Rensselaer Republican, Volume 24, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 November 1891 — MARS HILL. [ARTICLE]

MARS HILL.

"The Acropolis, andlts‘Wonderful Architecture. ' r ■ The Monarch or All Ruing, Where Thunder holt* of lroth are Proclaimed Through All Ageg. ... . ' Rev. Dr. Talmage preached at Brooks’ll last Sunday. Text: Acts xvii, 16. After a few opening TiF' marks he said: We come now to the Acropolis. It is a rock about two miles in circumference at the base and 1,000 feet at the top and 300 feet high. On it has been crowded more elaborate architecture and sculture than in any other place under the whole heavens. Originally a fortress afterward a congregation of temples and statues and pillars, their ruins an enchantment from which no observer ever breaks away. Lord Elgin, the English Ambassaof the Sultan to remove from the Acropolis fallen pieces of the building, but he took from the building to England the finest.statues, removing them at the expense of SBOO,OOO. A storm overthrew many of the statues of the Acropolis. Morosini, the General, attempted to remove from a pediment the sculptured car and horses of Victory, but the clumsy, machinery dropped it, and all was lost. The Turks turned the building into a powder magazine, where the Venitian guns dropped a fire that by explosion sent the columns flying in the air and falling cracked and splintered.

But after all that time and storm and war and iconoclasm have effected the Acropolis is the monarch of all ruins, and before it bow the learning, the genius, the poetry, the art the history of the ages. I saw ilt it .■ was thousauds of yefy:_s ago. I had read so much about it and dreamed so much about it that I needed no magician’s wand to restore it. At one wave of my hand on that clear morning in 1889 it rose before me in the glory it had when Pericles ordered it,, and Ictinus planned it, and Protogines painted it, and Pansanias described it. Its gates, which were earefully guarded by the ancients, open to let you in, and you ascerid by sixty marble steps the propylsea, which Epaminendas wanted to transfer to Thebes, but permission, I am glad to saj% could not be granted for the removal of this architectural miracle. In the clays when ten cents would do more than a dollar now, the building cost $2,300. Sea its five ornamental gates, the keys entrusted to an officer for only one day lest the temptation to go in and misappropriate the treasures be too great for him; its ceiling a mingling of blue and scarlet and green, and the walls abloom with pictures utmost in thought and coloring'. Yonder is a temple to a goddess •‘Victory without Wings.” So many of t e triumphs of the world hai been followed by defeat that the Greeks wished in marble to indicate that victory for Athens had come Mover again to fly away, and hence this temple to “Victory without Wings"—a temple of marble, snow■white and glimmering. Yonder behold the pedestal hf Agrippa, twentyseven feet high arid twelve feet square. But the overshadowing won-> dor Qf all the hill is the Parthenon. .In days when’ money was ten times tnoro valuable than now, it cost 54.600.000. It is a Doric grandeur, having 66 columns, each column 34 feet high end fijjeef 2 inches in diameter. Wondrousintercolumniatidns! Painted porticos, architraves tinged with ocher, shields of gold hung up, lines of most delicate curve, figures of : horses and men and women and gods, j oxen on the wav to sacrifice, statues j of the deities Dionysius, Prometheus, Hermes. Demeter, Zeus, Hera, Poseidon* in one freize twelve divinities; centaurs in battle; weaponry from Marathon; chariot of night; eharion of the morning; horses of the sun; the fates, the furies; statue of Jupiter holding in bis right hand the thunderbolt; silver-footed chair in which Xerxes watched the battle of Salamis, only a few miles away. Here is the colossal statue of Minerva in full armor, eyes of gray-col-ored stone, figure of a sphinx on her head, griffins by her side (which are lions with eagles’ beaks), spear in one hand, statue of Liberty in the other, a shield carved with battlescenes, and even the slippers sculptured and tied on with thongs of gold; ~Par out at sea the sailors saw this statue of Minerva rising, high above all tho temples, glittering in the sun. Here are statues of equestrians, statue of a lioners, and there are the G races, and yonder a horse in bronze. There is a statue, said ip the time of Augustus to have turned around of its own accord and spit blood; statues made out of shields .conquered in battle; statue of Apollo,the oxpeller of locusts; statue of Anacreon, drunk and singing; statue of Olvmpodorus, a Greek, memorable for the fact that he was cheerful when others were cast down, a trait worthy of sculpture. But. walk on and around the Acropolis,-mnd yonder you- seo a statue of Hygeia, and the statue of Thesis fighting the Minotaur. and the. statue of Hercules ' .slaying serpents. No wonder PetroiSuilsaid it was easier to find a god than a man in Athens. On, the Acropolis! The most of its tqmplvs and statues made from the marble quarries of Mount Penteticum, a little way from the city. I have here on my table a block of 'Parthenon, and qu it is the sculp-

