the places where he had formerly preached, and Barnabas intended to go with him). But a difference of opinion as to whether they should take Mark with them led to a violent quarrel between these two apostles; as the result of which Paul chose Silas as his companion, and left Barnabas to pursue his own course with his friend Mark (Acts xv).
The writer now follows the fortunes of Paul in his missionary work in various countries, and it is remarkable that in the sixteenth chapter he drops the third person, and begins to speak in the first person plural, implying that he himself was one of the company. The fact that from this point onwards the book becomes practically not the Acts of the Apostles, but the Acts of Paul, who is evidently the hero of the story, indicates an author who belonged to the Pauline section of the Church, and to whom Paul was the chief living embodiment of the Christian faith. Who this author was—whether Silas, or some other companion—it would be hard to say, but he seems to have written under the direct inspiration of Paul himself.
Increased by the addition of Timotheus, the party, guided by a vision seen by Paul of a Macedonian entreating them to come, went into Macedonia. At Philippi they met with some success among women, making particular friends with a purple-seller named Lydia. But the conversion of a divining girl who was a source of profit to her employers, led to the imprisonment of Paul and Silas, from which, however, an opportune earthquake set them free (Acts xvi).
At Athens Paul made a speech on the Areopagos, in which he ingeniously availed himself of an altar he had noticed, inscribed "To an Unknown God," to maintain that this unknown God was no other than the Jehovah of the Jews (Acts xvii. 16-34). At Corinth he was allowed to preach every Sabbath in the synagogue (as he had done at Thessalonica, and did again at Ephesus), another evidence of the tolerant spirit of the Jews as compared with Christians. Not, of course, that the Jews were not bigoted adherents of their narrow creed, or that they had any scruple about supporting it by physical force; but they were willing to allow those who had a reformation to propose to be heard in the sonagogues. The effect, as might be expected, was to embitter those who remained orthodox against
