Much of this is necessarily conjectural. But 'whatever length of time had elapsed since Saul came from Jerusalem to Tarsus, and however that time had been employed by him; whether he had already founded any of those churches in his native Cilicia, which we read of soon after;1 whether he had there undergone any of those manifold labours and sufferings recorded by himself, but omitted by St. Luke; whether by active intercourse with the Gentiles, by study of their literature, by travelling, by discoursing with their philosophers, he had been making himself acquainted with their opinions and prejudices, and so preparing his mind for the work that was before him; or whether he had been waiting in silence for the call of God's providence, praying for guidance from above, reflecting on the condition of the Gentiles, and gazing more and more closely on the plan of the world's redemption,-however this may be, it must have been an eventful day when Barnabas, having come across the sea from Seleucia, or round by the defiles of Mount Amanus, suddenly appeared in the streets of Tarsus. The last time the two friends met was in Jerusalem. All that they then hoped, and probably more than they then thought possible, had occurred. God had granted to the Gentiles repentance unto life.3 Barnabas had seen "the grace of God" with his own eyes at Antioch; and under his own teaching, a great multitude "5 had been "added to the Lord." But he needed the assistance of one whose wisdom was higher than his own, whose zeal was an example to all, and whose peculiar mission had been miraculously declared.'

66

Saul doubtless accompanied his old friend with great readiness to Antioch; and the result of a year of their joint labour in that city was last evening noticed.

The fact of Barnabas going to Tarsus to seek Paul is very suggestive. When Paul went to Jerusalem, after his conversion, the body of the disciples were afraid of him. They distrusted his sincerity. But Barnabas had a deeper insight into character. He 3 Acts xi. 18.

1 Acts xv. 41.

4 Acts xi. 23.

2

2 Cor. xi.

5 Acts xi. 24.

6 Howson, in Life and Writings of St. Paul, i. 128.

appears to have perceived at once, not only the glorious transformation effected in the man, but the vast importance of such a convert to the Christian cause. And when, on visiting Antioch, Barnabas saw the great work there going on among the learned and polished people of that gay capital, he felt that Paul was just the man specially fitted for that field of labour. His accomplished scholarship, his logical acumen, his profound knowledge of human nature, his zeal, his courage, and the prestige of his name, were calculated to make a deep impression on the people of Antioch. Barnabas evidently thought so, and he was not disappointed. The new sect was increased and organized on a broad and liberal basis. Paul's great work, as the Apostle of the Gentiles, now commenced in real earnest ; and we find that, at the very outset, he cast aside all Jewish prejudice, all feelings of race and nationality, and boldly propagated a religion whose doctrines, rites, and moral precepts were suited, as they were intended, for all mankind. This religion became so clearly and sharply defined under the wise teaching and superintendence of Paul, that it could no longer be confounded with Judaism. It now, for the first time, forced itself upon the stage of the world's history as a distinct faith, and its votaries received the distinctive name of Christians.'

Forty-sixth Week-Fourth Day.

ANTIOCH.-ACTS XI. 26.

As the first city in which a church gathered directly from the Gentiles was founded, and as the spot where the illustrious name of 'CHRISTIAN' was first heard, Antioch has special claims to our regard, and has the right to be looked upon as the mother church of Gentile Christendom.

If the map be consulted, it will be seen that Antioch is situated nearly in the angle where the coast line of Cilicia running eastward, and that of Palestine extending northward, are brought to an abrupt meeting. It will also be perceived that, more or less parallel to each of these coasts, there is a line of mountains not far from the sea, which are brought into con

tact with each other near the same angle, the principal breach in the continuity of either of them being the valley of the Orontes, which passes by Antioch. The first of these mountain ranges is the Taurus, so often mentioned by the writers of Greece and Rome; the other is the Lebanon, a name rendered familiar to us by frequent allusions in the Scriptures.

