indeed of your present reverence, but one of whose nature and operations and demands upon you, you know nothing.” Respecting the existence of such an altar, we are told that the Athenians through the very excess of their idolatry (which led them to look for gods in every place and circumstance, and to ascribe every event, good or ill, to the influence of some deity) had on more than one occasion, when an unusually severe pestilence had visited them, which they could not connect with any of their known gods, conjectured that it must be the doing of some god whom they did not propitiate with sacrifices, and, failing to find out who it was, and yet fearing to neglect his worship, had caused altars _without names_ to be erected, and offerings to be made to the nameless being; and that in course of time these altars came to be described, and to bear a corresponding inscription, as severally the altars of an “unknown god.” There is no reason to suppose that they meant to exalt that god above the others, that they had any clearly defined ideas of the general operations of one unknown Being, much less that they meant under that title to worship the GOD of the Jews; but with a kind of natural instinct, a very vague feeling that something beyond and above what they knew, existed, they had stumbled, as it were, in the dark, upon a real truth, which was now to be revealed to them. “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship—Whom you are right in worshipping, but of Whose proper worship you know nothing, Him declare I, and reveal unto you.” You know how St. Paul went on, meeting without mentioning the errors of the various sects of philosophers, that there was indeed a GOD who made the world, and all things therein; that He was not a mere idol of wood and stone (“dwelling not in temples made with hands”), that He had no such passions, and no such needs as they ascribed to Jove and Mars and their deified men (“Neither is worshipped with men’s hands as though He needed anything”), that He was not a sentiment—an ideal thing—a being bound by fate—an indifferent spectator of men’s ways. “He giveth to all life and breath and all things.” “In Him we live and move and have our being.” “He hath appointed a day in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom He hath chosen;” to whom He has borne such signal testimony in raising Him from the dead; in whose name, and at whose command, I come to tell you of the resurrection from the dead, and to call you out of the ignorance which GOD will no longer wink at, and to urge upon you repentance and preparation for judgment. So he spoke of the unknown GOD. Some mocked, and refused to understand; some were in doubt and difficulty, and wished to hear more; others began to know Him who had hitherto been unknown, and clave unto the Apostle, and believed. And shortly after Paul departed from Athens, never, as far as we know, to visit again!