ture of Phidias, I brought it from the Acropolis. This specimen has on it the dust of ages and the marks of explosion and battle; but you can g<*t from it some idea of the delicate luster of the Acropolis when it was covered with a mountain of this marble cut into all the exquisite shapes that genius could contrive and striped, with silver and aflame with gold. The Acropolis in the morning light cf those ancients must have shone as though it was an aerolite cast off from the noonday sun. The temples must have looked like petrified foam; the whole Acropolis must have seemed like the white breakers of the great ocean of time. Mars Hill is a rough pile of rocks fifty feet high. It was famous long before New Testament times. The Persians easily and terribly assaulted the Acropolis from this hill top, Here assembled the court td try criminals. It was held in the night time, so that the faces of the Judges could not be seen/nor the faces of the lawyers who made the plea, and so, instead of a trial being one of emotion, itmust have been, one ...of cool justice. But there was one occasion on this hill memorable ahove all others. A little man, physically weak, and his rhetoric described by himself as contemptible, had by his sermons rbeked Athens with commotion, and he was summoned either by writ of law or hearty invitation to come upon that pulpit of rock and give a specimen of his theology. All the wiseacres of Athens turned out and turned up to hear him. The more venerable of them sat in an amphitheater, the granite seats of which are still visible, but the other people swarmed on all sides of the hill and at the base of it to-hear this man, whom some called a fanatic, and others called a mad-cap, and others a blasphemer, and others styled contemptuously “this fellow.” Paul arrived in answer to a writ or invitation and confronted them and gave 'them the biggest dose that mortals ever took. He was so built that nothing could scare him, and as for Jupiter apd Athenia, the god and goddess whose images were in full sight on the adjoining hill, ho had not so much regard for them as‘he had for the ant that was crawling in the sand under his feet. In that audience were the first orators of the world, and they had voices like flutes when they were passive and like trumpets when they were aroused, and I think they laughed in thesleeve of their gown as this insignificant looking man rose to speak. In that audience were scholars who knew everything, or thought they did, and from the end of the longest hair on the top of their craniurns to the end of the nail on the longest toe they -were, stuffed with hypercriticisms, and they leaned back, with a supercilious look to listen. What I have so far said in this discourse was necessary in order that you may understand the boldness, the defiance, the holy recklessness, the magnificence of Paul’s Speech. The first thunderbolt he launched at the hill—the Acropolis—the moment all aglitter with idols and temples. He cried out. “God, who made the

world.” Why, they thought that Prometheus made it, that Mercury made it, that Apollo made it, that Poseidon made it, that Eros made it, that Paudrocus made it, that Boreas made it, that it took all the gods of the Parthenon; yea, all the gods and goddesses of the Acropolis to make it, and here stands a man without any ecclesiastical! title, neither a D. D. uor even a reverend, declaring that the world was made by the Lord oT heaven and earth, and hence the inference that all the splendid covering of the Acropolis, so near that the people standing on the steps of the Parthenon could hear it, was a deceit, a falsehood, a sham, a blasphemy. Look at the faces of his au- | ditors; they are turning pale, and j then red. and then wrathful. There j had been several earthquakes in that region, but that was the severest shock these men had ever felt. The Persians had bombarded the Acropolis from the heights of Mars Hill, but this Pauline bombardment was more terrific. “What,” said his hearers, “have we been hauling with many yokes of oxen for centuries these blocks from the quarries of Mount Pentlieum. and have we had our architects putting up these structures of unparalleled splendor, and have we had the greatest of all sculptors, Phidias, with his men chiseling away at those wondrous pediments, anil cutting away at these freizes, and have we taxed the nation’s resources to the utmost, now to be told that those statues see nothig, hear nothing, know nothing.

Oh. Paul stop for a moment and give these started and overwhelmed auditors time to catch their breath! Make a rhetorical pause! Take a look around you at the interesting landscape, and give your hearers time to recover! No, heroes not make even a period, or so much as a colon or semicolon, but launches the second thunderbolt right after the first, and in the same breath goes on to say: ‘ God dwelleth not in temples made with hands:” Oh, Paul! Is not deity more in the Parthenon, or more In the Theseum, or more in the Erechthoiurn, or . more in the temple of Zeus Olympius than in the open air, more than on the hill where we are sitting more than on Mi. Hymettus out yonder, from which the bees get their honey. “No mQre!" responds Paul, “lie dwelleth not in temples made with hands." But surely the preacher on the pulpit of rock on Mars Hill will stop now. His audience .can endure no more. Then when he began, and his ryes, which were quiet, became two flames of tiro, aud his face which, was calm in theyintroduction, now depicts a

