---

Paul entered, not the grand, classical Corinth, but a sort of afterglow Corinth. The old city had been destroyed by Consul Mummius It was burned to the ground. The streets ran with molten metal from the innumerable statues and gothic buildings; the fused mass continued to be collected for years afterwards, and fetched a good price in the open market as "Corinthian brass"; it was exported in blocks. Julius Caesar rebuilt and colonised Corinth not long before Christ. It was a flourishing mercantile town in Paul's time. Over its isthmus men dragged the ships from Port Cenchraea to Port Lechaeum, and thus the tide of commerce flowed from the East straight through to Rome, leaving in the city about one of the most unenviable and mixed moral deposits conceivable. Imagine Liverpool and Brighton, without a touch of Christian influence, rolled into one, and you have Corinth. They were traders, not manufacturers — money getters, not creators; engaged, not in producing (which requires invention and implies culture), but in transference. Mere money grubbing is not elevating, refining, or morally bracing. They were pleasure mad too — that was their reaction from toil. Drunkenness and debauchery — temples consecrated to it, priestesses devoted to licence; when your life is on a low moral plane, your recreation is certain to be on a lower one still. The Jewry was there, of course, but it had little moral influence — a protest against sin without a touch of sympathy for moral frailty, and I should like to know what good ever came of such a gospel as that. What could this poor, suffering Jew — apparently a very indifferent specimen of a sorry community of fanatics — do in such a Vanity Fair? Such he must have seemed to the fashionable tourist from Rome, to the Corinthian fop or merchant. Indeed, how hopeless the outlook upon a great city after nineteen centuries of Christian civilisation! But Paul looked upon that scene with other eyes. The fields which might appear to us burnt up and wasted were to him whitening to the harvest. He felt he could operate in that atmosphere — he believed in humanity, in Christ — that was quite enough. He had to deal with the slaves of pleasure, the dupes of money, the puppets of ambition. He knew that every one of them hungered for something different from what he had got. Bide your time, man of God! Watch and pray; the world will come round to you — the world can't do without you. When the thrill of the senses is past — money gone, ambition a wreck — does not everyone cry out for something which the world cannot give or take away? Sensuality, drink, extortion. I have seen something like it not a hundred miles from London. "Truly a mad world, my masters!" this Corinth about A.D. 53. It was Paul's opportunity.

(H. R. Haweis, M. A.)

---

---

KJV: After these things Paul departed from Athens, and came to Corinth;

WEB: After these things Paul departed from Athens, and came to Corinth.