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Popular favourites in other departments have to experience the same fate one day, 'roses, roses, all the way'; the next, rotten eggs and curses. Other folks than the ignorant peasants at Lystra have had devout emotion surging over them and leaving them dry. Who are 'they' who stoned Paul? Grammatically, the Jews, and probably it was so.
This part of the argument, also, is in the clearest manner insisted upon in the sacred writings; when the apostle Paul, in calling upon the people of Lystra to worship the true God, who made heaven and earth, adds, as a source of knowledge from which they ought to learn his character; "he left not himself without a witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness."
"The first object of Paul was to confirm the churches he had already founded; and accordingly he began his mission by visiting the churches of Syria and Cilicia," crossing the Taurus range by the famous Cilician Gates, one of the most frightful mountain passes in the world, penetrating thus into Lycaonia, and reaching Derbe, Lystra, and Iconium.
And when they had preached the gospel to that city, and had taught many, they returned again to Lystra, and to Iconium, and Antioch, Confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to continue in the faith, and that we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.
The story of that missionary journey begins 'Barnabas and Saul, but very soon it comes to be 'Paul and Barnabas, and it keeps that order throughout. He was an older man than Paul, for when at Lystra the people thought that the gods had come down in the likeness of men; Barnabas was Jupiter, and Paul the quick-footed Mercury, messenger of the gods.
Raising his arms in the attitude of Raphael's Paul at Lystra, he said simply, "I am the thorn which Allah has placed in the eye of the Franks. And if you will help me I will send them weeping into the sea." But when it came to a demand for supplies, the Kabyles, says Daumas, utterly refused. "You have come as a pilgrim," said their amins, "and we have fed you with kouskoussu.
As he had a good reputation among the brothers at Lystra and Iconium, Paul wished to have him go with him. And the churches were strengthened in the faith and increased in numbers daily. Then Paul and his companions crossed the Phrygian and Galatian country, but were prevented by the Holy Spirit from preaching in the province of Asia.
I half expected that these miserable beings, like the people of Lystra, would recognise their betters and force us to the altar; in which case, warned by the late of Paul and Barnabas, I do not know that my modesty would have prevailed upon me to decline. But there was no need for such churlish virtue.
I say with the very heathen God deals thus. We have plain Scripture for that. For we have, and thanks be to God that we have, in such times as these, a missionary sermon preached by St Paul to the heathen at Lystra. And in that is not one word concerning these terrors of the law.
But when writers justify the appropriation, of entire figures, without any such change, we do not agree with them; and cannot but think that the examples they have quoted, as in the Sacrifice at Lystra, by Raffaelle, and the Baptism, by Poussin, will fully support our position.
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