XI

JOHN OF ANTIOCH (CHRYSOSTOM) THE GREAT PREACHER OF THE FOURTH CENTURY

A Lecture delivered at Music Hall, Boston, March 26, 1894.

XI

JOHN OF ANTIOCH (CHRYSOSTOM) THE GREAT PREACHER OF THE FOURTH

CENTURY

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

THE eloquence of the pulpit has been a theme of large discussion, in other times and in our own; and you have had such examples of this eloquence, in this city of Boston, for many years, and especially of late, that it may appear wholly superfluous to have another descriptively presented, from a distant century, or to be asked to pause at all in the rush of affairs for any thoughts suggested by it. Yet surely a rare and splendid soul must always attract us, wherever shown; and the mystery of eloquence does not the less fascinate or dominate, because we ourselves have felt its power. It is therefore without fear, rather with assurance of cordial welcome, that I come to speak to you of John of Antioch, whose extraordinary gifts and unsurpassed spirit had the pulpit for their throne, and whose majestic and winning personality sheds luster on his age. With all the differences of manners and language, in spite of the intervals of space and of time, I cannot but feel that you will find yourselves at home with this commanding and illustrious preacher, who was also a hero and a saint.

Let us first get distinctly before us the city and the

circumstances in which the part of his work which gave him the chief part of his early fame was nobly done.

The traveler beyond the Bosphorus, in those Oriental lands which were wont to come to our thought in childhood, on familiar and memorable pages, gilded and purpled, rustling with silks, redolent of perfumes, dazzling with splendor of armies and palaces, may not unfrequently feel that history must have become romantic in such descriptions; that poetic illusion displaced, or at least disguised, reality; and that such a city as the Antioch of old is declared to have been could not have existed where remains only the desolate town, of a few thousand inhabitants, housed in rough, transient habitations, without arts or commerce, enterprise or hope. Yet a recent brilliant and famous story, perhaps more widely read in our country than any other of this generation, has given a not exaggerated picture of Antioch as it was in the day of the Master, and as it largely continued to be in the centuries following; as it was, indeed, in recent memory, and in still existing indications, when the Emperor Justinian sought to restore the marvelous beauty which had then been shattered by earthquakes and by war. Its historic glory was still recognized; and it was a natural impulse of imperial ambition to reproduce and prolong that.

From a remote antiquity its site had been noticed as suitable for a large and opulent seat of commerce. Lying at the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean, in the angle which the coast of Syria, running northward, there makes with the coast of Asia Minor running westward; only separated from the sea by a fruitful valley, between whose lines of stately piers