Evidence of Christianity eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 465 pages of information about Evidence of Christianity.

Evidence of Christianity eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 465 pages of information about Evidence of Christianity.
were insulted, and their lives endangered.  After being expelled from Antioch in Pisidia, they repaired to Iconium. (Acts xiii. 51.) At Iconium, an attempt was made to stone them; at Lystra, whither they fled from Iconium, one of them actually was stoned and drawn out of the city for dead. (Acts xiv. 19.) These two men, though not themselves original apostles, were acting in connection and conjunction with the original apostles; for, after the completion of their journey, being sent on a particular commission to Jerusalem, they there related to the apostles (Acts xv. 12—­26.) and elders the events and success of their ministry, and were in return recommended by them to the churches, “as men who had hazarded their lives in the cause.”

The treatment which they had experienced in the first progress did not deter them from preparing for a second.  Upon a dispute, however, arising between them, but not connected with the common subject of their labours, they acted as wise and sincere men would act; they did not retire in disgust from the service in which they were engaged, but, each devoting his endeavours to the advancement of the religion, they parted from one another, and set forward upon separate routes.  The history goes along with one of them; and the second enterprise to him was attended with the same dangers and persecutions as both had met with in the first.  The apostle’s travels hitherto had been confined to Asia.  He now crosses for the first time the Aegean sea, and carries with him, amongst others, the person whose accounts supply the information we are stating. (Acts xvi. 11.) The first place in Greece at which he appears to have stopped, was Philippi in Macedonia.  Here himself and one of his companions were cruelly whipped, cast into prison, and kept there under the most rigorous custody, being thrust, whilst yet smarting with their wounds, into the inner dungeon, and their feet made fast in the stocks. (Acts xvi. 23, 24, 33.) Notwithstanding this unequivocal specimen of the usage which they had to look for in that country, they went forward in the execution of their errand.  After passing through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica; in which city the house in which they lodged was assailed by a party of their enemies, in order to bring them out to the populace.  And when, fortunately for their preservation, they were not found at home, the master of the house was dragged before the magistrate for admitting them within his doors. (Acts xvii. 1—­5.) Their reception at the next city was something better:  but neither had they continued long before their turbulent adversaries the Jews, excited against them such commotions amongst the inhabitants as obliged the apostle to make his escape by a private journey to Athens. (Acts xvii. 13.) The extremity of the progress was Corinth.  His abode in this city, for some time, seems to have been without molestation.  At length, however, the Jews found means to stir up an insurrection against him, and to bring him before the tribunal of the Roman president. (Acts xviii. 12.) It was to the contempt which that magistrate entertained for the Jews and their controversies, of which he accounted Christianity to be one, that our apostle owed his deliverance. (Acts xviii. 15.)

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Evidence of Christianity from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.