nothing less than the whole Gentile world.

The known world was not, indeed, in that age, of anything like the
same dimensions as it is today. It consisted only of a narrow disc of
countries round the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet to any other man
the vocation to evangelize it all must have been bewildering and even
paralyzing. St. Paul, however, accepted it in all seriousness, and
ever afterwards, till the day of his death, he regarded the
populations of these countries as people to whom he owed the message
of the Gospel. Speaking of the two recognised divisions of the Gentile
world of that day, he says, "I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the
barbarians, both to the wise and to the unwise."

Of course he did not live long enough to preach the Gospel to all the
inhabitants of even the little world of his day. Yet it is amazing to
think of the range of his labours. He preached in nearly all the great
cities of that world--in Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Athens, Rome and
many others--his predilection for cities being obviously due to the
hope that, when Christ was made known in these crowded centres, the
sound of his doctrine would echo through the surrounding regions. And
this hope was justified. The cities in the province of Asia, for
example, to which St. John sent the letters in the beginning of
Revelation, were probably all evangelized from Ephesus by converts of
St. Paul, though he himself may have visited none of them but
Ephesus. The passion burned continually in his mind to get forward and
cover new ground. He could not bear to build on another man's
foundation. The wide unfulfilled provinces of his apostolate ever
called him on.

His first journey was merely a circuit of the countries bordering to
the west and north on his own native Cilicia, and lay chiefly among
barbarians. But the second, after a still more extended tour among the
barbarians, brought him to the borders of that wonderful world of
culture and renown in which dwelt the Greeks as distinguished from the
barbarians. He was standing on the shore of Asia and looking across to
the shore of Europe. In Europe were the two great eyes of the Gentile
world--Athens and Rome--the one the centre of its wisdom and the other
of its power. How could the Apostle of the Gentiles help wishing to
preach the Gospel there? He crossed the narrow strait, and then
advanced from one Greek town to another, till he stood on the very
spot where Socrates had taught a