that reason was so called, is immaterial. We know he spoke to an Athenian audience, who were curious to hear from a Jewish Socrates, a new man on a new subject, THE UNKNOWN GOD.

“From the summary of his discourse we know it was framed upon that pedagogical dictum that one should proceed from the known to the unknown. That he talked first of their gods, of their poets, of their belief that there [pg 302] was an unknown god; then of a universal God, unknown to them, but known to him, of Christ, of the resurrection. He quoted from their poet Epimenides; and considering the subject, we have a right to assume that he quoted from his own prophet, Isaiah. How a man taketh an ash log, and with part thereof he roasteth flesh ‘and is satisfied; yea he warmeth himself and saith, Aha I am warm, I have seen the fire; and the residue thereof he maketh a god, even a graven image; he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me, for thou art my god.’

“But man is wrong. God dwelleth not in temples made with hands. God is not an image of gold or silver or stone; but himself made the earth and all things therein; and in him we live and move and have our being.

“When Paul talked to them, not of gods of appetite and ambition, which sometimes rule in our hearts, or of hand made gods, such as decorated the streets of Athens and were enshrined in their temples, which even while we worship have a habit of disintegrating to dust and ashes, but of the Divine Creator, the Universal God, the Bountiful Giver, the Almighty Ruler, the Unseen Spirit, the Tender Father, the Righteous Judge, they called him a babbler; and when he spoke of the Eternal Son of God and the resurrection, many of them mocked, some said we will hear you again—and a few believed.

“Until he came to Athens, the opposition he had met was Jewish prejudice and mob violence; it was a tangible thing; but at Athens he encountered something harder to overcome, philosophy, conceit, contempt. Having delivered his message, discouraged, he departed in sorrow.