Article January 13, 1912 Issue

The most tragic and touching scene in the eventful career...

R. Stanhope Easterday

Goshen (Ind.) News-Times

The most tragic and touching scene in the eventful career of Paul, that sturdy apostle of the Gentiles, was not any one of his harrowing experience with the elements, with wild beasts, or with wilder opponents in human guise; it was that soul-stirring episode on Mars' hill, on the occasion when he preached to the philosophers of the Grecian metropolis. The cream of the world's learning was assembled there, and yet among the countless altars there had to be one "to the unknown god." It was characteristic of that people that they "spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing," yet it was necessary for a humble follower of the despised Nazarene to tell them that God was all around and about them and ever available. The pathos and force of the incident, and the thing which most stirred Paul's heart, was their touching ignorance of this essential of man's being and their mute yearning to know, expressed in that significant inscription.

But have we not a reasonable parallel, in our own time? Are not we as ruthlessly buffeted with divers winds of doctrine, religious beliefs and laws of health, so called? Are we not as a people halting today between the extremes of epicurean liberalism, tending to laxity of morals, and stoical conservatism, blinding us to wholesome good? Are we not today, as in Paul's time, in a strait between the innate desire to know good and the prohibitive belief that the infinite is incomprehensible? And does it not all tend to pitiable confusion and despair, rather than to the legitimate hope of peace and assurance offered to humanity in the gospels? Are we not, indeed, still seeking, like the Athenians, some new thing in religion and medicine? The indications are that the answer must be in the affirmative, and yet Solomon has said, "There is no new thing under the sun."

It is innately characteristic of the human mind that, in the hour of direst extremity, when all else has failed, it instinctively calls out, "God help me." This tendency among mortals to make the last and final appeal to the divine source for surcease, a tendency manifesting itself in all classes of people and in all stages of civilization, in the pagan as well as in the Christian, in the degenerate as well as in the man of morals, in the ignorant as well as in the intellectual, irrespective of creed, system, or environment, contradictory and inexplicable as it may seem, is deeply significant. It at once sweeps away both boasted and tentative agnosticism, it establishes irrefutably the idea of an undestroyed and indestructible relationship between God and man, it attests the spark of divinity shining through humanity, and above all else it establishes the fact that despite the blighting influence of prevalent belief, from Adam down to the immediate present, in an existence apart from God or of life as in matter, in which latter there can be no God, simple faith has continued in some faint sense the potent factor in the human economy. In other words, humanity can still, can here and now, breathe at least in the hour of need the prayer, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."

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