the Emperor and starving Greeklings were ready to practise any and every profession, the conservatives in Greece lamented the introduction of such peculiarly Roman sports as the gladiatorial shows, of which the remains of the Roman amphitheatre at Corinth are a memorial. The conquering and the conquered races had reacted on one another; the Romans had become more literary; the Greeks had become more material. It was at this period, about 54 A.D., that an event occurred which profoundly modified the future of the Greek race. In, or a little before, that year St Paul arrived at Athens, and, stirred by the idolatry of the city, delivered his famous speech in the midst of the Areopagos. The unvarnished narrative of the Acts of the Apostles does not disguise the failure of the great teacher’s first attempt to convert the argumentative Greeks, to whom the new gospel seemed “foolishness.” But “Dionysios the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them,” believed, thus forming the small beginnings of the Church which grew up there in later days. From Athens the Apostle proceeded to Corinth, where he stayed “a year and six months.” The capital of Achaia and mart of Greece was a fine field for his missionary labours. The Roman colony, which had now been in existence almost a century, had become the home of commerce and the luxury which usually accompanies it. The superb situation, commanding the two seas, had attracted a cosmopolitan population, including many Jews, and the vices of the East and the West seemed to meet on the Isthmus—the Port Said of the Roman Empire. We may trace in the language of the two Epistles, which the Apostle addressed to the Corinthians later on, the main characteristics of the seat of Roman rule in Greece. The allusions to the fights with wild beasts, to the Isthmian games, to the long hair of the Corinthian dandies, to the easy virtue of the Corinthian women, all show what was the daily life of the most flourishing city of Greece in the middle of the first century. Yet even at Corinth many were persuaded by the arguments of the tent-maker, and a Christian community was founded at the port of Kenchreæ on the Saronic Gulf. At the outset the converts were of humble origin, like “the house of Stephanas, the first fruits of Achaia”; but Gaius, Tertius, Quartus, and “Erastus, the chamberlain of the city,” were persons of better position. That a man like Gallio, the brother of Seneca the philosopher and uncle of Lucan the poet, a man whom the other great poet of the day, Statius, has described as “sweetness” itself, was at that time governor of Achaia, shows the importance attached by the Romans to their Greek province. St Paul had not the profound classical learning of the governor’s talented family, but the two Epistles to the Thessalonians, which he wrote during this first stay at Corinth, have conferred an undying literary interest on the capital of Roman Greece. Silas and Timotheus joined the Apostle at