try; God, unknown or unknowable, has been made manifest to us by
our Lord Jesus Christ, who was born like us all for a purpose, his
death, which was to save the world from its sins, whereupon, greedy for
a story, they began to listen to me, and I had their attention till I
came to these words--"And was raised by his Father from the dead." Paul,
they answered, we will listen another day to the rest of this story of
thy new divinity.

A frivolous people, Mathias, living in a city of statues in the air, and
in the streets below a city of men that seek after reason, and would
explain all things in the heavens above and the earth beneath by their
reason, and only willing to listen to the story of a miracle because
miracles amuse them. A race much given to enjoyment, like women,
Mathias, and among their mountains they are not a different race from
what they are in the city, but given to milking goats and dancing in the
shade to the sounds of a pipe, and dreaming over the past glories of
Athens, that are dust to-day though yesterday they were realities, a
light race that will be soon forgotten, and convinced of their
transience I departed for Corinth, a city of fencing masters, merchants,
slaves, courtesans, yet a city more willing to hearken to the truth than
the light Athenians, perhaps because it has much commerce and is not
slothful in business, a city wherein I fortuned upon a pious twain,
Aquila and Priscilla, of our faith, and of the same trade as myself,
wherefore we set up our looms together in one house and sold the cloths
as we weaved them, getting our living thereby and never costing the
faithful anything, which was just pride, and mine always, for I have
travelled the world over gaining a living with my own hands, never
taking money from anybody, though it has been offered to me in plenty by
the devout, thinking it better to be under no obligation, for such
destroys independence....

Once only was this rule broken by me. In Macedonia, a dyer of purple----
But Lydia's story concerns ye not, therefore I will leave her story
untold and return to Corinth, to Priscilla and Aquila, weavers like
myself, with whom I worked for eighteen months, and more than that;
preaching the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ to all who
would hear us when our daily work was done, until the same fate befell
us--the intervention of the Jews, who sought to embroil us, as
beforetimes, with the Romans.

We preached in the syn