whirlwind of emotion as he ties th* two thunderbolts, together with at cord of inconsumable courage and hurls them at the crowd now ing or sitting aghast—the two thunderbolts of resurrection and last judgment. His closing words were:? “Because He hath appointed a in which He will judge the world io< righteousness by that whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men in that He hath raised Him from the dead. ” ! Remember those thoughts were to them novel and provocative; that Christ, the despised would come to be their Judge, and they should have to get up out of their cemeteries to stand before Him and take their eternal doom. >, The brotherhood of man, and the Christ of God, and the peroration of resurrection and last judgment witb which the Tarsian orator closed his sermon on that day amid the mocking crowd, shall yet revolutionize tho planet. Oh, Acropolis! I have stood here long enough to witnesi that your gods are no gods at all. Your Boreas could not control the winds. Your Neptune could not manage the sea. Your Apollo never evoked a musical note. Your god Ceres never grew a harvest. Your goddess of wisdom, Minerva, never knew tho Greek alphabet. Your Jupiter could not handle the lightnings. But the God whom I proclaimed on the day when Paul preached before the astounded assemblage on my rough heights, is the God of music, the God of wisdom, the God of power, the God of mercy, the God of love, the God of storms, the God of sunshine, the God of land, and the God of the sea,- the God over all, blessed forever.”

Then the Acropolis spake apu said, as though in self-defense; “My Plato argued for the immortality of the soul, and my Socrates praised virtue and my Miltiades at Marathon drove back the Persian oppressors.” “Yes,” Mars Hill, "your Plata laboriously guessed at the immortality of the soul, but my Paul, divinely inspired, declared it as a fact straight from God. Your Socrates praised virtue. but expired as a suicide. Your Miltiades was brave against earthly foes, yet died from a wound iguominiously received in after defeat. But my Paul challenged all earth and all hell with! this battle shout: “We wrestle not against llesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places, and then on the 29th of June, in the year 66, on the road to Ostia, after the sword of the headsman had given one keen stroke, took the crown of martyrdom. ’ ” After a moment's silence by both hills, the Acropolis moaned out in the darkness: “Alas! alas!” and Mars responded: “Hosannah! Hosannah!” Then the voices of both hills became indistinct, and as I passed on and away in the twilight I seemed to hear only two sounds—a fragment of Pentelicon marble from the architrave of the Acropolis dropping down on the ruins of a shattered idol, and the other sound seemed to come from the rock on. Mars Hill, from which we had just descended. But we were by this time so far off that tlie fragments of sentences were smaller when dropping from Mars Hill than were the fragments of fallen marble on the Acropolis, and I could only hear parts of disconnected sentences wafted on the night air->-“God who made the world,” "of onq blood al|, nations,” “appointed a day in which He will judge the world,” “raised him from the dead. ” As that night in Athens I put my tired head on my pillow and the exciting scenes of day passed through my mind, I thought on the same subject on which as a boy I made my comfnencenaent speech ob Niblo's theater oiF graduation day from tho,New York University, viz.; “The Moral Effects of Sculpture and Architecture:” but further than I could have thought in boyhood I thought that night in Athens that the moral effects of architecture and sculptui*e depend unon what you do in great buildings after they are put up, and upon the character of the men whose forms you cut in the marble; yea! 1 thought that night what struggles the martyrs went through in order that in our time the Gospel might have full swing; and I thought that night, what a brainy religion it must be that could absorb a hero like Him who we have considered to day,a man the superior of the whole human race, the infidels but pigmies or homunculi compared with Him; and I thought what a rapturous consideration it is that through the same grace that saved Paul, we shall confront this great Apostle, and shall have the opportunity, amid the familiarity of the skies, of asking Him what was the greatest occasion of all bis life. He may say, "The riot at Ephesus.” He may say,.-5?My last walk out on the road to Ostia.” But, I think he will say: “The day I stood on Mars’ Hill addressing the indignant Areopagites, and looking off upon the towering form of the goddess Minerva, and the majesty of the Parthenon, and i\U the brilliant divinities of the Acropolis. That account in the Bible was true. My spirit was stirred within me when I saw the city wholly giveu up to idolatry.

The battlefield between God and Satan is the huruau heart, and the prize at stake is the soul of man. The devil has. never been able to hit a Christian -hard enough to drive him a quarter of au inch toward the pit. No man is a sinner because he lies,' and steals, and breaks the Sabbath; but beeauso he is rejecting Jesus Christ. .-;*f