THE FANATIC. HI 



Knowledge is a bleak, dark shadow against the upper air until there rises above 

 its crest the fiery column of the glowing lava and the flame-lit vapors of intense 

 emotion. When out-reaching thought is vivified and illumined by a profound be- 

 lief in the imminence and guidance of supernatural control, at once there moves 

 into historic light and grandeur a central figure, and often a fanatic whose record 

 is the story of his age. 



Who could bring before us Athens without recounting the marvelous life and 

 philosophy, the gracious yet despised teaching of Socrates. He drank the fatal 

 •cup of hemlock because beyond his day he beheld a more perfect way of life for 

 the Athenian youth than the chosen beliefs and rites of their ancestors. Gibbon, 

 cold and agnostic, cannot touch a single phase of that vast empire, whose decline 

 and fall he so majestically recites, without, amid all his cynicism and unbelief, 

 halting spellbound and amazed, to wonder at the inexplicable hold possessed by 

 the life and words of the humble Nazarene, dying in obloquy an abhorred death, 

 over the legions of Caesar, the favorites of .the royal palace, the students of the 

 colleges, and the hordes swarming from Northern woods and snows over the 

 plains of the Po, Adige and Tiber. 



The most illustrious character in all history, save one, is that citizen of Tar- 

 sus who, standing with clanking chain before imperial rulers, clad in gold and 

 purple, pleaded for the acceptance of an obscure faith, whose outcome would im- 

 measureably bjess the world, with such pathos and intellectual power that he 

 seemed to one governor a madman and to the other the revelator of a divine religion. 

 The widest acquirements of wisdom and philosophy of that day were found 

 among the porches of the academies and the groves of scholars in Athens, that 

 •city of ancient art and wealth. Standing in the shadow of that temple of Minerva, 

 whose statue, frieze and decorations were the work of Phidias, Paul delivered a 

 plea for Monotheism and its great human representative which, even in its frag- 

 mentary form, has excited the wonder of the orator, the imagination of the poet, 

 and the homage of the believer. In the annals of time there is no more impres- 

 sive illustration of the majestic bravery of transcendent genius than this con- 

 temned Hebrew from the rostrum where Pericles had spoken, philosophers argued, 

 and bards chanted sweetest lays, proclaiming to learned and acute professors, teach- 

 ers and logicians, his unshaken faith in the resurrection of the dead, and leading 

 his auditors up to this new and strange doctrine by irresistible appeals to the 

 vague yearnings of their own poets and the mute sentiments of their own altar 

 builders. Or, if there be a more marvelous scene, it is this same man at a later 

 day, pale with prison damps and darkness, with manacled limbs, unmoved by a 

 double court and royalty, recounting before Festus and Agrippa and Que^n Ber- 

 nice, the noonday light that bewildered him as he rode along the mountain crest 

 above the white spires of Damascus, the heavenly vision he there beheld, and the 

 divine mission then given him, which ever after was to master and impel his 

 life. And yet, doubtless, the large majority of the men whom Paul addressed at 

 Jerusalem, or in the cities of the Mediterranean and at Rome, as they turned 

 away from his fervid utterances, exclaimed. What a gifted, learned fanatic! The 



