“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. “We have heard many times the expression, ‘When Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of war.’ That day in the Areopagus Paul started a tug of war that shall continue long after we and what we know of the tangible handiwork of man is in dust and ashes; started it because his spirit was troubled at beholding that the world’s greatest city intellectually, was given over to idol worship. His discourse on Mars Hill, or if you prefer in the Athenian Council, started the conflict between pagan philosophies and Christianity; and while Christianity prevailed, the converts from paganism brought into it too much of the metaphysical, the doctrinal, and that simple faith become contaminated by what was borrowed from these philosophies. “The Epicureans taught that pleasure is the only possible end of rational action. They believed that everything started from an atom. That the gods were not interested in men and that there was no future life. “The Stoics believed in the school of philosophy founded by Zeno. That man should submit to the inevitable; they were fatalists; did not believe in exhibiting joy or sorrow; lived lives of sternness and austerity and many believed in the immortality of the soul.