The city established in this spot is not mentioned in the Old Testament, as it was not founded till some time after the close of the Hebrew canon. The Jewish commentators indeed make it to have been the same with the Riblah, which was the headquarters of Nebuchadnezzar at the time that Jerusalem was taken by his generals, and to which Zedekiah was brought as a captive to meet his proud conqueror.1 If this were so, the place would be of very ancient date, Riblah being named in the time of Moses; but there is no real foundation for this identification of Antioch (by the name of Daphne) with Riblah, and there are some serious objections to it. In the Jewish history, which, in Josephus and in the books of the Maccabees, fills the interval between the Old Testament and the New, Antioch is very frequently mentioned, being the seat of that great power to which the Jews were for a long time more or less subject, and against which they were sometimes in arms for their religious and political rights. That power was the Greek empire in Syria, commonly called that of the Seleucidæ, from its founder Seleucus, one of the generals who shared among them the empire of Alexander. It was to this personage that Antioch owed its origin, at least as a great metropolitan city; for it was founded by him expressly as the capital of his western Asiatic states, and as such it soon acquired a standing as one of the first among the great cities of the earth, which, under various governments, it maintained for nearly a thousand years. Seleucus was a great founder of cities; but he had a weakness for calling them after the names of his own family to a degree of iteration, which stored up some perplexities for geographers of future times. To sixteen cities he gave the name of Antiochia after his father; and of these this Antiochia 1 2 Kings xxv. 6. 2 Num. xxxiv. II.

on the Orontes was destined to become the chief. Seven cities he called after himself, Seleucia, of which the one upon the Tigris-destined, as the capital of his eastern states, to rival old Babylon-became the chief; while another, distinguished as Seleucia Pieria, at the mouth of the Orontes, became the port of Antioch. Five cities he called after his mother, Laodicea; three from the name of his first wife, Apamea; and one from his second wife, Stratoniceia.

Antioch, like London, rose to the extent and populousness which it eventually attained, by the accretion of several townships to the original city. There were four townships in all. The first, built by Seleucus, was peopled chiefly by his removing to it the inhabitants of the neighbouring town of Antigonia, which his unhappy rival Antigonus had intended for his metropolis; the second grew out of the overgrowth of the first, and was peopled by settlers from it; the third was built, or at least consolidated, about fifty years after the first, by the second Seleucus (Callinicus); and the fourth about forty years after that, by his grandson Antiochus Epiphanes, the notorious persecutor of the Jews. Each of these quarters or townships had its own wall, and all the four were enclosed by a common' wall of great strength.

The cities just named, and a prodigious number of others that the first Seleucus founded, owed their origin chiefly to his energy and perseverance, in carrying out the projects of Alexander for the Hellenization of his Asiatic empire, by sowing it with Greek and Macedonian colonies, which might become so many centres of Greek civilisation and refinement. And how well this object was realized, is shown in the Acts of the Apostles, by the essentially Grecian character of the incidents that come under our notice in the visits of Saul to the cities of Asia, as well as by the allusions to Greek usages, customs, and ideas, which pervade such of the Epistles as are addressed to the churches in Asia. The measures of Seleucus and his successors were not, indeed, the sole causes of this result, but they contributed very materially towards it. The great difficulty of Seleucus was to find inhabitants for the cities he founded.

Sometimes, as we have seen, he adopted, under mitigating circumstances, the barbarous old oriental policy of removing the inhabitants of an existing town to his new city. But he was by far too enlightened a man not to discern the essential impolicy of this course; and his more usual plan, and certainly a far better one, was to attract inhabitants, by offering premiums to those who were willing to become citizens. This accounts for the extraordinary privileges which the Jews enjoyed in all of these cities—having equal rights, in all respects, with the first class of inhabitants, the Macedonians. Higher privileges than these could not be given; and that their value was well understood in Judea, is evinced by the large bodies of Jews which, in and before the time of the apostles, formed a prominent part of the civic communities thus collected.

This was particularly the case at Antioch, not only from the wealth and importance of the city, but from the commercial advantages it offered to a people who had already addicted themselves largely to mercantile pursuits. For, by its harbour of Seleucia, Antioch was in communication with all the trade of the Mediterranean; and, through the open country behind the Lebanon, it could be conveniently approached by the caravans of Mesopotamia and Arabia. There was, in fact, everything in the situation and circumstances of the city to render it a place of most miscellaneous concourse; and in the apostolic age, it was an oriental Rome, in which all the forms of civilised life in the empire found some representative. It was hence well suited to become the centre of apostolical movements for the diffusion of the gospel among the Gentilesamong all sorts and conditions of men.'

The celebrated names of Ignatius and Chrysostom are connected with the Christian history of Antioch: Ignatius, who is said to have conversed with the apostles, and who, at the beginning of the second century, witnessed a good confession before Trajan, at Antioch, where he was bishop, and whence he was sent to be given to the lions in the amphitheatre at Rome; Chrysostom, who was a native of this city, and who, in the fourth century, uttered within the walls of its great