Yet here we are brought to the humbling conviction of the weakness of man without Christianity. Men had this combined motive for ages. What was the result on the heart and the life? What effect had even the teaching of the wisest? The masses were still sunk in superstition and sin. The farthest advanced were only looking at a height which they could not hope to reach. The most acute thinkers were often in doubt. We see the extremes meeting. Superstition, in its most debased and enthralling forms, stands boldly in the front of the most exalted teachings of philosophy. What could mere philosophy do? She could perhaps find employment for the minds of a few of the most gifted. But what had she to give as food for the hungry souls of the multitude? The starving spirits asked for bread, and she gave them the stone of an unattainable moral excellence. They asked for fish, and she gave them the stinging serpent of pleasure and self-enjoyment[9]. In Athens the human mind reached its zenith, yet could not rise to happiness or peace. How unspeakably was the world blessed, therefore, when the cross of Christ was raised as the means whereby man might reach heaven. Never before was such life-giving truth offered to the Athenians, as the good news which was now brought by the Apostle who “preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection.” This was the subject of St Paul’s daily discourses in the Agora. Instead of blind theories and abstract ideas, he placed before them a person;—a divine person, who had left an example of how to act and how to suffer;—a Saviour, who had died to open the way to happiness for others; who had risen again to show that his sacrifice was complete and sufficient. The Epicureans wondered and yet were unbelieving, while they heard of one who was Lord of all, that he thought of men’s lives and cared for their needs. It was strange and unwelcome to them, who held that happiness was enjoyment and freedom from pain, to hear one proclaimed as worthy of their admiration and trust, who was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” who even gloried in His sufferings and death; and who had bid those that would be his disciples, take up their cross and follow him, by resisting and subduing self and pride. The Stoics heard the tidings (for “the porch” was in the Agora), and they, stern and self-reliant, were surprised, yet not pleased, to hear of one who led a life of self-sacrifice for others’ sake; who was meek and lowly; and who had sent his messenger to declare to those very self-satisfied philosophers, that the only way to real virtue for them, as for the rest of mankind, was by trusting in the merits of another, and by a change of heart through His divine power. “The resurrection” was also equally strange and equally contrary to the ideas of the one sect, who regarded death as annihilation; and of the other, who looked on it as the absorption of men into universal nature of which they were component parts.