This is how I account for his familiar knowledge of the heathen poets. Some of the ancient Fathers consider that the Greeks were under a special dispensation of Providence, preparatory to the Gospel, though not directly from heaven 15 as the Jewish was. Now St. Paul seems, if I may say it, to partake of this feeling; distinctly as he teaches that the heathen are in darkness, and in sin, and under the power of the Evil One, he will not allow that they are beyond the eye of Divine 20 Mercy. On the contrary, he speaks of God as "determining their times and the limits of their habitation," that is, going along with the revolutions of history and the migrations of races, "in order that they should seek Him, if haply they 25 may feel after Him and find Him," since, he continues, "He is not far from every one of us." Again, when the Lycaonians would have worshiped him, he at once places himself on their level and reckons himself among them, and at 30 the same time speaks of God's love of them, heathens though they were. "Ye men," he cries, "why do ye these things? We also are mortals, men like unto you;" and he adds that God in times past, though suffering all nations to walk in their own ways, "nevertheless left not Himself 5 without testimony, doing good from heaven, giving rains and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness." You see, he says, "_our_ hearts," not "your," as if he were one of those Gentiles; and he dwells in a kindly human way 10 over the food, and the gladness which food causes, which the poor heathen were granted. Hence it is that he is the Apostle who especially insists on our all coming from one father, Adam; for he had pleasure in thinking that all men were 15 brethren. "God hath made," he says, "all mankind of one;" "as in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive." I will cite but one more passage from the great Apostle on the same subject, one in which he tenderly contemplates 20 the captivity, and the anguish, and the longing, and the deliverance of poor human nature. "The expectation of the creature," he says, that is, of human nature, "waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made 25 subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him that made it subject, in hope; because it shall be delivered from the servitude of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that every creature 30 groaneth and travaileth in pain until now."