Like most of the Asiatic cities that have come under the government of the Turks, Tarsus, which, after being once or twice new-named, as Crania or Antioch, still retains its old title under the slightly altered form of Tersoos, has dwindled from its ancient greatness. The Cydnus, instead of flowing through it, leaves the town about a mile to the west. The streets are narrow and squalid, and the houses rarely more than one story high. No inscription or monument, beyond the scanty remains of a theatre, between the town and the river, rewards the researches of the traveller. The marshes formed near the mouth of the river and left undrained, expose the inhabitants, and yet more, strangers, to attacks of malaria fever. The population, however, is reckoned at about 30,000; and the old manufactures which made it famous in the days of the Apostle still flourish there. Fifty tanners carry on their business, and from the goats' hair, which they get from the skins which they turn into leather, they make sacks, which are exported on a tolerably large scale (500 loads of fifty pieces each annually) to other parts of Asia Minor.1 'Lewin, St. Paul, i. c. v. Barker, "Lares and Penates," App. E. The latter gives the population at 6,000. 35 ST. PAUL AT ANTIOCH. THE position which Antioch occupies in the history of the Apostolic Age is such as to fix the attention even of the most casual observer. It was in every sense of the word the Mother Church of Gentile, as Jerusalem was of Jewish, Christendom. There the great name of Christian, which was afterwards to echo through the ages to the end of time, was first formed on human lips. There the Word of life was first publicly proclaimed to the Gentiles as such; and there they were, as a body, first admitted to the full privileges of fellowship with the Church of Christ without passing through the preparatory stage of Judaism, or accepting any of its distinctive ordinances. There the Apostle of the Gentiles and his friend or fellow-worker Joses, the Son of Consolation, laboured in the extension of the Church of Christ, while they yet showed by kindly sympathy or liberal gifts that their hearts were with their brethren according to the flesh. Thence they were sent out on that memorable journey which was the type and pattern of all missionary enterprises. There, when they returned and reported that what had been seen in the Syrian Antioch had been reproduced in the Pisidian, and in the other cities of the inner provinces of Asia Minor, so that the question was assuming more than local proportions, there sprang up the first great controversy that threatened to break up the unity of the new society. The city which was thus the scene of some of the most momentous passages of that great drama which we speak of as the rise and progress of Christianity might well claim our notice, if only as furnishing the background and the surroundings amid which the actors in that drama played their part. At that time, however, it commanded the attention of travellers and historians on quite different grounds. Of all the cities that owned the sovereignty of Rome it occupied all but the highest place, second only to Alexandria in its fame and greatness. Though it could not boast the remote antiquity of Damascus, or of the old imperial cities on the Tigris or the Euphrates, which had been the centres of the Assyrian and Babylonian monarchies, its career up to this time had been one of unchecked prosperity. The beauty of its position, the grandeur of its buildings, the culture for which it was pre-eminent among the cities of Asia, drew thither visitors even from the remoter West. The early history, the very topography, of such a city, the associations that had gathered round it, cannot be without interest to the student of Christian antiquity. The foundation of the city belonged, as its name indicates, to the period of the Syrian monarchy, which rose under the Seleucidæ upon the ruins of the great fabric that had risen, with startling rapidity, from the conquests of Alexander the Great, and was shivered |