Acts 17:25

Acts 17:25. Neither is he worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed anything. The men of the heathen world loved to spend their wealth on the adornment of the temples of the gods, to whom also they brought costly offerings of food and drink, as though these imaginary eternal beings needed such things. Iliad, i. 37, 38 (Pope's Version), may be quoted as expressive of the true heathen feeling in this respect:

‘If e'er with wreaths I hung thy sacred fane,

Or fed the flames with fat of oxen slain.'

Paul's words were the outcome of a mind steeped in the often-repeated reminders and reproaches of the prophets, that the God of Israel was not to be worshipped with sacrifice and incense, but with a pure, noble life. The words of the Psalmist were evidently in his mind: ‘I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he-goats out of thy folds: For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills.... If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine.... Thinkest thou that I will eat bulls' flesh and drink the blood of goats?' (Ps. 1. 9-13). The higher minds among the Epicurean teachers, rising above the popular notion of worship, grasped this lofty conception, which the old Hebrew prophets so nobly set forth, of Deity being above the loves and passions of mortals, dwelling in a sphere far removed from earth and earthly needs. But while the Hebrew teachers used this sublime truth to show the infinite love which, needing nothing from men, could yet stoop to watch over them with a father's care, and to guide erring feet through the mazes of this life to a higher existence, the Epicurean only seems to have grasped it to show the deserted helplessness of mortals, and the serene selfishness of Divinity. See the lines of the Epicurean Lucretius:

Omnis enim perse Divdm natura necesse est,

Immortal! aevo summi cum pace fruatur.'

Life and breath. The God Paul was preaching to them not merely was the All-Creator but also the All-Preserver. Their very breath, by means of which from minute to minute each mortal lived, was His gift.